bece. newsletter vol.6, no.2, 2020 888 the impact of student leaders’ identity on their acquisition of learning opportunities: a study based on the findings from 4,026 junior high school students via propensity score matching by ke, z. & li, c.j. correspondence to: ke, z. email: kezheng@ecnu.edu.cn study published in education research, taking 4,026 junior high school students as samples and use the method of propensity score matching to conduct data analysis, in order to explore two questions: does the identity of student leader affect students’ learning opportunities? and how big is the impact? in terms of the data model, the dependent variable learning opportunities were subdivided into question opportunity, discussion and cognitive opportunities. the sample was divided into the student leaders and the ordinary students by propensity score matches, where the two groups of variables can be as similar as possible, to eliminate bias, better for causal inference, the results are as follows:  preliminary descriptive statistics and differential analysis show that student leaders do get more learning opportunities than ordinary students in the natural state.  the logit model is established to analyze the factors that influence the identity of student leaders. gender, academic ability and personality are all important factors that influence students to serve as student leaders. female students are more likely to serve as student leaders, and students with strong academic ability and outgoing personality are more likely to serve as student leaders.  the nearest-neighbor matching method is used to match the model, and the result is suitable. the average treatment effect (att) was calculated to analyze the increase in learning opportunities brought by student leaders. the att of student leaders on students’ opportunities to acquire the opportunities to ask questions, discuss, acknowledge and overall learning are 34.4%, 13.4%, 21.6% and 26.1%, respectively. it shows a vol.6, no.2, 2020 889 that the identity has indeed brought improvement to students’ learning opportunities. based on this, researchers believe that the current student leader system has become a lever for advantaged student groups to gain greater educational advantages, which aggravates the unfairness of educational process or learning opportunities and it is necessary to adjust the current student leader system. source: educational research, 2020; 41(5):112-125. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 1014 how to design graphical scaffolds to support stem teaching effectively? by cai, h., dong, h., & wang, q. correspondence to: huiying cai, associate professor, research center of educational informatization, jiangnan university, china. email: caihy@jiangnana.edu.cn meta-analysis study published in e-education research was conducted to explore the effectiveness of the graphical scaffolds in the teaching of stem courses by in-depth, analyzing 30 experimental and quasiexperimental studies. the research findings are as follows:  graphical scaffolds have a moderately positive effect on learners’ learning in stem courses. it can not only improve learners’ cognitive perception and academic motivation but also reduce cognitive load and improve learners’ abilities of spatial representation and problem-solving. however, graphical scaffolds in stem courses have no significant positive effect on learners’ metacognitive ability and self-efficacy.  visualize information, knowledge structure, dynamic knowledge, thoughts, learning process, and graphical scaffolds have different positive effects on improving students’ results in stem courses. the factors above show a moderately positive effect on the shallow and deep understanding of learners, and they can reduce the cognitive load of learners.  from the perspective of the learning phases, the integration of graphical scaffolds in the stem curriculum has a relatively strong impact on students’ learning in elementary and high school, a moderate impact on it in junior high school, and a low impact on college students. from the perspective of subjects, the integration of graphical scaffolds in stem courses has a moderately high impact on the learning of mathematics and engineering courses, and a moderate impact on the learning of technology and science courses. from the perspective of teaching methods, compared with project-based learning and problem-solving learning, inquiry-based learning, and collaborative learning have a positive impact on learners’ learning results. a vol.7, no.2, 2021 1015  research implication: first, teachers should consciously design graphical scaffolds to improve the cognitive, skill, and emotional aspects of learning quality. second, teachers should design graphical scaffolds in a personalized way. on the one hand, teachers should design graphical scaffolds by consideration with the emphasis of learning goals. thirdly, teachers can design graphical scaffolds to structure collaborative inquiry instruction pertinently by analyzing the characteristic of domain-specific knowledge and learners. source: e-education research, 2020; 41(10): 73-81. bece. newsletter vol.6, no.1, 2020 798 how to accurately prevent and manage school bullying: study on the influencing mechanism of school bullying among primary school students of different genders by li, j.z., hu, y.m. correspondence to: hu, y.m. email: huym0718@bnu.edu.cn study published in journal of educational studies, using the data from “regional education quality health check-up” survey sample of 176823 pupils, examined primary student's self-esteem, academic performance, parental involvement, peer relationship, teacher-student relationship, and the characteristics of family variables on its suffering from all kinds of school bullying, the results are as follow:  the difference analysis shows that there are significant differences in the frequency of three types of bullying (physical, verbal and relationship) among primary school students of different genders, among which the average frequency of primary schoolboys being bullied is significantly higher than that of primary schoolgirls.  ols regression model was established to explore the influencing factors, and it was found that each variable significantly predicted the probability of physical bullying of primary schoolboys and girls. the result of the regression of the three dependent variables found that primary school students from single-parent families were more likely to suffer from various types of school bullying without gender differences. in terms of physical bullying, among primary schoolboys, migrant boys are more likely to suffer physical bullying than non-migrant children. among primary schoolgirls, whether they are migrant children has no steady and significant influence on their physical bullying. in terms of verbal bullying, migrant children are more likely to suffer verbal bullying, and there is no gender difference. however, whether being migrant children or not has no steady and significant influence on the relationship bullying of primary school students. moreover, among primary schoolboys only, leftbehind children are more likely to suffer from three types of bullying than non-left-behind children. among primary schoolgirls, lefta vol.6, no.1, 2020 799 behind children have no significant influence on their suffering from three types of bullying.  in addition, academic performance can significantly predict the probability of primary school students suffering from three types of school bullying, and improving academic performance has a greater impact on reducing the probability of physical bullying and verbal bullying for primary schoolgirls, and a greater impact on reducing the probability of relationship bullying for primary schoolboys. selfesteem level can significantly predict the probability of primary school students being bullied by three types of school, and improving self-esteem level has a greater impact on reducing the probability of primary schoolboys being bullied by three types of school bullying. peer relationship and teacher-student relationship can also significantly predict the probability of primary school students suffering from three types of school bullying, and improving peer relationships has a greater impact on reducing the probability of primary schoolboys suffering from three types of school bullying. improving the relationship between teachers and students has a greater impact on reducing the probability of primary schoolgirls suffering from three types of school bullying. parental involvement can significantly predict the probability of primary school students suffering from three types of school bullying, and increasing parental involvement has a greater impact on reducing the probability of primary schoolgirls suffering from relationship bullying. the paper suggests that in the prevention and management of school bullying, schools should pay special attention to the learning status and mental health status of left-behind and floating children and primary school students from single-parent families, and pay attention to the important role of parents in the prevention and treatment of school bullying. at the same time, teachers should pay close attention to boys with tense peer relationships, timely guide boys to build a healthy and harmonious peer relationship. in addition, teachers should pay attention to the way of communication with girls, protect their self-esteem, and actively create a caring and supportive teacher-student relationship. source: journal of educational studies, 2020; 16(03):55-69. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 999 the effect of migrant students on local students’ academic performance by liu, z., & guo, r. correspondence to: zeyun liu, ph.d. candidate, business school, beijing normal university, china. email: zeyun_liu@bnu.edu.cn hether the aggregation of migrant students in schools will affect the academic development of local students is a valuable and practical problems. based on the survey data of grade 9 students collected by ceps2013-2014 (china education panel survey) and the balance test, this article simulated scenario of random class-division within the same school by adding the fixed effect and deleting samples of non-random class-division, estimated the effect of the proportion of migrant students on the academic performance of local students. the results are as follows:  in the same class, the proportion of migrant students with nonagricultural household registration does not affect the academic performance of local students.  the proportion of migrant students with agricultural household registration statistically negatively affect the academic performance of female local students, local students with better ability, local students studying in the best local schools, and local students in municipalities or provincial capital cities. however, this influence is not universal which only statistically significant, and the practical influence is relatively small.  this negative effect may be due to the spillover effect caused by migrant students’ less participation in extra-curricular tutoring, what’s worse, the increase in the proportion of migrant students will enhance the difficulty of class management and force teachers to adjust teaching methods. base on the empirical study researchers suggested that: the government should strive to reduce the institutional barriers that restrict migrant students to receive education in the migratory place. also, in the process of education resource allocation, the government should incline to the schools where migrant students are more concentrated, so as to neutralize the negative impact of the reverse peer effects. w vol.7, no.2, 2021 1000 source: peking university education review, 2020; 18(4): 71-102 + 187. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.1, 2021 925 matthew effect or fair effect by fang, c., & huang, b. correspondence to: fang, c., lecturer, school of public administration, nanjing university of finance & economics, china. email: 99288137@qq.com s the financial educational funding from the government became more adequate, what role does family education expenditure play? does it promote educational equity? these problems are worth pondering. many studies have found that the higher the economic status and educational level of families, the higher the monetary investment in after-class tutoring. if investment in family education can significantly promote the development of students, then policymakers should be wary of the possible “matthew effect”. based on this, research published in education & economy uses the data of china education panel survey (ceps) from 2013 to 2014, taking the student’s cognitive level as the dependent variable, and the monetary investment of the student’s family in after-class tutoring as the core independent variable constructs the regression model of an education production function. at the same time, students with different cognitive levels may be affected differently by investment in after-class tutoring. therefore, conditional quantile regression and generalized quantile regression were used to test the possible heterogeneity. the results are as follows:  the regression model shows that family education investment can significantly predict the cognitive level of students. for every unit increase in after-school interest or cram school that parents pay for a child over the course of a semester, the standardized cognitive test score rose 3.9 percent.  the conditional quantile regression was used to test the effect among students with low, middle, and high scores. among the students with low scores, the regression coefficient was negative and significant, indicating that for the students with low cognitive ability, more investment in family education was not conducive to the improvement of students’ cognitive ability. further use of generalized quantile regression also found the “matthew effect”, that is, more the investment in family human capital will widen the gap between groups of students at both ends of the cognitive ability distribution, which will lead to the “matthew effect” that “the stronger the strong, a vol.7, no.1, 2021 926 the weaker the weak”, which is not conducive to promoting the equity of educational outcome. source: education & economy, 2020; 36(4): 58-67. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.1, 2021 936 public goods dilemma experiment: how will the pressure & situational attribution brought by the reward &punishment system affect the cooperative behavior of junior high school students? by liu, y., tang, m.l. & tian, h. correspondence to: liu, yu., associate professor, university of electronic science and technology of china, china. email: liuyu2301@126.com n school education, the reward system and punishment system, as two common methods of controlling students’ behavior, have an important impact on the cooperative behavior of junior high school students. and what is the impact and how does the mechanism work? a study published in educational research and experiment used the game experiment of public goods dilemma, the pressure perception questionnaire, and the situational attribution questionnaire to analyze 285 junior high school students:  in the public goods dilemma experiment, a series of five rounds with different rewards and punishments are designed, including no rewards or punishments, continuous fixed rewards, variableratio rewards, continuous fixed punishments, and variable-ratio punishments. the experiment used the amount of the subject coins for dependent variable as an indicator of cooperative behaviors among individuals. the more the amount of the coins, the higher the level of their cooperative behavior. the two experimental rounds of continuous fixed reward and variable-ratio reward are merged into the “reward group”, while the two experimental bureaus of a continuous fixed penalty and variable-ratio penalty are merged into the “penalty group” and compared with the no reward or punishment group.  the perceived stress scale was consisted of 8 items and uses a 5point marking-system, ranging from 1 for “strongly disagree” to 5 for “strongly agree”. the higher the score, the higher the level of perceived stress. the α coefficient is 0.87. as for the situational attribution questionnaire, using 4 items to judge the extent to individual and cooperative concerning the external rewards/punishments or economic. the α coefficient of the questionnaire in this study is 0.84. i vol.7, no.1, 2021 937 the research results are as follows:  junior high school students will show more cooperative behavior under the reward system or punishment system. compared with the continuous fixed reward and punishment system and no reward and punishment system, junior high school students will have more cooperative behaviors under the variable-ratio reward and punishment system;  the reward system shows the direct and significant effects on the cooperative behavior of junior high school students, and indirectly affects the cooperative behavior of junior high school students through the mediating effect of contextual attribution;  the punishment system shows the direct and significant effects on the cooperative behavior of junior high school students, and there are three indirect paths: punishment system → perceived stress → cooperative behavior, punishment system → situational attribution → cooperative behavior, punishment system → perceived stress → situational attribution → cooperative behavior. this empirical study skillfully used game experiments, finding that situational attribution plays a mediating role between the reward system and the cooperative behavior of junior high school students, but the perceived stress does not have a significant mediating role between the two. therefore, it is concluded that schools should promote both rewards and punishments, guiding students to establish a correct view of rewards and punishments, and educate students to rationally understand and correctly deal with pressure; at the same time, in conjunction with the requirements on adolescents psychological development , the school should establish and improve psychological counseling and mental health education system, and carry out targeted attribution training to guide students to form a positive and reasonable situational attribution method. source: educational research and experiment, 2020; 2020(4):91-96. bece. newsletter vol.6, no.2, 2020 881 from universities to elite universities: heterogeneous returns to higher education and the sorting mechanism in the context of higher education expansion in china by zhou, y. & xie, y. correspondence to: xie, y. email: ihss@pku.edu.cn ith the popularization of higher education, the viewpoint of “academic qualification is useless” begins to rise. there is still a controversial debate that accesses to higher education increases return on income, and what are the mechanisms by which education affects return on income? in fact, there may be strong “heterogeneity” within the sample, that is, differences not only in higher education but also in other factors affecting income between individuals and groups. a survey published in educational research, using baseline data from the china family panel studies (cfps) as a database, constructed the following regression mode:  the logarithm of the income in the year (2010) of the sampling data collection was taken as the dependent variables, and control variables such as gender and age were included. because the social stratification structure brought by higher education is obviously different before and after the enrollment expansion policy for higher education, the sample group is divided into preenrollment and post-enrollment.  the core intervention variable is the type of higher education, which is divided into non-university education, non-key university education, and key university education. that is to say, the sample group includes high school groups, non-key university groups, and key university groups.  in order to control the selection bias of the samples, an intervention model was established to estimate the predisposition weight of each sample to select three types of higher education. based on the weights obtained, the resulting model is constructed, and the improved mincer income function is used to estimate the impact of higher education on income return. the results are as following: w vol.6, no.2, 2020 882  before the higher education expansion, there was no significant difference in the returns to high education between key universities and non-key universities, but both of them had earnings much higher than those with senior high school education. in other words, the higher education selection in the elite education stage has become the “stepping stone” to enter the higher income group.  after the enrollment expansion, the marginal income of key universities is significantly higher than that of non-key universities, but the difference in marginal income between the labor force in non-key universities and senior high schools is no longer significant. that is to say, key universities continue to play the role of “screening elite”, while non-key universities have seen the transformation of higher education from elitist education to popular education. this empirical study finds that higher education influences income returns through opportunity scarcity and achieves social stratification. before the enrollment expansion policy for higher education, the scarcity mainly existed between universities and high schools, but after the enrollment expansion, the scarcity existed between key universities and other academic qualifications. after the analysis of heterogeneity, this study points out the inevitable structural changes brought about by the popularization of higher education and demonstrates the functions of elite universities in key universities. source: educational research, 2020; 41(5):86-98. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 1009 is critical thinking teachable? by leng, j., & lu, x. correspondence to: jing leng, associate professor, faculty of education, east china normal university, china. email: jleng@deit.ecnu.edu.cn ritical thinking, as an indispensable ability for talents in the 21st century is helpful for people to think logically and independently, screen information, and make decisions quickly in the information society. whether critical thinking is teachable or not has always been a controversial topic in the academic world. a recent study published in open education research selected 79 experiment or quasi-experimental research literature from china and abroad as the research objects, explored the differences of critical thinking teaching effects and the teachability of critical thinking from the aspects of the discipline, teaching stage, the number of participants, technical intervention, countries, testing methods and so on. the results show that:  the effect of critical thinking teaching varies significantly among different disciplines and teaching stages, it works the best in mathematics and in high school education.  the longer the cycle of critical thinking teaching is, the better the enhancing effects will be.  teaching intervention has the same effect on whatever the participants’ number, and there is no significant difference in the improvement of students’ critical thinking with or without technical intervention;  the teaching effect of critical thinking among different countries is significantly different, and the improvement of critical thinking ability measured by the self-compiled tools of standardized tests is more obvious. suggestions:  extend the integration range of critical thinking and disciplines.  professors of critical thinking should be introduced into basic education, and the continuity and systematization of teaching should be maintained.  in the teaching of critical thinking, teachers should not blindly follow the trend of technology and abandon the traditional teaching methods. c vol.7, no.2, 2021 1010  use multiple assessment tools to measure changes in critical thinking. evaluation tools are one of the variables that affect the effectiveness of students’ critical thinking. in conclusion, through the comprehensive analysis of the existing research data, this study obtained that the combined effects of teaching intervention effect on students’ critical thinking values, with the quantitative results, show that critical thinking can be taught, and found that subject, learning, teaching period, the technology involved in various cultures, and assessment tools for the students’ critical thinking teaching effect has certain adjustment. source: open education research, 2020; 26(6):110-118. vol.7, no.1, 2021 891 we look forward to the future in the difficult days o matter from which point of view, 2020 is an unimaginable year. the sudden outbreak and rapid spread of the covid-19 pandemic have caused the world to face unprecedented challenges. schools were closed, and how to make the education system work effectively in this context has become a common topic among educators around the world. best evidence in chinese education (bece) realized the importance of this topic early on. as the country that first encountered the virus and was the fastest to control its impact, china has gained valuable experience in the process of education and anti-epidemic. although the real situations are different in different countries, we believe that using academics to reach consensus and form a joint force must be our inevitable survival choice in the pandemic. based on this understanding, the editorial office quickly organized topics on education to fight against the pandemic. we have not only invited chinese scholars to discuss this issue, but at the same time, considering that this is a global public health crisis, people urgently need to learn from their own experience and strength. so we also organized scholars outside of china to discuss their own country's experience. this topic quickly attracted the attention of all parts. the download and reprint of related papers have risen rapidly from the statistics results, and some readers have given us feedback and praised us for doing a significant thing. we are gratified that we can contribute our modest strength to the global fight against the pandemic. besides, we continue to focus on promoting high-quality education empirical research results from china. throughout 2020, through professional evaluation and screening, we published 15 original papers, reprinted the full text of 10 high-quality papers published in chinese academic journals, and published 32 carefully compiled newsletters. these papers and newsletters cover a wide range of topics from pre-school education to higher education, involving dozens of authoritative chinese education research journals. the authors include front-line teachers, education administrators, and scholars. through our efforts, we hope that we can portray the current empirical research on education in china and promote academic exchanges and development for colleagues worldwide who are concerned about empirical research on chinese education. in this process, we have received strong support from the journal staff, editors, and reviewers, and our readers continued to encourage and look forward to us. on behalf of the editorial office colleagues, i would like to express my sincere thanks to you for your guidance and help! n vol.7, no.1, 2021 892 in 2021, we will continue to adhere to our original aspiration and promote empirical research on high-quality education in china as our mission and goal. 2021 is a critical time node for the initiation and deepening of china's education reform. we will focus on significant and vital issues in china, focusing on china's education poverty alleviation, education evaluation reform, education modernization progress, and front-line teaching reform as selected topics, and strive to contribute valuable empirical research on chinese education to education colleagues around the world. just as whether or not the groundhog phil can see his shadow, spring will definitely come. although we still face challenges and difficulties at the beginning of the new year, we are full of expectations for the future. we believe that difficult days will always pass, and we hope everything will return to normal as soon as possible and wish all people safety and health! correspondence to: jijun yao, ed.d. executive editor-in-chief best evidence in chinese education nanjing normal university nanjing, china e-mail: eic_bece@bonoi.org. conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.e003 bece. newsletter vol.8, no.2, 2021 1150 can physical exercise promote the development of teenagers’ cognitive ability? by fang, c., & huang, b. correspondence to: huang, b., school of public administration, nanjing university of finance & economics, nanjing, jiangsu, china 210023. email: james7526@163.com study published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences) explored the relationship between physical exercise and the student’s cognitive ability. the study selected variables related to the student’s cognitive ability from the china education panel study (ceps), taking the daily average exercise duration of students as the core independent variable, and setting the cognitive ability test score of students as the dependent variable. the researchers used techniques such as the least square regression, propensity score matching, quantile regression to explore the influence of physical exercise on students’ cognitive ability. the results are as follows:  the result of the least square regression shows that the standard score on the cognitive ability test of the adolescents who exercise more than 3 days a week was 0.149 points higher than those who exercise less. while after controlling the pre-ability, the standard score on the cognitive ability test increases 0.049 points every time the exercising time increases per unit.  quantile regression indicates that engaging in physical exercise has the most significant promoting effects on teenagers with a median score, and spending more time exercising will not widen the gap of low-high cognitive with the same group. what’s more, encourage teenagers with the low cognitive ability to actively participate in physical exercise is helpful to narrow the gap of teenagers’ cognitive ability within the group.  according to the propensity score matching results, frequently participate in physical exercise improves 0.095-0.117 points on the test, which was lower than the 0.149 in the baseline regression, suggesting that the net effect of physical exercise would be overestimated if the selective bias was ignored. based on this, the researchers believe that physical exercise can not only help build a strong body for teenagers but also improve their a mailto:james7526@163.com vol.8, no.2, 2021 1151 cognitive ability to some extent. in family education, parents should abandon the traditional concept of “academics comes first” and form a beneficial closed-loop of “encouragement, support, guidance and feedback” for teenagers to participate in physical exercises. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2021; 39(03):84-98. bece. newsletter vol.6, no.2, 2020 883 the impact of new college entrance examination reform on academic adaptation of freshmen: suppression or enhancement? by bao, w. & jin, h. h. correspondence to: bao, w. email: baowei@pku.edu.cn his a study published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), which used the double differential propensity score matching method (psm-did). the research is based on the national college teaching quality and student development survey data and interview data, using the double differential tendency score matching method (psm-did) to explore the effect of the new college entrance examination reform on the academic adaptation of freshmen. this paper used the national college student development survey data of year 2017 and 2018, setting the type of college entrance examination as the core independent variable. judging by the different location, students in zhejiang and shanghai are considering as the treatment group, which values as 1; and students from other provinces are the control group, and the variable is 0. in order to improve the reliability of the data analysis results, this paper incorporates the individual characteristics of the students’ academic foundation (grouping and standardizing the college entrance examination scores), college characteristics, discipline types, academic participation, and family socioeconomic status into the control variables. this article focuses on the following three major issues: (i) how will the new college entrance examination reform affect students’ academic performance at the university level? (ii) whether the reform will help to improve the matching degree of students’ professional choices? (iii) whether those students with relatively weak educational resources may face obstacles in academic adaptation after admission. the research results are as follows:  in terms of academic performance, research data shows. before the implementation of the new college entrance examination reform, the academic performance of students in zhejiang and shanghai areas was significantly better than other provinces. while after the reform, the academic performance advantage of freshmen in zhejiang and shanghai area has shrunk. on the one hand, the increase in the number of exams squeezed students’ lint vol.6, no.2, 2020 884 ear learning time, speeding up and compressing the learning progress, but instead caused the weakening of the students’ academic foundation before entering the university, leading to a decline in the academic performance of freshmen in zhejiang and shanghai. on the other hand, to help students choose professional subjects based on students’ learning interests and personality development. in reality, they are also alienated into divergence and avoidance of competition strategies that are difficult to optimize scores. this bought a freshman basic subject risk of lack of knowledge.  about the interest of studying majors, after the implementation of the new college entrance examination reform, the academic interest of freshmen in the shanghai area of zhejiang province has significantly improved. the design of the admission mechanism of the new college entrance examination has met the students’ professional aspirations to the greatest extent, which helped to promote further studies. the degree of matching between the person and the major of study. due to the system design of subject selection, high school schools are required to strengthen the career planning education of high school students to help students establish an objective understanding of various majors and their future career directions, so as to make more rational professional choices.  the impact of the new college entrance examination reform on college students’ academic adaptation has obvious heterogeneity. in the context of the new college entrance examination, due to the weak school hardware conditions, the shortage of teacher reserves and curriculum resources, the disadvantaged group of students in vulnerable high school schools may be at a disadvantage in the new progression model. it can be seen that the difference in the level of educational resources occupies the children of the disadvantaged in the new college entrance examination reform, which shows a more embarrassing situation of academic discomfort and decline after entering the university. the research conclusion of this article can provide the following four aspects of enlightenment for the reform of the new college entrance examination: first, the reform of the new college entrance examination requires reflection and coordination of possible conflicts between the reform measures and the teaching practice of the high school. on the basis of adhering to the value orientation of the new college entrance examination, the stability of the high school education is maintained. second, university education also needs to adjust training programs in time for reforms, and provide targeted tutorial education for students with different subject structures and academic foundations. third, each reform area should provide sufficient high school teachers and social resources for each high school to assist each school to establish an effective life planning education system. fourth, the new reform should con vol.6, no.2, 2020 885 sider the relatively weak schools at the grass-roots high schools, providing them with the necessary teachers and hardware conditions for the reform, so that the disadvantaged groups receive a fairer education. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2020; 38(6):20-33. bece, vol.7, no.2, 2021 943 discussion on the role of “head teacher” in china’s basic education longjun zhou, 1,2 fangmei li 3 1. jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, china. 2. engineering research center of digital learning support technology, ministry of education, changchun 130000, jilin, china. 3. china tao xingzhi research association wisdom education research institute, and nanjing dianji institute of psychological education, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china “i have been impressed with the urgency of doing. knowing is not enough; we must apply. being willing is not enough; we must do.” –leonardo da vinci rom the perspective of the development of education, the initial reason for the emergence of schools is to enable students to master specific knowledge and skills required by society. in this process, it is inevitable to undertake the task of cultivating students’ ideology and morality. before the 18th century, due to the relatively low level of social development and education, the two functions of “teaching” and “educating” were often intertwined in the education process. after the british bourgeois industrial revolution in the 18th century, education began to pursue the ability to train the talents needed for large-scale machine production on a large scale and with high efficiency. all capitalist countries have established modern school education systems one after another. scientific knowledge is developing daily, and subject teaching is gradually taking shape (silver, 2013). the refinement and scientific requirement of modern school teaching content intensified the division and contradiction between teaching and educating people. teaching and management have increasingly evolved into two independent and professional activities. by the end of the 19th century, influenced by the herbart school’s ideas and others, © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. f bece, vol.7, no.2, 2021 944 people “divided the school’s internal educational activities into four functional aspects: teaching, training, conservation and management” (herbat, 1806). at this time, there are two functional systems in ordinary schools: one was the “work system” divided by disciplines, that is, the teaching system; the other was the student management, education, and guidance system, which can also be called the management training system the independence of the student management and training system has prompted the emergence of work arrangements and positions in schools with functions such as management, guidance, and education as individual goals (silver, 2013). take china as an example. in 1903, the school set up a “supervisor” responsible for students’ character education. later it was renamed “administrator” and “director teacher.” after 1938, the person responsible for managing a class in the school was renamed “class tutor.” after the founding of china, under the influence of the former soviet union’s head teacher system, the original elementary and middle school teachers and mentors were all changed to “head teacher” (chen, 2007). at present, elementary and middle schools in various countries have particular management positions for students. however, there are differences in their specific work objects or scope of work. in the united states, most elementary schools implement the head teacher “package system.” the package teacher is responsible for the students’ daily management, education, and guidance and responsible for the teaching of all subjects in a class. usually, the teacher’s office is the classroom where the students attend classes. all students’ teaching activities are carried out in a classroom. therefore, the student management, guidance, and education functions at the elementary school stage are basically undertaken by the package teacher. in american middle schools, exceptionally comprehensive high schools, the schools implement the “selection system” in the curriculum and the “credit system” in the school system. therefore, students do not have a fixed class, so the head teacher responsible for student management and guidance is not specified, but a counselor 1 , homeroom teacher 2 , dean, and the students themselves and social forces. separate implementation and joint responsibility (hammerness, 2011). in the french school system, “teaching” and “educating” are two separate functions, and the inspector is an exceptional collaborator in ordinary french secondary schools. the school inspector’s activities are basically to supervise and inspect students’ behavior inside and outside the school and maintain school discipline. due to the increasingly severe educational problems in schools, french elementary and middle schools have replaced the “supervisors” administrators — education consultants. educational consultants focus on students’ management and guidance and act as an inspiration and advocate (belinda, 2013). in china, the elementary and middle school head teacher system is a characteristic and essential part of national basic education. after 1949, to adapt to the needs of social development and accelerate the training of new generations needed for social development, based on learning the experience bece, vol.7, no.2, 2021 945 of the soviet union, elementary and middle schools in china generally implemented the head teacher system. they promulgated the “interim middle schools regulations (draft)” in 1952. the “draft” clearly stipulates that “each class of the middle school has one head teacher, who the principal selects from among the teachers in each class. under the leadership of the dean, he is responsible for contacting the teachers in the class, referring to the life and study of the students...”. since then, the head teacher system and the head teacher’s basic responsibilities have been formally determined in china. later, in 1979, the “requirements on the work of head teachers” was issued to clarify further the scope of duties of the head teacher’s work and the specific requirements for self-construction (xu, 1989). in 2009, in response to head teachers’ responsibilities and tasks, the ministry of education issued the “work regulations for elementary and middle school head teachers” (ministry of education of china, 2009). according to the “regulations,” each elementary and middle school class should be equipped with a head teacher. the head teacher is selected and hired by the school from the class teachers, and its job responsibilities should include the following aspects: (i) first, get a comprehensive understanding of every student in the class and deeply analyze the students’ thinking, psychology, study, and living conditions. care for all students, treat every student equally and respect student personality. adopt various ways to communicate with students, carry out targeted ideological and moral education, and promote the comprehensive development of students’ morality, intelligence, and physical beauty. (ii) carefully maintain the class’ daily management and the class’ order, cultivate students’ sense of rules, sense of responsibility, and sense of collective honor, and create a collaborative atmosphere of democracy, harmony, solidarity, and mutual assistance a healthy and progressive atmosphere. (iii) organize and guide various class activities such as class meetings, team meetings (days), cultural and sports entertainment, social practice, spring (autumn) tours, etc. pay attention to mobilizing students’ enthusiasm and initiative and do an excellent job in safety protection. (iv) organize students’ comprehensive quality evaluation work, guide students to carefully record growth records, realistically evaluate student conduct, and make recommendations for rewards and punishments to the school. (v) frequently communicate with teachers and other faculty and staff, actively contact students’ parents and the communities where students live and strive to form an educational synergy. it can be seen that, compared with european and american schools in class, students are scattered among the schools, living in individual forms or temporary classroom organizations. chinese elementary and middle schools live in schools as ‘classes.’ classes are a teaching community and a living community and administrative management unit. this allows chinese classes bece, vol.7, no.2, 2021 946 to carry a unique educational advantage in educating people, and it also makes head teacher positions in china irreplaceable (xiong & sun, 2017). compared to one post in other countries, head teachers in china may hold multiple posts. it is necessary to reflect teaching and educating people through teaching work, reflect management and education through class organization and management, and reflect service and education in students’ development and service. also, many excellent head teachers carry the vital mission of “leading parents to assist education.” they assume western countries’ responsibility to guide parent educators’ identity from the national system level (wang, 2019). the particularity of head teachers’ duties and labor in china determines that teachers engaged in head teacher work should have strong professional qualities, such as excellent teaching ability, class management ability, moral reflection ability, and spiritual care ability. among the many professional literacy requirements, strong teaching ability has become the primary criterion for head teacher positions. especially influenced by the traditional teaching ideology of “integration of training and education” and examination-oriented education, class teachers are mostly core subject teachers. more schools and parents believe that the core subject teacher 3 has extended contact with students and can have more time to understand students effectively and coordinate the education work of teachers and parents of students (shi, 2021). with the advancement of quality education in china, especially in 2019, the state council promulgated the “opinions of the central state council on deepening education and teaching reform and comprehensively improving the quality of compulsory education.” it must comprehensively develop quality education, focusing on academic instruction, moral education, physical education, aesthetic education, and labor education. more and more schools have begun to use non-core subject teachers as head teachers. however, the school’s innovation has not been recognized by all parents, and even some parents have distrust and opposition to the entire teaching work because the associate teacher is the head teacher. the debate about who is the head teacher has intensified in china, but the academic community has not given sufficient evidence. using evidence as the basis for selecting and improving programs can promote education innovation, evaluation, and gradual improvement (slavin et al., 2021). in this issue of the journal, bai et al. (2021) discussed whether a physical education teacher’s head teacher will adversely affect student performance. they use a combination of rigorous experimental research and qualitative research to evaluate the effect of physical education teachers as head teachers. in the research method, this article summarizes previous research shortcomings that only experience but not evidence. while responding to social concerns provide a scientific basis for optimizing head teacher staffing and improving class management in china. bece, vol.7, no.2, 2021 947 notes 1. in american middle schools, tutors are full-time teachers between teachers and administrators. they do not teach classes, but their work is precise and specialized, with fixed objects and work scope. 2. homeroom teacher: some high schools in the united states have arranged “homeroom” in the students’ curriculum. the family room gathers the students enrolled in the same grade to facilitate some student management activities. 3. affected by china’s examination system, in basic education courses, examination subjects are called core subjects, and subjects that do not take examinations are called non-core subjects. generally speaking, the core subjects include chinese, mathematics, english, politics, history, physics, biology, geography, and chemistry. non-core subjects include music, art, sports, etc. references bai, p. zhang, j., & yao, j. (2021). is it reliable for a physical education teacher to be a head teacher? a mixed-method study. best evidence in chinese education, 7(2):949-960. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or019 belinda, h. (2013). international school-based counseling. scoping report. british association for counseling and psychotherapy. https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/2050/counselling-minded-international-schoolbasedcounselling-harris.pdf chen, g. (2007). head teacher system. journal of shanghai educational research, 2007(11):4-6. [chinese] https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfd2007&f ilename=sjyy200711002&v=bycwyms57uyp1fxlmzn2adgesepautniuqq esjmxawxlnfbmjutw5w6yhkw9ifia hammerness, k. (2011). classroom management in the united states: a view from new york city. teaching education, 22:151-167. https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2011.567844 herbart, j.f. (1806). allgemeine pädagogik aus dem zweck der erziehung abgeleitet (general pedagogics deduced from the goal of education johann friedrich röwer. [german] ministry of education of china. (2009). working regulations of elementary and middle school head teacher (jiaojiyi [2009] no. 12). 08-12 [chinese] http://old.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s3325/201001/81878.html shi, x. (2021). can a non-core subject teacher serve as a homeroom teacher? discussion on the dispute between core and non-core subject teachers as a homeroom teacher. science insights education frontiers, 8(1):989-1000. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.or003 silver, h. (2013). education as history (vol. 36). routledge. isbn: 0-416-33310-9. slavin, r.e., cheung, a.c., & zhuang, t. (2021). how could evidence-based reform advance education? ecnu review of education, 4(1):7-24. doi: https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.03.002 wang, h. (2019). the cognition of the head teacher’s role from the perspective of chinese-english comparative education. new curriculum review, 2019(9):123-128. [chinese] https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xkpl201909016 .htm https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or019 https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/2050/counselling-minded-international-school-based-%20counselling-harris.pdf https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/2050/counselling-minded-international-school-based-%20counselling-harris.pdf https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfd2007&filename=sjyy200711002&v=bycwyms57uyp1fxlmzn2adgesepautniuqqesjmxawxlnfbmjutw5w6yhkw9ifia https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfd2007&filename=sjyy200711002&v=bycwyms57uyp1fxlmzn2adgesepautniuqqesjmxawxlnfbmjutw5w6yhkw9ifia https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfd2007&filename=sjyy200711002&v=bycwyms57uyp1fxlmzn2adgesepautniuqqesjmxawxlnfbmjutw5w6yhkw9ifia https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2011.567844 http://old.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s3325/201001/81878.html https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.or003 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.03.002 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xkpl201909016%20.htm bece, vol.7, no.2, 2021 948 xiong, h., & sun, l. (2017). chinese class characteristics. educational research and experiment, 2017(5):67-72. [chinese] https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotalyjsy201705014.htm xu, y. (1989). the evolution of the class system, head teacher system, and the emergence of head teacher learning. dongjiang journal, 1989(4):43-46. [chinese] https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-djxk198904008.htm correspondence to: longjun zhou, ph.d. jiangsu second normal university, china email: 294437034@qq.com conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.co005 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-yjsy201705014.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-yjsy201705014.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-djxk198904008.htm bece. newsletter vol.6, no.1, 2020 789 how long should we sleep? the ideal matching pattern between sleep time and academic achievement of high-school students by liu, j., zhao, l.m., du, x.f., xu, g.x. correspondence to: liu, j. email: ncctlj@126.com or zhao, l. email: 545997501@qq.com dequate sleep time, good psychosomatic development environment, and high-quality academic achievement are necessary conditions for educational success. based on this, a study published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), relying on the data of the quality and health check-up program of china basic education quality monitoring coordination center, explored the ideal matching model between students’ high academic achievement and sleep time on the basis of students psychosomatic development and a good educational environment, and providing multi-level early-warning to schools that sacrifice students’ sleep time in exchange for good scores. the results show that:  in general, high school students have the best academic performance when they sleep more than nine hours. and those students enjoy a higher interest in learning, less stress, better learning quality, higher activity participation, more harmonious interpersonal relationships, and more happiness.  for schools with low socioeconomic status, students who get the best grades when they sleep between eight to nine hours have higher interest, less stress, better learning quality, more activity participation, harmonious interpersonal relationships, and more happiness. this shows that in the school environment with an overall lower socio-economic background, students need to pay a certain amount of time and effort to achieve good grades, and the best performance can only be achieved on the basis of at least eight hours of sleep, which guarantees a healthy educational environment.  for schools with high socio-economic status groups, students who get the best grades when they sleep for more than eight hours have higher interest, lower stress, better learning quality, more aca vol.6, no.1, 2020 790 tivity participation, more harmonious interpersonal relationships and more happiness. the study suggests that high achievement should not come at the expense of less sleep, regardless of the socio-economic status of the school. keeping students’ sleep time at or above eight hours is an ideal matching mode for schools to ensure students’ physical and mental health development and to create a good educational environment. it’s suggested that the administrators, schools, teachers, and parents should hold positive values and understand the relationship between students’ sleep time and academic performance. for schools that blindly pursue high grades at the expense of students’ sleep time, a multi-level early-warning mechanism should be established and their rectification should be supervised. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2020; 38(3):71-79. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.1, 2021 933 how do personal trait credibility and facial credibility affect children’s peers trust? by li, q.g., zhang, w.y., sun, j.y., & ma, f.l. correspondence to: li, q.g., department of psychology, zhejiang normal university, china. email: liqinggong@zjnu.cn acial credibility means the confidence level of the trustee is related to facial features, while personal trait credibility represents that concerns personality traits. li’s team surveys 297 students aged 8 to 12 to explore the prediction of trustee’s personal trait credibility and facial credibility on peers trust and the age difference. the measurement process is divided into three parts. first, each participant evaluates the confidence level of their classmates to obtain peers trust scores. second, through the introduction, the test relates high level to the traits of being honest, reliable, and considerate, so as to obtain the number of high level nominations for each student, and obtain the personal trait credibility scores. third, 80 primary students aged from 8 to 12 who did not participate in the test are selected to evaluate the credibility of participants from each face photo to get a facial credibility score. the results show that: children are inclined to trust peers with high facial credibility score and high personal trait credibility score. compared with low personal trait credibility, when trustees have higher score, facial credibility has a greater predictive effect on peers trust. compared with low personal trait credibility, when trustees have higher score, trait credibility has a greater predictive effect on peer trust. the predictive effect of personal trait credibility increases with the growth of age, whereas the predictive effect of facial credibility remains the same. source: psychological development and education, 2020; 36(1):38-44. f i can deadly virus stop education? ovid-19 is a sudden human disaster. as the country with the earliest outbreak, china’s epidemic situation has been basically controlled after arduous efforts. in the fight against the epidemic, the chinese government has continued to postpone the start of new school semester, launched the largest online education activity in human history, and realized “school’s out, but class’s on” at all levels. with the continuous spread of the virus, more and more countries and regions in the world have announced the suspension of schools and the use of online education in order to control the epidemic. in order to better help countries around the world to understand china’s experience, the editorial office of the journal organized a special issue to report on the practices and experiences of chinese schools in conducting online education activities during the epidemic. it should be noted that some of the manuscripts presented in this issue are not “academic research” in a strict sense. we believe that at such an urgent moment, academic standards should give way to realistic needs to a certain extent. in the manuscripts we present, there is a comprehensive analysis of the actual basis and impact of the largest online education activity in human history in china, as well as detailed descriptions of online education measures in different schools in china. the schools herein included came from both developed and underdeveloped regions of china, and also from urban and rural schools. therefore, it can represent the status of basic education in china more completely. we hope that through the sharing of these experiences, we can provide some lessons for all educators working hard to fight and control the virus. we also hope that with the efforts of everyone, the disaster will end earlier and quickly, and people’s lives and school education will return to normal as soon as possible! correspondence to: editorial office best evidence of chinese education e-mail: eif.bece@basehq.org. conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ed006 c a six-step online teaching method based on protocol-guided learning during the covid19 epidemic: a case study of the first middle school teaching practice in changyuan city, henan province, china ruichang cai, quanzhou wang the first middle school of changyuan city, changyuan 453400, henan, china abstract. the first middle school in changyuan city, henan province has been relying on protocol-guided learning for a long time. during the covid-19 epidemic, the school used protocol-guided learning as a carrier and conducted online teaching activities based on an online teaching platform. we have created a six-step teaching method for students to learn independently during the epidemic. we explored this school’s sixstep teaching method based on protocol-guided learning during the covid-19 epidemic. best evid chin edu 2020; 4(2):529-534. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.rp010. keywords: covid-19 epidemic; online teaching; autonomous learning; teaching practice; middle school about the author: ruichang cai, principal, changyuan first middle school, changyuan 453400, henan, china. email: cyyzcrc@163.com. correspondence to: quanzhou wang, vice principal, changyuan first middle school, changyuan 453400, henan, china. email: 13839066456@163.com. conflict of interests: none. cai & wang. a six-step online teaching method during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 530 utonomous learning refers to the ability of learners to set learning goals, determine learning content and progress, choose learning techniques, monitor self-learning processes, and conduct self-assessment (holec, 1981). the first middle school in changyuan city, henan province, in recent years, has guided students in autonomous learning with protocol-guided learning. in the continuous practice, accumulation and improvement, a unique student autonomous learning model has been formed and achieved remarkable results. protocol-guided learning is based on curriculum standards and teaching materials for middle and elementary school teachers, combining students’ academic situation and cognitive status, taking learning goals as the guidance, and questions as the core, and guiding students’ learning before, during, and after class (xia, 2020). compared with the traditional teaching mode, teaching based on protocol-guided learning not only reflects the student as the center, but also significantly improves the academic performance of students, with an effect value of 0.29 (zhou & li, 2020). during the covid-19 epidemic, the first middle school in changyuan city, henan province, implemented the epidemic prevention and control requirements of the ministry of education and local governments. in response to the “school’s out, but class’s on” policy, i.e., “school is closed, but student learning is continuing online” or “online home study” (this refers to the official website of the chinese ministry of education: http://en.moe.gov.cn/), teachers and students throughout the school use protocol-guided learning as the carrier and online teaching platforms as the basis for online teaching activities to promote student autonomous learning. during the teaching process, the school resolutely and seriously implemented the teaching concept of “learning first and then teaching”, combined with the way students learn independently during the epidemic, and created a six-step teaching method for online learning based on the teaching facts of the school. teachers assign learning tasks during the epidemic, the school strictly followed the normal teaching schedule to carry out autonomous learning activities for students. restricted by the epidemic, the school adopted the “internet + protocol-guided learning” teaching model and established public information exchange platforms such as wechat group and dingding group. in order to facilitate the communication and exchange between teachers, students and parents, teachers, students and parents are closely connected through the above public information communication tools. teachers will issue protocol-guided learning on established public information platforms (wechat group or dingding group). teachers arrange learning tasks through the platform, students receive learning tasks on the platform, and parents urge students to accept tasks on the platform. a cai & wang. a six-step online teaching method during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 531 students prepare and pre-study according to the protocol, complete homework and communicate within the group in the daily teaching activities, the school emphasizes “learning first and then teaching”, and all students first preview the learning content and complete the corresponding preview test exercises. during the epidemic, students carried out autonomous learning activities based on tasks assigned by teachers on the platform. when the teacher guides the students to preview, they mainly complete the “i. self-learning the basic knowledge” part of the first lesson independently with “protocol-guided learning”, or try to complete the questions in other parts of “protocol-guided learning” with pencils. on the platform, the independently completed preview exercises are uploaded to the study group, and discussions and exchanges are organized between group members. parental supervision and teacher guidance parents are important guides for the growth of students. in the daily teaching, parents are too busy with work and are neglecting to educate and guide their children. only when teachers and parents work together can we ensure that students’ autonomous learning can be carried out smoothly during the epidemic, and that this” school’s out, but class’s on “will achieve its due effect (zhang, 2020). during the epidemic, parents were more with their students and more assumed some of the responsibilities that originally belonged to teachers. in order to give full play to the role of parents in educating students, the school puts forward different requirements for parents who work from home, parents who do not need to work at home, and teachers according to different personal circumstances. if parents still have to undertake work tasks during the epidemic, they cannot always urge students to learn. therefore, parents must put forward specific requirements to students every day, and strengthen the ideological education of students’ autonomous learning, autonomous consciousness, and active learning. for parents who rest at home, there is more time to urge their children to learn independently. parents not only see whether they learn or not, but also the efficiency of learning. they should pay attention to observe whether students can keep up with the teacher’s teaching pace, and whether they can independently solve learning problems. students’ autonomous learning also needs the guidance and guidance of teachers. on the one hand, teachers should check the group summary report in time to understand the students’ autonomous learning situation. on the other hand, in response to students’ problems and doubts during learning, teachers need to do timely telephone communication and guidance with parents. the problem feedback, layer by layer cai & wang. a six-step online teaching method during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 532 in the school’s normal teaching practice, the school establishes sixor eight-person study groups to promote student learning through study groups. each student has his or her own learning partner. generally, students with higher grades and students with less than ideal grades go together in order to improve each other. during the epidemic, the study group was transferred to a public information platform, connecting students, parents, and teachers through the public platform. and set up learning groups on the platform, each group has its own learning exchange group, to facilitate the team leader to monitor the completion of the group members’ work in a timely manner. at the same time, the teacher can understand the learning situation of all students through the group leader, saving time. tasks and homework assignments arranged by the teacher are studied in groups. the detailed learning steps are below: first, students think independently and digest the knowledge they can solve by themselves. in the process of self-study, outline the points you don’t understand and communicate with your learning partners. if there are still problems after the exchange between the partners, submit them to the group, and the group will cooperate to solve them. in the wechat group, the teacher collects the problems that the students can’t solve in the study, and the problems that the students don’t solve, the teacher focuses on explaining through the online platform. for the team members to complete the task, the teacher asked the team leader to report in two groups in the class every day: 1. report the housekeeping, physical exercise, and dual-channel temperature reports before 6:30 am in the morning. 2. inform the list of students whose other tasks are not completed on time or not completed before 8:00 pm. the above two periods of reporting require that you take notes and make a weekly summary every sunday to announce your personal grade reduction. therefore, we particularly emphasize that the class teacher should attach great importance to the training of the team leader and teach them management methods; at the same time, special care and guidance should be given in study and life. teachers’ online lecture guidance, problem correction and re-feedback teachers learn about student group learning in a timely manner, and based on understanding of student learning, targeted teaching. teachers carry out online instructional activities based on the results of online learning and the learning of each group. teachers’ online classroom guidance must do three close integrations: 1. closely integrate the “protocol-guided learning” of the school; 2. closely integrate common questions raised in students’ autonomous learning; cai & wang. a six-step online teaching method during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 533 3. closely integrate high-quality course resources. high-quality teaching resources such as the “henan provincial experimental middle school quality online course” were launched by the education department of henan province. we must pay attention to collecting the problems existing in the pre-class review, pay attention to intensive lectures and interaction with students. after the online teaching of science, the method of recording multiple small videos of the most difficult points and further focusing on counseling was provided to allow students to selectively check for omissions. in order to ensure the pertinence of teaching, teachers who have already met the students will no longer teach. consolidation and promotion, summary and sublimation the teacher arranges exercises for the students again through the network learning platform, and the students complete the corresponding exercises independently. after the students complete the homework, they submit it to the platform, and the teacher reviews it in time, and finds that the problem is corrected in time. teachers guide students to summarize their learning content, so that students can refine the core knowledge of each lesson. during the epidemic, the school guided students to learn independently through an original six-step method of online teaching. on the one hand, it responded to the national “school’s out, but class’s on” policy, which ensured the normal learning process of students and promoted the improvement of students’ autonomous learning ability. on the other hand, it has further strengthened the communication with students’ parents, strengthened the parents’ awareness of students’ supervision, and paved the way for the restoration of regular teaching activities. references holec, h. (1981) autonomy and foreign language learning. oxford: pergamon, 3. xia, j.p. (2020) teaching for student learning: exploration of teaching strategies based on protocol-guided learning. sci insigt edu front, 5(1): 451-467. zhang, m. “school’s out, but class’s on” requires the cooperation of many parties [n]. china women’s news, 2020-02-20 (001). zhou, l.j., li, c.g. (2020) can student selfdirected learning improve their academic performance? experimental evidence from cai & wang. a six-step online teaching method during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 534 the instruction of protocol-guided learning in china’s elementary and middle schools. sci insigt edu front, 5(1): 469-480. received: 29 february 2020 revised: 03 march 2020 accepted: 12 march 2020 report-quanzhouwang-bece_title_15mar2020 report-quanzhouwang-bece_maintext15mar2020 success for all: professor slavin and the improvement of evidence-based schools and its enlightenment to china longjun zhou,1,2 hui gu 3 1. jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, china 2. engineering research center of digital learning support technology, ministry of education, changchun 130000, jilin, china 3. nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, jiangsu, china abstract. success for all (sfa) is a school improvement project promoted by the team of professor robert slavin of johns hopkins university. this paper reviewed the development process of sfa and analyzed its characteristics. by comparing with china’s “new basic education” project, we summarized the reference value of sfa for china, and further discussed the possible path of china’s evidence-based school improvement. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 8(1):1029-1040. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.or35. how to cite: zhou, l., gu, h. (2021). success for all: professor slavin and the improvement of evidence-based schools and its enlightenment to china. best evidence in chinese education, 8(1):1029-1040. keywords: robert edward slavin, success for all, evidence-based school improvement, enlightenment to china about author: hui gu, school of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, jiangsu, china. email: gu_nnu@163.com correspondence to: longjun zhou, jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, china; engineering research center of digital learning support technology, ministry of education, changchun 130000, jilin, china. email: 294437034@qq.com conflict of interests: none. zhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1030 elping schools, especially weak schools, improve the efficiency of education and teaching, and promote the quality of teaching is an important theme in educational research and practice. over the years, with the joint efforts of researchers and practitioners, the improvement projects of some schools have achieved remarkable results. this includes “success for all” (sfa) led by robert slavin of johns hopkins university, “direct instruction” (di) of siegfried engelmann of the university of illinois, and “the accelerated schools” of henry levin of stanford university. they are all helping students, especially those with disadvantaged family backgrounds and poor grades, through which they have achieved remarkable results in improving students’ reading, math, and language skills. however, researchers have noticed that what works well in some schools may not be applicable in others (borman et. al., 2002). in order to avoid the bias of results caused by a single independent research, and to achieve the best plan for the evaluation of student ability, a non-profit social science research institution operated by the american institutions for research (ar) funded by the office of elementary and secondary education of the us department of education comprehensive school reform quality (csrq) evaluated and compared the effectiveness and quality of 22 comprehensive school reforms. it was found that sfa relied on the wide coverage of schools (1,200) and applicable age (preschool-7th grade), the most research designs (41), the most valid conclusions (34), and a clear effect size (d = 0.18), thus getting the best evaluation (slavin, 2007). chinese educators have also contributed greatly to the school improvement. as a successful school improvement project, sfa was the most important educational research and practice legacy of professor slavin. it undoubtedly provided an important reference for the work of chinese colleagues. this paper will discuss the path of china’s evidence-based school improvement on the basis of reviewing and summarizing the experience of sfa, hoping to find some new ideas for the reform and development of chinese education. success for all: how professor slavin promoted school improvement based on evidence since 1986, professor slavin’s team has been invited by baltimore city public schools to develop a project that can ensure the success of all poor children, which became the origin of the sfa project. professor slavin and his team believed that a good school can © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. h zhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1031 develop more “adversity-resistant students”, thereby helping those students with poor family backgrounds to obtain “counter-attack” in performance. however, helping students to read is an early key factor for students to achieve academic success. therefore, the research team started from cooperative reading and gradually developed a school improvement plan that can provide comprehensive guidance for students from preschool to 7th-grade. early interventions include ability grouping in the form of teaching organization-aka joplin plan (slavin, 1987; gutierrez & slavin, 1992), classroom management strategies (evertson et al, 2000), and one-to-one student reading improvement program (pinnell et al., 1988; pinnell et al., 1994), teacher professional development path (perry et. al., 1999); etc. these actions were integrated into the early sfa plan. the early intervention has achieved obvious results. since then, the research team has turned its attention to a wider range of areas. on the one hand, the sfa plan began to pay attention to the impact of related interventions on second language acquisition. because when teaching children from poor families, a large number of students come from families whose mother tongue is not english, it has partially demonstrated the positive effect of the sfa program on bilingual learning. at the same time, when teaching reading, learning phonics & phonological awareness, which is an important part of english learning like chinese phonetic alphabet (pin yin in chinese), is extremely conducive to the rapid grasp of english pronunciation and writing. studies have found that this has a significant positive impact on the english learning of spanish, colombian, mexican and chinese students (calderon et al., 1998; cheung & slavin, 2005; slavin & madden, 1999; ross et al., 1996). in addition, borman et al. also conducted a longitudinal follow-up survey of baltimore school students and found that by the eighth grade, these students’ performance in standardized reading was still significantly better than the early control students (borman et al., 2003). on the other hand, the sfa project team also explored the auxiliary teaching and evaluation of electronic software. the research team used reading reel and alphie’s alley. the former is software that helps students to learn vocabulary in the form of animation, and the latter is software that helps teachers to plan lessons and evaluate students. after three sets of comparative experiments, it was found that the students who used reading reel and alphie’s alley performed better than those who only participated in the sfa program and only participated in the sfa tutor guidance (chambers et al., 2007; chambers et al., 2005a; chambers et al. al., 2005b). so far, sfa has achieved great success. it has become one of the most effective and evidence-based education-based school improvement programs in the united states. after csqr integrated 41 sfa experiments, it is found that the effect size of sfa on students is d = 0.18. although 0.18 was a small effect size, in the field of education, large-scale random intervention programs such as sfa could achieve an effect size of about 0.2 was already a very exciting result. this showed that the effect of sfa was significant, and its actions could provide strong evidence for the formulation of education policies. the success of sfa is largely due to the design, implementation and improvement of each of its interventions based on scientific evidence; and in the process of continuous iteration, a robust, systematic, high promotion value, and effective zhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1032 intervention method has been formed. in this way, more schools will benefit in a larger scale. these proven methods include: flexible class schedule and class placement mode based on the research of evertson et al. (2000), the sfa plan uses 90 minutes as a course unit to make the classroom rhythm compact and efficient. what teachers have to do is to improve class management strategies and use time efficiently. however, due to the large differences in the abilities of students in a class, efficient teaching is challenged. therefore, students in the sfa program should pass a test before participating in the reading program and be reclassified. this type of teaching has the following advantages: first, teachers can better teach per their aptitude to meet the different learning needs of students with different abilities. second, teachers do not need to group in class for separate guidance when teaching, which not only improves the rhythm of the course, but also increases the efficiency of the class. third, the class size after re-grouped is smaller than the original class size, which helps teachers pay more attention to students and accumulate teaching experience and skills. rich and diverse teaching resources in order to meet the different reading needs of students from preschool to seventh grade, sfa has designed different curriculum plans. in the teaching materials book provided by sfa, these activities will be integrated according to the physical and mental laws of student development, and the key points, goals, and maxims of teaching will be put forward. it provides teachers with a set of teaching systemic materials for almost all the ability development needs of students. in the pre-school stage, these materials were called curiosity corner and kinder corner by the sfa research team; after that, sfa provided reading roots, reading wings and reading edge course materials for the beginner, intermediate and middle school students, respectively. in addition to providing teaching materials and books, sfa also provides comprehensive guidance on activities corresponding to the development needs of students, student evaluation record sheets after teaching, evaluation methods and evaluation questions, which provide teachers with direction guidance. professional “coordinator” guidance in order to realize the smooth development of the project, sfa has set up a project “coordinator”, which mainly includes two roles: one is the facilitator for the entire project operation; the other is the tutor for coordinating courses, teachers, students, and equipment. a school generally has a facilitator, whose main job is to organize periodic student assessments, lectures and lectures, and teacher training, select the appropriate learning stage for students, and help teachers improve their work; etc. in this process, the coordinator is not an evaluator, supervisor or vice-principal, but a supporter of teacher development. therefore, many coordinators themselves are excellent and exzhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1033 tremely experienced teachers. a school can have multiple tutors. when instructing students, they often adopt one-to-one guidance, assess students’ progress, determine priority development abilities and teaching materials, combine class teaching, learn to read by reading, and actively communicate with class instructors. emphasize fairness and full participation according to the original purpose of the sfa plan, in order to promote educational equity, helping students from poor families to develop better. first of all, sfa plans to conduct school selection before officially introducing schools. it generally selects disadvantaged schools that are dominated by non-white students such as latino or african descent. secondly, before the school is ready to accept the plan, teachers will vote to decide whether to participate. it will only be introduced when more than 90% of school teachers show a positive attitude towards this plan. finally, the school will inform the parents of the rules of the plan and sign an agreement to protect the parents’ right to know the plan; if the parents refuse to participate, the children will not be included in the school improvement plan. these three steps ensure that all participants initially have a positive attitude to promote the complete operation of the entire program. after the plan is launched, sfa will also obtain parental support and participation through various methods such as home visits, sending text messages to parents, parent-child reading, and family-school activities. what can we learn? enlightenment of evidencebased school improvement in a comparative perspective in the process of china’s education reform and development, school improvement is also a task that all parties attach great importance to. in the process of long-term exploration, chinese educators have also discovered some ways to improve schools with chinese characteristics. among the many local school reforms in china, the most influential one with the most complete system and the longest continuous practice is undoubtedly the “new basic education” reform. for a long time, excessive emphasis on test scores has made it difficult to cultivate the talents china needs. this is the main problem that china’s basic education has been widely criticized. in this regard, professor lan ye from east china normal university put forward the basic education reform idea of “new basic education” and put it into practice (feng & xiang, 2018). in 1994, professor lan ye began to construct the theory of “new basic education”; by 1999, it entered the stage of promotion and developmental research; so far, it has entered a stage of gradual enrichment and vigorous growth in theory and practice. the research and experiment of “new basic education” have gone through nearly 30 years. it has become a model of school improvement with far-reaching influence and chinese characteristics. zhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1034 this project, starting from the full and complete development of “life”, highlights the dominant position of learners, and builds a complete system of classroom teaching, teacher development, class construction, and school management. its ultimate goal is to promote the healthy and comprehensive development of students. it is an educational reform that is jointly promoted by chinese local researchers and front-line workers, combines educational theory and practical exploration, and meets the needs of cultivating new talents in the 21st century (ye, 1999). such a change has impacted the traditional educational concepts and strengthened the student-centered view of teaching in a considerable range, through which a distinctive, flexible and effective teaching mode and curriculum system have formed. eventually it became a representative project for the improvement of chinese local schools in the new era (liu, 2003). similar to sfa, the experiments of “new basic education” are all educational reform projects based on school improvement. there are many similarities between the two in terms of value pursuit, implementation methods and research drive. first of all, both uphold the student-centered teaching concept, and make every student fully developed as the value pursuit. in terms of curriculum, sfa always focuses on the development of students, and strives to solve the reading problems of students in weak schools, so that students can increase students’ enthusiasm and autonomy through group cooperation, thereby improving students’ reading ability. meanwhile, the sfa program will also set up different reading courses for students at different levels to achieve personalized reading teaching as much as possible. china’s “new basic education” experiment also has a lot of measures focusing on individualized learning of students and helping disadvantaged schools and students. both of them embody a strong value trend of emphasizing educational equity. second, both have adopted a comprehensive reform approach to advance, and attach importance to the participation of multiple subjects. the reform of the sfa model was originally intended to improve the reading level of the students in the lower grades of weak schools. however, with the advancement of experimental reforms, the sfa model not only includes reading teaching, but also involves the psychological aspects of students, and finally developed into an effective teaching paradigm for bilingual teaching and non-native english teaching. in order to promote school reform and ensure the effect of intervention, sfa has also formed a package plan including research support, teaching optimization, leadership improvement, and home-school cooperation. it has fully mobilized the power and resources of schools, families and communities. at the same time, with the support of the government and enterprises and other social forces, the participants have realized diversificazhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1035 tion. the “new basic education” experiment also showed such characteristics in the process of organization and implementation. researchers in the theory of education system ecology represented by the american psychologist bronfenbrenner (1979) believed that the development of human beings is affected by multiple environmental factors. through mutual restriction and mutual connection among various elements, children’s development and understanding will be enriched continuously. both of these projects have achieved the joint participation of schools, families and communities, and the joint efforts of multiple parties have contributed to success. third, both are based on full cooperation between scholars and schools, and school improvements implemented with the support of academic research. as mentioned earlier, during the implementation of sfa, professor slavin and his team provided solid research support for the reform of the school. this support is not only reflected in the provision of relevant teaching resources and teaching models for the implementation of reforms, but also in the implementation of recommendations and interventions based on research evidence. this ensures that relevant reforms can be carried out in the right direction, while also being able to adjust specific measures in a timely manner based on feedback. the “new basic education” was initiated by scholars when it was implemented. starting from theoretical research and then promoting practical improvement, throughout the implementation process, a research-driven, theorypractice-combined approach was adopted. from this perspective, these two school improvement projects are different from the reform efforts carried out by the schools themselves, and both reflect obvious research-leading characteristics. although the two projects have the same characteristics as above, it is undeniable that there are also differences between the two. although the “new basic education” is a far-reaching school improvement project in china, it has also made outstanding contributions to the reform of china’s education. but so far, such efforts still suffer from insufficient scientific evidence, improper grasp of the model, unclear interpretation of the rules, and difficulty in popularizing experience. the reason for this is largely due to the fact that many chinese school improvement projects, including “new basic education”, are not based on scientific evidence, but rely more on experience and feelings. for a long time, in china’s education reforms, the gradual empiricist reform model is often emphasized, that is, reforms are carried out in accordance with past experience and subjective wishes while ignoring scientific evidence (zhang, 2007). this makes it difficult for people to objectively judge the actual effect of a certain reform. furthermore, due to the lack of scientific evidence, even if a certain reform achieves the expected results, we still cannot know exactly what factors have led to such a success under what conditions. therefore, it is even more difficult to know to what extent such success reveals the scientific laws of education and teaching, and to what extent can it be promoted and valued. as a representative project of evidencebased school improvement, sfa may be able to provide us with reference to solve this zhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1036 problem in china. as an outstanding scholar of evidence-based education research and reform, professor slavin has spent his life exploring the methods and paths of evidencebased education. in the implementation of the sfa project, on the one hand, any intervention is based on the evidence of previous studies. on the other hand, during the implementation of the project, rigorous experimental interventions were also implemented. so that researchers and practitioners can accurately grasp and evaluate the effect of project implementation and its mechanism of action. in this way, we can get rid of the chronic problem of empirical school improvement projects and help find more targeted and effective school reform measures. this is probably the most worthy place for chinese schools to learn from. what can we do? possible approaches to china’s evidence-based school improvement from the perspective of the advancement and improvement process of sfa, research methodology based on educational experiments and quasi-experiments has become an important support for the reform of the program. in the reform, the use of evidence as the basis for selected programs will enable education to enter a virtuous circle of innovation, evaluation, and gradual improvement (slavin, 2013). but it needs to be pointed out that due to the differences in national conditions and teaching conditions, when we learn from the experience of sfa, we first need to demonstrate the possibility of learning. first, as far as the overall policy environment is concerned, china has issued a series of policy documents and emphasizes the application of evidence in the educational decision-making and reform process. however, we are not like the united states, requiring all important education reforms at the national level to be based on evidence and educational scientific research. as a result, many of the current decisions and reforms in china are still based on feelings, experience and even the consciousness of officials. therefore, the scientific awareness and quality of educators need to be greatly improved. second, in terms of the implementation conditions of evidence-based school improvement, chinese schools need to implement teaching in accordance with the national curriculum standards and syllabus during the teaching process. therefore, the teaching autonomy of schools and teachers is greatly restricted. this makes the selection and implementation of intervention measures face more restrictions and difficulties in the process of promoting school improvement. third, because of the evidence-based research and reform of education, it is still a new thing for china. therefore, there are deficiencies in the research staff and research level. there is also a lack of accurate and effective measurement tools suitable for the local area, which makes us have more difficulties in measurement and analysis to deal with in the process of carrying out evidence-based education reform. this means that china must do something and not do something in the process of promoting evidence-based school improvement. in other words, it is necessary to zhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1037 explore the evidence-based school improvement road with chinese characteristics based on the national conditions and education of the country. (i) whether they are policy makers, researchers, principals or frontline teachers, they all need to firmly establish a scientific outlook on development. in the reform and development of education, it is necessary to strengthen the awareness of evidence and truly achieve decision-making and teaching based on evidence. to achieve this, the government not only needs to further strengthen the requirements for evidence at the institutional level, but also requires researchers to change the style of study and vigorously strengthen empirical research; further, schools need to pay more attention to the acquisition and use of evidence in the reform process. (ii) it is necessary to vigorously strengthen and promote educational experimental research in china. as far as the current research status of domestic school improvement is concerned, most of the research is still speculative research, and a small amount of empirical research is mostly statistical description and correlation analysis. although this type of research can help understand the status quo and influencing factors of specific educational phenomena, it is difficult to conduct causal analysis. in education empirical studies without a control group, there would be a risk of biased estimation of the intervention effect (cheung & slavin, 2016). to solve this problem, technically, the best way is to carry out rigorously designed experimental research. only in this way can we provide more robust scientific evidence for school improvement based on more empirical research. (iii) efforts should be made to solve the problem of measurement methods and tools. in the process of school improvement in china, they are often good at reforming teaching and management models. however, due to the lack of authoritative and scientific measurement tools suitable for china conditions, many school improvement plans are unable to accurately report actual effects, influencing factors, and mechanism of action, so it is difficult to summarize their truly effective scientific laws. to solve this problem, the only way to increase scientific research is to develop measuring tools suitable for china’s national and teachings conditions, and truly solve the problem of “can be measured and measured more accurately”. (iv) as mentioned earlier, successful evidence-based school improvement projects are the result of the cooperation of multiple parties. from the current reality of china’s education reform and development, it can be known that the transformation of school improvement from experience-based to evidence-based cannot be accomplished with the efforts of one party alone. in terms of education evidence-based research and reform itself, it also requires close cooperation between researchers and practical work. it is impossible to obtain effective and robust evidence only by speculative “rocking chair” research, let alone evidence-based school improvement. therefore, this must be a process from cooperation to win-win. in other words, the road of evidence-based zhou & gu. success for all: professor slavin and the enlightenment to china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1038 school improvement must be the road of mutual dependence and promotion between theory and practice. professor slavin and his team have presented a successful evidence-based school improvement path for educators around the world through the sfa project. although the situation in different countries is not the same, the idea and path of evidencebased school improvement based on scientific research to promote the achievement of reform goals has shown its universal value. this is especially important for a country like china that has long been accustomed to advancing reforms through experience. after decades of rapid economic development in china, its education reform, like reforms in other fields, has entered the “deep water zone.” under such circumstances, reforms based solely on experience have increasingly shown its risks. relying on scientific evidence to promote reforms steadily has become the only way for china’s education reform and development. this road is not easy, but it is full of hope. in this process, professor slavin’s outstanding work in the field of evidence-based research will continue to guide the researchers and practitioners to move forward like a lighthouse! we would like to commemorate the respected professor slavin with this article. references borman, g.d., hewes, g.m., overman, l.t., & brown, s. 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https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-zjyx200707005.html originalarticle-longjunzhou-bece_title_may2021 originalarticle-longjunzhou-bece_maintextmay2021 integrating games into picture books to facilitate the development of social emotions in preschoolers: an empirical study on the positive effects of game-combined guided reading of picture books on social emotional development in preschoolers juzhe xi, wenying zhou, zhihong zuo east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china abstract. this 6-week experimental study aimed to examine the effects of game-combined guided reading of picture books on children’s social emotional development. preand post-test design was used among a sample of 81 children and their parents from 3 senior classes in a shanghai public kindergarten. the participants were divided into five groups: guided reading group, self-reading group, reading-withlistening group, and two control groups. in both preand post-tests, children’s parents were administered measurement “the scale of school readiness in emotional and social areas for children”. the guided reading group was asked to read picture books by following the instructions, the self-reading group read the picture books by themselves, while in the reading-with-listening group, the investigator read the stories out loud to the children and pointed to the text. the two control groups did not read picture books, and the second control group was mainly used to investigate the effects of the pre-test. the results indicated that all types of reading had significant effects on the improvement of children’s social-emotional development with difference across the groups. the game-combined guided reading had more significant effects on children’s interpersonal relationships and self-awareness development than the other two reading styles, but the effect on children’s moral development was at the statistically marginal level and was significantly higher in the other groups. our data suggest that picture book reading is effective in promoting children’s social-emotional development. furthermore, game-combined guided reading is suitable for children’s psychological characteristics, and has much greater promoting effects on their xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no.1, 2019 306 social-emotional development. if adults could add mini games to the reading, it would enhance children’s positive experience and contribute to their social-emotional development. best evid chin edu 2019; 3(1):305-320. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1076 keywords: game; picture books; reading; social development, social-emotional development; kindergarten senior class correspondence to: zhihong zuo, associate professor, department of preschool education, faculty of education, east china normal university, china; email: zuozhihong@126.com. about the author juzhe xi, professor, department of applied psychology, school of psychology and cognitive science, east china normal university, china; email: jzxi@psy.ecnu.edu.cn. wenying zhou, graduate student, department of applied psychology, school of psychology and cognitive science, east china normal university, china; email: ecnuzhouwenying@163.com. conflict of interests: none. xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 307 s an important component of psychological development, social development has aroused increasing attention. since early 1930s, western scholars have begun to study social development in children that regarded children as active participants in social activities rather than passive socialized individuals. freud’s theory of personality, vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology, and meade’s cultural determinism were considered the three most important theoretical bases of children’s social development (chen, 1994). since the 1980s, the term ‘social’ has been recognized in preschool and school-aged education in china (shi, 1994). from the mid-1980s, the focus of preschool education has shifted from intelligence development to children’s overall development. since the mid and late 1990s, quality-oriented education and the cultivation of children’s sociality have been strongly promoted. social development is not only an important part of children’s psychological development, but also the foundation of healthy personality and social adaptation ability. the guidelines for kindergarten education (trial version) issued by the ministry of education of china in 2001 stated that the purpose of social development in preschool children is to build up their ‘willingness to communicate, learn, cooperate and share, and compassion for others’. social development can facilitate children’s formation of multi-dimensional and multi-level psychological structure, shapes their personality structure of agreeableness and intelligence, and builds up their morals of gregariousness and harmony (liu, 2010). children with such social competence are likely to understand social norms, master life skills, manage interpersonal relationships and adapt to social life (yang & wu, 2001). a nationwide survey showed that promoting children’s social and emotional development helped reduce the occurrence of behavioral problems (lian et al., 2008). emotion is one of the four most important factors in children’s sociopsychological structure and a core field in their social development (chen, 1994; shaffer & kipp, 2013). social-emotional development, as a critical component of children’s social development, is particularly important to preschool children (pahl, 2007). socialemotional development refers to the generation of emotions with social significance in the process of interpersonal communication and social behavior feedback on the basis of primitive emotions (meng, 1989). children with high levels of social-emotional development tend to be more confident, have better peer relationships and more cooperative spirit, and be more capable of managing and regulating emotions, solving conflicts and promoting interpersonal communication and social adaptation (cunningham, et al., 2009; mandez, et al., 2002). in contrast, children who have difficulties in socialemotional development tend to demonstrate poor performance in school life, peer relationships and academic learning (aviles, 2005; harniss, 1999). the transition from kindergarten to elementary school is a crucial stage of overall development in preschool children. therefore, this stage requires special attention (chen, 2008). the main task of social development in preschool children is to have emotional interaction and maintain positive social interaction. it is imperative to prepare preschool children to have socialemotional development in accordance with the purpose of social development stated in a xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 308 the guidelines for kindergarten education (trial version) so that the children may have a better transition from kindergarten to elementary school. picture books are suitable materials for preschool children. the effects of picture book reading on children’s development have aroused great attention. high quality picture books do not only deliver knowledge, but also inspire courage, sow hope, and cultivate children’s temperament (geng, 2010). the results of previous empirical research suggested that picture books play a significant role in promoting children’s social-emotional development. for example, picture book reading can effectively promote the development of children’s social interaction and moderate their challenging behaviors (zuo, et al. 2012). it promoted children’s self-perception, interpersonal relationships and understanding of social regulations (zhang & zeng, 2016). in addition, reading picture books could encourage pro-social behaviors and improved social adaptability in preschool children (du, 2015; yang, et al., 2014). the existing empirical studies on the use of picture books had provided enlightenment and directions for socialemotional development education in children (liu, s., 2003; xie, 2003). in addition to picture book reading, playing games is also a crucial way to support children’s social-emotional development (he & liu, 1999; zhou, 1990). vygotsky maintained that playing games is a purposeful and conscious social activity among children (lv, 2006). for example, sports games can improve social interactions, help free children from self-centered traits, and cultivate positive emotions and healthy psychological quality (yang, 2002). role-playing games can reinforce pro-social behaviors, improve social cognition, and promote peer interaction and cooperation (duan, 2010). moreover, autonomous games can promote the development of social cognition, social emotions, social skills, social morality and self-awareness (meng, 2014). in summary, the combination of picture book reading with game playing in the kindergarten curriculum is a new and worthwhile topic. for example, jiangsu provincial department of education launched a gamification course program in 2014, aiming to guide kindergartens to set up correct views on children, games and curriculum (cao, 2016). in sun’s (2017) study of early childhood reading in the context of gamification curriculum, picture book stories were put through into children’s daily life in the form of games. the picture books game course was developed on the basis of the holistic function of picture book reading. fei (2016) and leng (2017) explored new ways of using picture books and new models of picture-book-based education so that the overall development in children could be promoted. kindergarten teachers integrated performance games into activities of picture book reading to stimulate children’s abilities to perform and comprehend reading materials. this method assumed that picture books are a critical carrier of children’s experiencing of games (peng, 2016). fang (2012) maintained that picture books contain game elements in the perspectives of form, content and usage. therefore, the combination of picture book reading with games can facilitate children’s understanding better of the material (guo, 2015). previous study indicated that gamified electronic picture books which integrate the characteristics of games into learning materials can improve students’ concentration and interest in learning (chen, 2017). in spite of the existing literature that suggested many benefits of combinxi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 309 ing picture book reading with games, concise and instructive curriculum frameworks for educators are rare. such frameworks are crucial for educators to grasp the essentials quickly and generate an educational system which integrates games into picture book reading. this study developed a mode of game-combined guided reading of picture books, which integrated picture book reading and games. during the reading process, thought provoking and guiding approaches were applied, different levels of questions were asked, and story related mini-games were designed. in the process of gamecombined guided reading of picture books, children’s initiative was paid full respect. the investigators used different approaches to encourage the children to participate in discussions and used various methods to stimulate children’s motivation. the goal was to help children to connect their existing life experiences and knowledge to the content of the story. thought provoking questions were used to guide them to think, and to cultivate their skills of anticipation, hypothesizing, questioning, and reflection. role-play, sports games and action mimicking were utilized to internalize and consolidate children’s social-emotional knowledge, and to enhance their social-emotional skills. the purpose of this study is to examine whether this innovative reading method, in comparison to traditional methods of picture book reading (e.g., self-reading, reading-withlistening), could improve children’s social-emotional development through participation and enriched experience of picture books. methods sample a volunteer sample of 81 preschool children including 47 boys (58.02%) and 34 girls (41.98%), and their parents were the participants of this study. all the children were from a senior class of a public kindergarten in shanghai where social-emotional development curriculum was not offered. all participants were under the ‘equivalent conditions’. we herein define ‘equivalent conditions’ as no significant difference in age, physiological development, and parent-and-child shared reading (e.g., attitude, frequency and time). prior to the experiment, all participants were randomly divided into five groups. an analysis of single factor anova for social-emotional development was conducted with all five groups of participants. the results indicate that there were no significant differences in the first four groups of social-emotional scores (f(3,63) = 0.93 -2.44, p > 0.05). the fifth group did not participate in the pre-test. there were no significant differences in age among each group (f(4,76) = 0.68, p = 0.957). as shown in the table 1, there were no statistically significant differences in terms of gender in each group (2 (df = 4, n = 47) = 3.54, p = 0.473). tools and materials outlines for game-combined guided reading of picture books xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 310 table 1. participants’ demographic information. group number boy (n) girl (n) average age (mo) (m ±sd) guided reading group 19 13 6 73.00 ± 3.39 self-reading group 16 9 7 72.55 ± 2.95 reading-with-listening group 19 9 10 72.60 ± 4.47 control group 1 13 6 7 72.40 ± 4.44 control group 2 14 10 4 72.33 ± 3.11 note: the purpose of setting up control group 2 was to examine the effect of pretest. the reading materials were selected from the way i feel series of picture book by cornelia maude spelman. the author was a therapist with children and families before turning full-time to writing and art. the reading materials included seven common social-emotional themes for preschool children: happiness, feeling scared, sadness, jealousy, self-confidence, missing someone, and empathy (see table 2). measurement of social-emotional development this study used yang’s (2015) “the scale of school readiness in emotional and social areas for children”, which was developed on the basis of the five-domain model of school readiness, child behavior checklist and child social development scale within the chinese cultural context. from yang’s scale, 44 items were selected. the children’s parents were asked to indicate their children’s performance in the aspects of interpersonal relationships (e.g., taking the initiative to play games with others), morals (e.g., never destroying plants and flowers or harming small animals), and selfawareness (e.g., using appropriate approaches to realize personal wishes). responses were on a five-point likert-type scale ranging from ‘completely disagree’ to ‘completely agree’. the internal consistency coefficients demonstrate satisfactory psychometric properties (interpersonal relationships ( = 0.881), morals ( = 0.898), self-awareness ( = 0.830) and overall ( = 0.864)). procedure as shown in the figure 1, this study included three stages: pre-test, experimental design implementation, and post-test. the pre-test was to understand participant children’s conditions of emotional development, select appropriate picture books, and make reading plans. the preand post-test utilized the same measurement. a team of university students who had received standardized training in advance implemented the experiment. only one chief investigator was in charge of all the experiments in all five groups. this was to minimize experimenter bias. the guided reading group was provided with instructions in reading the game-combined picture books. children in the self-reading group read the materials by themselves. in the reading-with-listening group, the chief investigator pointed to the texts while reading the story out loud, and the participant xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 311 children listened to the story. the two control groups did not read picture books, and the second control group was only used to examine the pre-test effects. children in the three experimental groups read picture books twice a week, 15-20 minutes each time, for a period of 6 weeks according to the setting of each experimental group. data analysis and results significance tests on children’s social-emotional developmental changes in each group the data of post-test from control groups 1 and 2 were compared. the results showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups (ps >.410). this finding indicated that receiving pre-test did not have impact on the participants’ post-test results. therefore, possible interference of the pre-test on the experimental results could be excluded. as shown in the table 3, the results of preand post-test comparisons showed table 2. outlines for game-combined guided reading of picture books. guided reading of game combined picture books introduction themes appropriate reading age story topic picture book introduction cover & back cover front lining & title page guided reading appropriate guiding behaviors thought provoking questions guiding questions experience sharing mini games action mimicking role play inappropriate guiding behaviors assigned reading materials distraction, perfunctoriness literacy lecturing in the process post reading summary sharing craft work mini-games conclusion xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 312 table 3. descriptive statistics of children’s social-emotional developmental changes (m ± sd). experimental groups interpersonal relationship moral self awareness guided reading group (n = 19) pre-test 40.53 ± 4.58 45.95 ± 3.29 60.95 ± 6.10 post-test 55.32 ± 4.36 57.26 ± 4.72 76.00 ± 6.31 self-reading group (n = 16) pre-test 41.69 ± 3.44 44.06 ± 4.12 61.88 ± 6.31 post-test 51.69 ± 3.26 52.81 ±4.22 73.25 ± 3.86 reading-with-listening group (n = 19) pre-test 42.58 ± 7.40 46.89 ± 2.81 63.53 ± 8.66 post-test 50.89 ± 3.56 54.58 ± 4.21 72.68 ± 5.93 control group 1 (n = 13) pre-test 43.46 ± 4.05 46.46 ± 2.44 65.23 ± 5.93 post-test 50.31 ± 4.11 54.54 ± 4.03 69.69 ± 4.99 significant improvement in all three aspects of interpersonal relationships, moral, and self-awareness among the four groups of participants (t = 2.27 − 13.91, p <.05). significance tests on children’s social-emotional developmental changes among different groups the above findings suggested that the four groups of participants who had shown no significant difference in the pre-test had developmental changes in social emotions after completing their respective picture book reading tasks. as shown in the table 4, a repeated anova on the scores of three social emotions (interpersonal relationships, moral and self-awareness) by 4 factors (four groups: guided reading group, self-reading group, reading-with-listening group, and control group 1) × 2 stages (two stages: pretest and post-test) was conducted. this was to examine the effects of guided picture book reading. the results showed that in the aspect of interpersonal relationships, the interaction effects within and between subjects reached the level of statistical significance (f(3,63) = 5.61, p = 0.002, η 2 p = 0.211). in the aspect of moral, the interaction effects within and between subjects reached the marginal level of statistical significance (f(3,63) = 2.42, p =0.075 <0.10, η 2 p = 0.075). for self-awareness, the interaction effects within and between subjects reached the extreme level of statistical significance (f(3,63) = 6.28, p = 0.001, η 2 p = 0.230). as shown in the figure 2, the mean deviation among the four groups in all three aspects (i.e., interpersonal relationships, moral, and self-awareness) was compared. it was found that the improvements within the guided reading group were especially significant, i.e., the scores in all three aspects were higher than that of the reading-withlistening group and the control group 1, and also significantly higher than that of the self-reading group in the aspect of interpersonal relationships (p < 0.05). simple effects tests on all three aspects were conducted. as shown in the table 5, the results indicated that participants’ performance in the post-test were significantly different among groups in the aspects of interpersonal relationships and self-awareness xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 313 table 4. effects of changes in children’s social-emotional within subjects, between subjects and interactive effects of within subjects & between subjects. source of variation statistical indicators interpersonal relationship moral self awareness within subjects × between subjects f (3, 63) 5.61** 2.42 † 6.28** p 0.002 0.075 0.001 η 2 p 0.211 0.103 0.230 within subjects f (3, 63) 178.76*** 258.97*** 135.10*** p <.001 <.001 <.001 η 2 p 0.739 0.804 0.682 between subjects f (3, 63) 0.52 3.18* 0.13 p 0.674 0.030 0.941 η 2 p 0.024 0.132 0.006 note: † p <0.10, *p < 0.05, **p <0.01, ***p < 0.001. table 5. group differences and repeat measure of simple effects tests. origins of differences interpersonal relationships morals self awareness f η 2 p f η 2 p f η 2 p guided reading group × pretest and post-test 113. 89*** 0.644 120.11*** 0.656 88.74*** 0.585 self-reading group × pre-test and post-test 43.85*** 0.410 60.48*** 0.490 42.67*** 0.404 reading-with-listening group × pre-test and post-test 36.01*** 0.364 55.39*** 0.468 32.84*** 0.343 control group 1 × pre-test and post-test 16.70*** 0.210 41.87*** 0.399 5.33* 0.078 differences within group × pretest 0.93 0.042 2.44† 0.104 1.14 0.052 differences within group × posttest 6.03** 0.223 3.19* 0.132 3.20* 0.132 note: † p <0.10, *p < 0.05, **p <0.01, ***p < 0.001. xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 314 figure 1. experiment procedure. (p < 0.001). the results of comparisons among tables 3 and 4 and figure 2 indicate that there were more significant improvements in social-emotional development within the guided reading group than in other groups. discussion game-combined guided reading of picture books is more effective in promoting children’s social-emotional development as shown in the figure 2, after the 6-week experiment, the social-emotional development levels in the entire participant children have been improved. the experiment began during the second semester in a kindergarten’s senior class, where the courses and activities related to the transition from kindergarten to elementary school were conducted. the children in the control groups also had a significant improvement in their level of self-awareness as their age increased. the fastest development stage was 4−8 years old (ran, 1994). all the participant children in this study were exactly on this stage. therefore, their self-awareness was developing rapidly in a positive trend. the interaction within and between subjects (see table 4) suggested that game-combined guided xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 315 figure 2. comparison of mean deviation (md) among groups. note: *the result reached statistical significance. reading of picture books plays a greater role in promoting children’s social-emotional development. children’s self-awareness reflects their understanding of the surrounding environment and their position in the society. it is an crucial prerequisite for socialization and personality improvement. self-awareness affects children’s social behavior and social adaptation (wang, et al, 2011; yang, 2014). self-awareness is not innate. instead, it is formed in the interactions with the objective social environment (xu & qu, 2001). children start to develop their awareness of social roles as well as their mind after their second year in kindergarten. in this study, through the activities of picture book reading, self-portrait, ‘praise myself’ and other mini games, children were guided to become aware of their similarities with and uniqueness from others. this was helpful for children to understand themselves properly and evaluate themselves positively. on the basis of proper self-evaluation, children could learn to evaluate others properly. in the process of answering thought invoking questions, children were free to deliver ideas so that they could fully express their thoughts, emotions and explanations. the participant children were also allowed to draw or act out their thoughts and feelings. in the activities within this study, children had a deeper self-experience, which enriched their inner world. rogers (1951) maintained that in social interactions, individuals require ‘positive regard’, and there is no exception for children. they also require recognition, attention and love from others. in the process of picture book reading, the investigators always responded to children with encouragement and positive words, so that the children could have a positive and new understanding of themselves. this process enabled chilxi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 316 dren to be freed from self-centeredness. the participant children were able to recognize, comprehend, and adjust their emotions on the basis of their experiences in reading and game playing. they first mimicked the characters’ actions of the story, and then learned to solve conflicts in constructive ways and manage interpersonal relationships. the reasons why the game-combined guided picture book reading could promote social-emotional development. why could game-combined guided picture book reading promote children’s socialemotional development? we herein explained that the main reason is the scaffolding for positive construction in the reading activities, which involves the following four points: first, children internalized many socialized experiences from reading picture books so that they were able to understand themselves and others, and then improve social skills. nowadays, children’s life experiences are mainly from their family, friends and people around them, but they were limited. however, picture books cover a wide range of contents, and through reading picture books, children could experience different lifestyles, meet a variety of people and things, and come across diverse views on life. picture books served as a medium, and the game-combined reading activities enabled children to have a deeper experience and understanding of the materials in an enjoyable way. in such process, children could experience many that they cannot get in their real life. their view horizons were expanded, their life experiences were enriched, and the knowledge and skills that they had learned could be transferred to their daily life (guo, 2015). the social practice of games set up a certain life scenarios, in which children could understand simple social relations, and take initiative to solve problems (fredrickson & marcial, 2005). second, game-combined guided reading of picture books adopted free and open discussion approaches, in which children were free to express their ideas and ask questions. this was to help children to learn the skills of thinking and reasoning. the improved ability of thinking in turn to help them understand the main points of the story and promote their cognitive and language development. then, they may become intelligent people with better-developed emotions. in addition, the picture books use elaborate illustrations, simple words and emotional expressions, and depict the virtues of courage, confidence, optimism and kindness in the stories. these elements helped set role models for children to learn. third, the features of the three-dimensional design, full-scale demonstration and game participation enhanced participants’ senses of experience. the gamecombined guided picture book reading enabled children to comprehend the content of stories, and further encouraged them to participate in the exploration and understanding of the external world through multiple forms of expression such as reading, acting, dancing, drawing, practicing, running and jumping. in the reading process, children gave many types of responses to the materials, such as dancing, clapping, acting and performing (hickman, 1981). game-combined guided picture book reading supported children to give responses to the stories, and encouraged investigators to interact with children. the embedded mini games in the reading process were not simply recreational xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 317 activities. instead, they incorporated higher level of meaning and value (dewey, 2003). children could use games to express their ideas, manage physical actions, express emotions and establish relationships with people and the environment. game is the primary form and path of children’s learning and development (yang & li, 2009). fourth, the selected picture books contained rich social-emotional elements, and the themes were in accordance with preschool children’s life experiences. children, who have not yet developed strong observation abilities, might have egocentric consciousness, and therefore lack awareness, cognition and understanding of other’s emotions and needs. this will lead to a lack of social-emotional skills such as helping others, cooperation, caring and compassion. the selected picture books contained a number of common emotions of children and themes such as empathy, self-esteem, self-reliance and self-awareness. the books were used to help children to develop their selfawareness (e.g., ‘who i am’ and ‘how i am’), social skills (e.g., how to greet others, apologize, and share), the adaptability to a new environment, recognition of their own emotions, control of emotions, self-regulation abilities and pro-social behaviors (e.g., being willing to get along with peers, recognition of other’s feelings and emotions and providing proper responses). limitation although the effects of game-combined guided picture book reading were significant in certain aspects, the duration of this study was relatively short. if longitudinal studies could be conducted among children, the durability of the guided reading effects could be investigated. this study only collected data from parents whose children participated in the study. the parents’ evaluation was mainly based on their own life experiences with their own children. in future research, data should be collected from multiple sources (e.g., teachers, parents and children). the pre-test data were collected on a parents’ meeting, while the post-tests were completed by the parents on their own at home. in both situations, parents’ evaluation could be biased. if the methods of observation, interview and experiment could be involved, the evaluation of children’s emotional development levels would be better-rounded. meanwhile, some other study methods such as social-cognitive aptitude test and object cognition test could be used. due to various objective limitations, this study only set up three experimental groups to compare game-combined guided picture book reading with traditional selfreading style and parent-reading-while-child-listening style. however, this study did not set up a game-only group (i.e., in this group, participants only play games without reading books). therefore, we were not able to distinguish which was the fundamental influencing factor (i.e., the picture book reading, or game playing or the combination of both) on children’ social emotional development. if game only groups could be added, the study results would be more rigorous and convincing. conclusion  picture book reading can promote children’s social-emotional development. furthermore, game-combined guided reading of picture books is more suitable xi, et al. games combined picture books and the social emotions in preschoolers vol.3, no. 1, 2019 318 for children’s psychological characteristics, and its core mechanism is to promote children’s scaffolding in learning and development. therefore, if adults add mini games into the reading with children, it will not only enhance children’s positive experience, but also support children’s social-emotional development.  although this study has some limitations, the results indicate that gamecombined guided reading of picture books plays a role of positive construction in social-emotional development in children. this reading style is worth applying and promoting. acknowledgement this study was supported by the shanghai philosophy and social science planning project (grant no. 2017bsh004) and shanghai pujiang program of china (grant no. 12pj037) to juzhe xi. we are immensely grateful to dr. xiaozhu pan for her assistance with the 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(2012). ameliorating preschoolers’ challenging behaviors through instructive picture books reading. stud early child edu, 6:29-35. received: 02 august 2019 revised: 13 august 2019 accepted: 09 september 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in j capital norm univ (soc sci ed) 2018; 243(4):167-174. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 席居哲, 周文颖, 左志宏. 整合游戏与绘本, 发展情绪社会性—游戏式绘本指导阅读促进幼 儿情绪社会性发展的实证研究. 首都师范大学学报, 2018; 243(4):167-174. article-title-bece_v3n1_30sep2019-jzx article-maintext-bece_v3n1_30sep2019-jzx i covid-19 versus education: who will win? he covid-19 pandemic is still raging around the world, but now all schools in china have reopened. with the advent of autumn, the number of global covid-19 infections may once again set new records. this means that the risk has not gone away, and it may become more serious. therefore, china’s “school is out, but class is on” during the pandemic period is still worthy of attention (zhou et al., 2020). in this issue, dongdong wang et al. (2020) conducted a large sample questionnaire survey based on the national network, and presented a panoramic view of chinese education painting to the world on the online teaching research related to “school is out, but class is on.” it provided the strategies and history of chinese education managers, teachers, students, and parents to deal with major public health crises. since various countries’ national conditions and educational environments are different, china’s experience may lack generality. however, as we expressed in the editorial of bece’s “covid-19 and education: world’s issue” in july, 2020, facing such a global crisis, sharing, cooperation, and solidarity are the only way we can respond correctly. in this sense, it is imperative to share more of global educators’ experiences. at present, the world is still suffering from covid-19. no one has ever thought that a virus will shut down the world and schools. however, covid-19 has not hindered the orderly implementation of education. whether it is the internet or tv, they have played an irreplaceable role in implementing e-learning amidst the pandemic in different countries and regions. although the internet can partially make up for the shortcomings of not attending school, many students still cannot accept it. today, when the global sars-cov-2 vaccine is about to come out, we sincerely hope that all students who are trapped at home receiving online courses can return to campus as soon as possible. we still welcome global education scholars to continue to discuss and share stories, experiences, and research results during the fight against covid-19 through the bece platform. t vol.6, no.1, 2020 ii references wang, d., wang, h., zhang, w., wang, h., & shen, x. (2020). online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period: based on 33,240 online questionnaire surveys across china. best evidence in chinese education, 6(1):753-767. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.20.ar061 zhou, l., li, f., wu, s., & zhou, m. (2020). “school’s out, but class’s on”, the largest online education in the world today: taking china’s practical exploration during the covid-19 epidemic prevention and control as an example. best evidence in chinese education, 4(2), 501-519. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.20.ar023 correspondence to: jijun yao, d.ed. executive editor-in-chief best evidence in chinese education nanjing normal university nanjing, china e-mail: eic_bece@bonoi.org. conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.e012 relationship between time length of e-learning environment using and physical health of elementary and middle school students jing gao, 1 jing liu, 2 hong feng, 1 zhixin zhang 1 1. capital normal university, beijing, china 2. beijing open university, beijing, china abstract. a total of 783 elementary and middle school students in beijing city and shandong province were selected for a one-year follow-up investigation, and the impact of time length of using e-learning environment each week on physical health was explored from four aspects as eyesight, respiratory rate, body mass index, sit and reach. through covariance analysis, we found that time length of using e-learning environment each week by elementary and middle school students had a significant impact on their eyesight, but not on the respiratory rate, body mass index, sit and reach. meanwhile, the comparative results of elementary and middle school students between different genders and learning stages that affected by the time length of e-learning were basically consistent with the findings above. slight difference was found that the e-learning environment produced significant impact on both left and right eyesight of elementary girls, but on the left eyesight of middleschool boys, and significant effect on the middle-school body mass index. based on this, we proposed that the time length of e-learning each day for elementary and middle school students should be controlled less than 1.5 hours. best evid chin edu 2019; 3(1):277-286. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1062 keywords: e-learning environment; eyesight; respiratory rate; body mass index; sit and reach correspondence to: jing liu, assistant research fellow, ouchn operating department, beijing open university, chin; email: xiaomiao517@163.com. about the author jing gao, postgraduate student, department of educational technology, capital normal university, china, email: gaojing11008389@163.com. gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 278 introduction -learing environment, which carries the whole process of online learning, has been proposed to have a big impact on students’ physical health and has aroused widespread concerns. at present, the impact of e-learning environment on students’ physical health has been becoming a hot issue in china with the rapid development of information technology. for this reason, the ministry of education of china has specially set up a project, and capital normal university was in charge of the one-year large-scale research with joint conduction of the general administration of sport of china, beijing sports university and other research institutes to formulate the “e-learning environment user manual” and provide parents, schools and communities with important guidelines for protecting the health of elementary and middle school students. a literature review on the relationship between e-learning environment and students’ physical health national students’ physical health survey results in 2014 showed that the rate of adolescents with poor eyesight in china was still high and tendened to become younger; and the rate of obesity among students of all ages continued to rise; the physical fitness, such as flexibility and strength, continued to show a steady and positive trend, but the level of physical health was worsening (general administration of sport of china, 2015). on the basis of these phenomena, parents and communities start to doubt the use of smart devices and e-learning environment. the adverse effects of hardware environment of online learning on students’ physical health have been confirmed that long-term use of computers and other electronic devices cause the absorption of electromagnetic waves and harmful gases released by these devices produced harmful effect on adolescents’ health (zhang et al., 2018). a web-based trial of dry eye disease showed that about 36.2% of netizens experienced five or more types of dry eye symptoms, and network using had an ascertained effect on eyes and excessive use would damage eyesight (wang et al., 2018). cumulating data have shown that mobile internet addiction could cause cervical spine stiffness, obesity, decreased vision, insufficient thoracic blood and cardiopulmonary function about the author: hong feng, associate professor, department of educational technology, capital normal university, china; email: hg_feng_cnu@126.com. zhixin zhang, lecturer, department of educational technology, capital normal university, china; email: zhangzx517@163.com. funding: this paper is a phased research result of the ministry of education-china mobile research fund (2013) research project “empirical study on the impact and intervention of internet learning environment on students’ physical and mental health” (project no. mcm20130602). conflict of interests: none. e gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 279 decline in adolescents; and computer internet addiction could cause decreased vision, obesity, insomnia and inappropriate eating behavior in adolescents; and the sub-health status of adolescents was closely related to the time they spent on internet (wang et al., 2017). other peer researches such as the american academy of ophthalmology also believed that increased frequency of computer use would lead to eye fatigue, redness, blurred vision, myopia and other various eye symptoms and potential visual impairment that depend on several factors including using time, viewing distance, sitting posture, computer screen (cai, 2017). frequently watching computer screens could cause eye irritation, blurred vision, fatigue and headache (kozeis, 2009). the most common symptoms from the use of computers were eye burning and muscle pain, which are strongly related to the duration of computer use (taptagaporn, 2009). although many recent studies had observed the influence of e-learning environment on students’ eyesight, obesity, cardiopulmonary function and so on, most of them were based on subjective judgments and lacked solid scientific evidence, and it is still difficult to explain scientifically how the e-learning environment affects the health of students. therefore, we intended in this study to answer following two questions:  does the e-learning environment have any impact on the physical health of elementary and middle school students?  in order to prevent e-learning environment from affecting students’ health, how long should they use e-learning environment every day? research implementation research tools in this study, eyesight, height and weight, sit and reach of the subjects were tested using standard logarithmic visual acuity scale (gb 11533-1989, shanghai aice electronic technology company limited), electronic height and weight meter (hgm-702, henan shengyuan industrial company limited), sit and reach tester (hhtc/zt100, beijing huaxia huihai technology company limited). body mass index equals weight divided by height squared, and respiratory rate was recorded and calculated with stopwatch (gy12001, shanghai stopwatch factory). research objects a total of 783 students from two middle schools and four elementary schools in beijing city and shandong province were selected by convenient sampling method, taking into the differences in economy, urban and rural locations, and quality of students etc. these students were the second, third, fourth and seventh graders, and all belonged to 21 experimental classes where the e-learning using was more than one semester and one control class where no e-learning environment at all. data collection and processing gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 280 from september to october 2014, the first test data were obtained; from september to october 2015, the second test data were obtained. this study investigated the use of e-learning environment, including:  time length of using “electronic whiteboard” or “touch integrated machine” in class;  time length of using “tablet” or “online notebook” in class;  time length of using “tablet” or “online notebook” outside classroom. according to the preliminary statistics, the duration of using of e-learning environment in the experimental and control classes was between 0 and 30 class hours per week. according to the time length of e-learning environment using each week and excluding missing values, the students in both experimental and control classes were divided into two groups with equal numbers. the first group used less e-learning environment (0 13 class hours each week) and the second group over-utilized e-learning environment (14 30 class hours each week), and the grade distribution of the two groups was the same. in this study, spss 19.0 was used for data processing and statistical analysis. covariance analysis was used to explore the impact of time length of elearning on the health of elementary and middle school students, as well as the extent to which students of different genders and grades were affected. according to the mean values adjusted by covariance, it was concluded that how long e-learning environment was used was beneficial to the health of the students through analysis. analysis and research results eyesight the relationship between eyesight and the time length of e-learning environment using each week in elementary and middle school students in this study, the time length of e-learning environment using each week in the sample students was the independent variable, the second test of the left eyesight was the dependent variable, and the first test of the left eyesight was the covariate. the homogeneity test results of the regression coefficients in the group showed that the interaction between the independent variables and the covariance did not reach a significant level (f(1,479) = 0.358, p > 0.05), indicating that the covariance in each group was consistent with the linear relationship of the dependent variables and the covariance analysis need to be continued. in order to correctly estimate the effect of the interaction between independent variable and covariance, this study removed the interaction term and reanalyzed it. in addition, levene’s variance homogeneity test did not reach significant levels (f(1,481) = 0.016, p > 0.05), showing that there was no significant difference between the discrete cases of the two groups. the test of covariance effect reached a significant level (f(1,480) = 905.533, p < .01), satisfying the conditions of the linear relationship. the test of the effect between groups reached a significant level (f(1,480) = 18.940, p < 0.01), indicating that the time length of using of e-learning environment gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 281 each week significantly affected the left eyesight of elementary and middle school students. in the same way, the time length of e-learning environment using each week in elementary and middle school students as the independent variable, the second test of the right eyesight as the dependent variable, and the first test of the right eyesight as the covariate, used the covariance analysis method for analysis. the results showed that the time length of e-learning environment using each week significantly affected the right eyesight of elementary and middle school students (f(1,482) = 4.130, p < 0.05) . comparing the mean values adjusted by covariance, we found that the left and right eyesight of elementary and middle school students in the group 1 was significantly better than that in the group 2. comparison of the degree of different genders students’ eyesight affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week in order to explore the extent to which the eyesight of students of different genders was affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we used covariance analysis to analyze the sample data of male and female students, respectively. the results of the male sample showed that the effect between the left eyesight reached a significant level (f(1,239) = 10.214, p < 0.01), while the the effect between the right eyesight did not reach a significant level (f(1,242) = 0.974, p > 0.05). the results of covariance analysis of female sample data showed that the effect between the left eyesight groups reached a significant level (f(1,238) = 11.595, p < 0.01), and the effect between the right eyesight groups also reached a significant level (f(1,237) = 5.933, p < 0.05). in conclusion, the time length of e-learning environment using each week significantly affected the left eyesight of the boys and both left and right eyesight of the girls. comprehensive comparison of the modified means of covariance between boys and girls, we found that the left eyesight of boys in the group 1 was significantly better than that of boys in the group 2, while the difference between the two groups of boys in the right eyesight was not significant; both left and right eyesight of girls in the group 1 was significantly better than that of girls in the group 2. comparison of the degree of different semesters students’ eyesight affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week in order to explore the extent to which the eyesight of students of different semesters was affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we used covariance analysis to analyze the sample data of middle school students and elementary school students, respectively. the results of covariance analysis of middle school students data showed that the effect between the left eyesight groups reached a significant level (f(1,108) = 10.529, p < 0.01), while the effect between the right eyesight groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,105) = 0.779, p > 0.05). the results of covariance analysis of elementary school students data showed that: the effect between the left eyesight groups reached a significant level (f(1,369) = 7.646, p < 0.01), and the effect between the right eyesight groups also reached a significant level (f(1,374) = 4.488, p < gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 282 0.05). in sum, the time length of e-learning environment using each week significantly affected the left eyesight of the middle school students and both left and right eyesight of the elementary school students. comprehensive comparison of the modified mean of covariance between middle school students and elementary school students, we found that the left eyesight of middle school students in the group 1 was significantly better than that of the middle school students in the group 2, while the difference between the two groups of middle school students in the right eyesight was not significant; the left and right eyesight of elementary school students in the group 1 was significantly better than that of the elementary school students in the group 2. respiratory rate the relationship between respiratory rate and the time length of e-learning environment using each week in elementary and middle school students in this study, the time length of e-learning environment using each week was the independent variable, the second test of students’ respiratory rate was the dependent variable, and the first test of students’ respiratory rate was the covariate. the results showed that the effect between the two groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,512) = 0.734, p > 0.05), indicating that the time length of e-learning environment using each week had no significant effect on the respiratory rate of elementary and middle school students. comparison of the degree of different genders students’ respiratory rate affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week in order to explore the extent to which the respiratory rate of students of different genders was affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we used covariance analysis to analyze the data of male and female students, respectively. the results of covariance analysis of male sample data showed that the effect between groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,264) = 0.085, p > 0.05). the results of covariance analysis of female data also showed that the effect between groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,245) = 1.157, p > 0.05). in sum, the time length of e-learning environment using each week had no significant effect on the respiratory rate of boys and girls. comparison of the degree of different semesters students’ respiratory rate affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week in order to explore the extent to which the respiratory rate of students of different semesters was affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we used covariance analysis to analyze the data of middle school students and elementary school students, respectively. the results of covariance analysis of middle school students data showed that the effect between groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,112) = 0.138, p > 0.05). the results of covariance analysis of elementary school students gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 283 data also showed that the effect between groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,397) = 0.459, p > 0.05). in sum, the time length of e-learning environment using each week had no significant effect on the respiratory rate of middle school and elementary school students. body mass index the relationship between body mass index and the time length of e-learning environment using each week in elementary and middle school students in this study, the time length of e-learning environment using each week in the students was the independent variable, the second test of the students’ body mass index was the dependent variable, and the first test of the students’ body mass index was the covariate. the results showed that the effect between groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,501) = 0.462, p > 0.05), indicating that the time length of using e-learning environment each week had no significant effect on the body mass index of elementary and middle school students. comparison of the degree of different genders students’ body mass index affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week in order to explore the extent to which the body mass index of students of different genders was affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we used covariance analysis to analyze the data of male and female students, respectively. the results of covariance analysis of male data showed that the effect between groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,252) = 0.039, p > 0.05). the results of covariance analysis of female data also showed that the effect between groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,246) = 1.722, p > 0.05). in sum, the time length of using of the elearning environment each week had no significant effect on the body mass index of both boys and girls. comparison of the degree of different semesters students’ body mass index affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week in order to explore the extent to which the body mass index of students of different semesters was affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we used covariance analysis to analyze the data of middle school students and elementary school students, respectively. the results of covariance analysis of middle school students data showed that the effect between groups reached a significant level (f(1,111) = 5.218, p < 0.05). but the results of covariance analysis of elementary school students data showed that the effect between groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,387) = 0.095, p > 0.05). in sum, the time length of e-learning environment using each week significantly affected the body mass index of middle school students, but had no significant effect on body mass index of elementary school students. sit and reach gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 284 the relationship between sit and reach and the time length of e-learning environment using each week in elementary and middle school students in this study, the time length of e-learning environment using each week in the students was the independent variable, the second test of the students’ sit and reach was the dependent variable, and the first test of the students’ sit and reach was the covariate. the results showed that the effect between the two groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,513) = 0.032, p > 0.05), indicating that the time length of e-learning environment using each week had no significant effect on the sit and reach of elementary and middle school students. comparison of the degree of different genders students’ sit and reach affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week in order to explore the extent to which the sit and reach of students of different genders was affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we used covariance analysis to analyze the data of male and female students, respectively. the results of covariance analysis of male data showed that the effect between the two groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,263) = 0.844, p > 0.05). the results of covariance analysis of female data also showed no significant difference (f(1,247) = 3.352, p > 0.05). in sum, the time length of e-learning environment using each week had no significant effect on the sit and reach of boys and girls. comparison of the degree of different semesters students’ sit and reach affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week in order to explore the extent to which the sit and reach of students of different semesters was affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we used covariance analysis to analyze the data of middle school students and elementary school students, respectively. the results of covariance analysis of middle school students data showed that the effect between the two groups did not reach a significant level (f(1,112) = 0.001, p > 0.05). the results of covariance analysis of elementary school students data also showed no significant difference (f(1,398) = 1.193, p > 0.05). in sum, the time length of the e-learning environment using each week had no significant effect on the sit and reach of both middle school and elementary school students. conclusion and suggestion from the results of covariance analysis above, our study demonstrated following conclusions. first, according to the full sample analysis, the time length of e-learning environment using each week by elementary and middle school students had a significant impact on their eyesight, but not on respiratory rate, body mass index , and sit and reach. however, we cannot rule out other confounding factors that were difficult to be controlled. in terms of eyesight, students with less use of the e-learning environment showed better eyesight than that of the over-utilized ones. after further refinement of the e-learning environment using to a daily basis, we found that the time length of daily gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 285 using of e-learning environment for elementary and middle school students should be controlled less than 1.5 hours. second, after comparing the effect of the time length of e-learning environment using each week with different genders, we received consistent results with the whole sample analysis in terms of respiratory rate, body mass index, and sit and reach. to the eyesight, the time length of e-learning environment using each week significantly affected both left and right eyesight of girls, but only on the left eyesight of the boys, indicating that girl’s eyesight was more sensitive and was more easily affected than that of boy’s even under the same condition. clinical studies have found that 53% 85% of people had right eye as their dominant eye (miao et al., 2007). in the binocular eyesight activity, the dominant eye occupies more space and has better clarity and development than the auxiliary eye (zang, 2012). the left eye might be more vulnerable to damage as an auxiliary eye in e-learning environment of course, this proposed statement is yet, confirmed by further research. third, according to the comparison results of different semesters affected by the time length of e-learning environment using each week, we got consistent results with the whole sample analysis in terms of respiratory rate, body mass index, and sit and reach. regarding the eyesight, the time length of e-learning environment using each week significantly affected both left and right eyesight of elementary school students, but only had a significant impact on the left eyesight of the middle school students indicating that students from elementary school were more sensitive in their eyesight and more easily to be affected than those from middle school. in addition, the time length of e-learning environment using each week significantly affected the body mass index of middle school students, but had no significant effect on that of the elementary school students. this may be because middle school students were at a critical stage of growth and development, so their body mass indexes were more susceptible to the time length of e-learning environment using. based on these findings, we proposed that:  primary and middle schools should arrange reasonable number of sessions of the e-learning environment using, and increase the extracurricular sports activities;  teachers should reasonably use a variety of media in teaching, but could not rely only on modern electronic media such as electronic whiteboards and internet notebooks;  parents should take more time to accompany their children and strictly control their extracurricular use of electronic devices and set themselves as role models. all in all, schools, teachers, and parents need to cooperate to create a good elearning environment for students and control the time length of the daily use of e-learning environment to less than 1.5 hours. gao et al. time length of e-learning and physical health vol.3, no. 1, 2019 286 references cai, p. (2017) research on the influence of network learning environment on the eyesight of elementary and middle school students. wuhan, p.r.china: central china normal university, 4. general administration of sport of china. (2015) results of the 2014 national student physical health survey. chinese journal of school health; 12:4. kozeis, n. (2009) impact of computer use on children’s vision. hippokratia; (4): 230231. miao, a.z., zhou, x.t. (2007) advances in the study of dominant eye. chinese journal of ocular and otorhinolaryngology; (1): 6162. taptagaporn, s. (2009) computer use among children: health and social impacts. proceedings of 17th world congress on ergonomics. beijing, p.r.china: international ergonomics association, 6. wang, w., lei, l., yang, j.h. (2018) the influence of internet on the physical and mental health of netizens. journal of shanxi datong university (natural science edition); (2): 69-73, 79. wang, z.s., wei, y. (2017) the influence of internet addiction on adolescent health. youth sports; (1): 120-121, 53. zang, y.j. (2012) study on characteristic parameters affecting the comfort of stereo image. tianjin, p.r. china: tianjin university, 56. zhang, z.x., gao, j., feng, h., xie, j.r., zhang, x.y. (2018) review on the impact of online learning on adolescents’ physical and mental health. modern distance education; (3): 5965. received: 23 july 2019 revised: 14 august 2019 accepted: 05 september 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in modern edu technol, 29(3):60-65. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 高景, 刘静, 冯红, 张志新. 网络学习环境使用时长与中小学生身体健康的关系探究. 现代教 育技术, 2019; 29(3):60-65. article-title_bece_v3n1_30sep2019-zxz article-maintext_bece_v3n1_30sep2019-zxz an empirical study on the influence of school choice on junior middle school students’ academic performance chenchen fang beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. using data from 17,424 junior middle school student responses in the chinese education panel survey 2014 (ceps 2014), this study analyzes the influence of school choice on the academic performance of primary to junior students. the results show that students whose families have a higher socioeconomic status and urban students are more likely to choose their school, and that the student’s choice of school does not make an impact on their chinese, mathematics, foreign language or total academic scores. this indicates that choosing schools does not improve students’ academic performance. school choice increases the unequal distribution of high-quality education opportunities and reduces the efficiency of educational resources. therefore, the government should take measures to allocate quality resources more equitably, to increase the supply of quality education resources and to guide parents and students to choose schools rationally. best evid chin edu 2019; 1(1):29-40. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1010 keywords: primary-to-junior; school choice on junior middle school; students’ academic performance; education equity correspondence to: chenchen fang, doctoral candidate, institute of educational economics, faculty of education, beijing normal university, china, e-mail: fcc1121@163.com. conflict of interests: none. vol.1, no. 1, 2019 30 research background and problem school choice” has always been a factor contributing to unfair educational starts and opportunities in china. according to china's compulsory education law, children and teenagers within the compulsory education age range should attend the school nearby their domicile seat. if parents and children are working or residing in a place other than the domicile, the children’s compulsory education should be received in the vicinity of their parents or other legal guardians. however, the development of compulsory education in china has been historically unbalanced and insufficient. high-quality education resources are limited, and families in higher social strata tend to acquire better education resources for their child through school choice, a behavior that increases the stratification perpetuated by education. in china, the government has clearly stated that multiple measures are necessary to resolve the inequities brought about by school choice. although local governments have introduced various policies and measures to limit school choice, school choice is hardly prohibited. school choice not only brings an economic burden to the family, but also has an impact on the efficiency and fairness of compulsory education (hu et al., 2008). the fundamental goal of parents and students when choosing a school is to gain a competitive advantage in college entrance examinations by attending a school that provides high quality educational resources and thereby significantly improves the students’ academic achievement. this leads to two questions: what factors affect students' school choice behavior? can students improve their academic achievement through school choice? using data from the 2014 china education panel survey, this study analyzes the differences in the likelihood of making a school choice for students with different family backgrounds in china, and then estimates the effect of school choice on the academic achievement of junior high school students. data sources and variable descriptions all data used in this study are from the china education panel survey (ceps) conducted by the china survey and data center (nsrc) in 2014. the survey project selected 112 schools, 438 classes and approximately 20,000 junior middle-school students nationwide as a sample, and respondents in this study. variables used in this study are described in table 1. who is choosing a school? school choice is examined by asking parents the multiple choice question: "has your family done the following things in order to let children go to this school?" figure 1 shows that 13.8% of parents seek help from friends, 1.9% give gifts to the leaders concerned, 2.9% pay extra fees, 5.5% buy houses in the school area, 3.1% “ vol.1, no. 1, 2019 31 table 1. description of variables. variable type variable name variable description school choice school choice or not 0=no, 1=yes student academic achievement total grades the total grades of language, mathematics and foreign language in the mid-term exam of 2013 language grades students' language grades in the mid-term examination of 2013 mathematics grades students' mathematics grades in the mid-term examination of 2013 foreign language grades students' foreign language grades in the mid-term examination of 2013 individual factors gender 0= female, 1=male only child or not 0=no, 1=yes migrant child or not 0=no, 1=yes household registration type 0= non-agricultural, 1= agricultural family factors parental education level * 1.illiterate/semi-literate, 2.elementary school, 3.junior high school, 4.high school, 5. junior college, 6. undergraduate, 7. postgraduate and above parental occupation classification † 1. lower, 2. middle, 3. upper family economic status 1. poor, 2. medium, 3. wealthy school factors school region 1 = eastern, 2 = central, 3 = western school location 1= central urban area，2= urban-rural junction，3= rural area (including townships) school ranking 1=blow the middle level，2=middle and above， 3=best *. compare the educational level of father and mother and choose the higher one. †. according to the study of li chunling (2010), divide the career of students’ parents into upper, middle and lower levels. relocate their household registration, 1.2% attach their household registration to relatives or friends, 6.6% of parents let their children take all kinds of academic examinations/specialty examinations. in addition, 1.8% of parents choose schools by other methods. overall, 26.8% of junior high school students enter their school through at least one way of choosing a school, indicating that more than a quarter of junior high school students in china are school-choice students. in addition, school choice behavior among junior high school students in china differs significantly based on the students’ individual, family and school backgrounds. table 2 shows that, at the individual level, gender significantly affects school choice behavior. the proportion of males that choose their school is 28.8%, significantly higher than that of females at 24.7%. the proportion of only-children making a school choice is 27.6%, significantly higher than that of non-only children at 26.1%. significantly more migrant children choose their school than non-migrant children (38.8% compared to 24.1%, respectively). the proportion of non-agricultural household stuvol.1, no. 1, 2019 32 figure 1. the behavior of school choice in “primary-to-junior”. dents choosing their school is significantly higher at 28.5% compared to 25.3% of agricultural household students. at the family level, the proportion of students choosing their school differs depending on parental educational level. generally speaking, the higher the educational level of the parents, the greater the proportion of students that choose their school. the proportion of students making a school choice whose parental occupation classification is at the upper level is 31.7%, significantly higher than students whose parental occupation classification is at the middle level (27.3%) and students whose parental occupation classification is at the lower level (20.4%). the proportion of students choosing schools is also significantly affected by family economic status. in students with a wealthy family economic status, 33.9% choose their school, significantly higher than for students with a medium family economic status (26.8%) and students with a poor family economic status (24.5%). in other words, the higher the family economic status is, the greater the proportion of students choosing their school. at the school level, the proportion of students in schools of their own choosing occurs in the western region, at 31.8%, followed by the eastern region at 27.6%, and the central region has the lowest proportion at 18.9%. there are significant differences in the proportion of students choosing schools in different regions. the highest proportion of students choosing their school is 31.8% in central urban areas, followed by 28.3% in the urban-rural junctions, and 20.3% in rural areas (including townships). the proportion of students who ranked below the middle level (25.3%) or in the middle and above vol.1, no. 1, 2019 33 table 2. differences in school choice scale of students. variable school choice ratio chi-square test gender female 24.7% x 2 =39.315 p<0.001 male 28.8% only child or not no 26.1% x 2 = 4.836 p=0.028 yes 27.6% migrant child or not no 24.1% x 2 = 291.668 p<0.001 yes 38.8% household registration type non-agricultural 28.5% x 2 = 23.467 p<0.001 agricultural 25.3% parental education level illiterate/semi-illiterate 30.4% x 2 =42.856 p<0.001 elementary school 25.4% junior high school 25.5% high school 26.5% junior college 31.1% undergraduate 31.1% postgraduate and above 31.0% parental occupation classification lower 20.4% x 2 = 142.519 p<0.001 middle 27.3% upper 31.7% family economic status poor 24.5% x 2 = 38.440 p<0.001 medium 26.8% wealthy 33.9% school region eastern 27.6% x 2 =186.044 p<0.001 central 18.9% western 31.8% school area central urban area 31.8% x 2 =242.029 p<0.001 urban-rural junction 28.3% rural area (including townships) 20.3% school ranking below the middle level 25.3% x 2 =104.559 p<0.001 middle and above 24.9% best 32.9% level (24.9%), are similar but are significantly smaller than the proportion of students choosing their school who ranked best (32.9%). what factors affect students’ school choice? to explore the factors affecting students’ school choice, we analyzed the factors that influence a student’s decision to choose a school at the level of the individual, family and school: y1 = ƒ (i,f,s) (1) in model (1), y1 represents whether students choose their school, a dichotomous variable. if students have at least one school choice behavior at the beginning of elevol.1, no. 1, 2019 34 mentary school, they are assigned a value of 1; otherwise they are assigned a value of 0. i represents the individual factors of students, including student gender, whether they are an only child, whether they are migrant children and the type of household registration. f represents student family factors, including parental educational level, parental occupation classification and family economic status. s represents school factors, including school region, school location and school ranking. in the specific analysis, a logistic regression model is used to explore the factors affecting whether students choose a school. table 3 shows that after controlling for other factors, the probability of school choice is significantly lower in females than in males. similarly, an only child is less likely to make a school choice than the non-only child. the probability of migrant children choosing their school is significantly higher than that of non-migrant children. children with parents that had a higher occupation classification were more likely to make a school choice. in addition, controlling for other factors, the probability of choosing a school is significantly higher in the western compared to the eastern region, and in the eastern compared to the central region. the probability of students choosing their school in central urban areas and in urban-rural junction areas is significantly higher than that of students in rural area (including townships) choosing their school. school ranking has a significant positive impact on students’ school choice. in cases of agricultural household registration, parental education level and family economic status have no significant impact on students’ school choice. an empirical analysis of the influence of school choice on students’ academic performance to analyze the influence of school choice on student achievement, the classical theoretical model of the educational production function established by hanushek was used to analyze the factors influencing student achievement (hanushek, 1986). the extended theoretical model is established as follows: y2 = ƒ (z,i,f,s) (2) in model (2), y2 represents student achievement, including language grades, mathematics grades, foreign language grades and total grades. z represents whether students chose their school. i represents individual student factors, including gender, whether they are only children, whether they are migrant children and household registration type. f represents student family factors, including parental education level, parental occupational classification and family economic status. s represents school factors, including school region, school location and school ranking. table 4 shows that when controlling for other factors, school choice has a significant negative effect on students’ academic achievement, both for individual subject grades and for total grades; that is, school choice cannot improve students’ academic achievement. for both single subject grades and total grades, female students’ academic achievement is significantly higher than that of males. the only child’s academic vol.1, no. 1, 2019 35 table 3. analysis of factors affecting students’ school choice. variable coefficient occurrence ratio (exp(b)) female (referenced against male students) -0.224*** (0.035) 0.800 only child (referenced against non-only child) -0.127** (0.041) 0.881 migrant children (referenced against non-migrant children) 0.626*** (0.046) 1.871 agricultural household registration (referenced against nonagricultural) 0.035 (0.043) 1.036 parental education level -0.013 (0.019) 0.987 parental occupation classification 0.156*** (0.033) 1.169 family economic status 0.045 (0.038) 1.046 central (referenced against eastern region) -0.246*** (0.052) 0.782 western (referenced against eastern region) 0.221*** (0.042) 1.247 urban-rural junction (referenced against rural areas (including townships)) 0.252*** (0.049) 1.287 central urban area (referenced against rural areas (including townships) ) 0.361*** (0.052) 1.435 school ranking 0.164*** (0.030) 1.178 nagelkerke r 2 0.052 sample size 17,424 notes: 1. standard errors are in parentheses. 2. *p<0.05，**p<0.01，***p<0.001. achievement is also significantly higher than that of the non-only child. in contrast, migrant children and non-migrant children did not differ significantly in achievement. besides foreign language, the grades of agricultural household registration students are significantly higher than that of non-agricultural students. the higher the parental education level, the higher the parental occupation classification is and thus the better the financial status of the family is; this results in better student academic achievement. the language and foreign language grades of students in urban-rural junctions are significantly higher than those in rural areas (including townships), but do not differ significantly for other subject grades. achievements of students in central urban areas are significantly higher than those in rural areas (including townships). the higher the ranking of schools, the better the students’ academic achievements are. conclusions based on data from china education panel survey done in 2014, this study analyzes differences in the proportion of students making a school choice at the primary-tojunior levels and its influence on subsequent academic achievement. the main conclusions are as follows. vol.1, no. 1, 2019 36 table 4. the results of analysis on the influence of school choice on junior middle school students’ academic performance. variable model 1: language grades model 2: mathematics grades model 3: foreign language grades model 4: total grades school choice -1.738*** (0.333) -2.318*** (0.526) -1.794*** (0.479) -5.858*** (1.185) female (referenced against male students) 7.986*** (0.290) 3.483*** (0.459) 13.042*** (0.417) 24.229*** (1.033) only child (referenced against nononly child) 2.589*** (0.339) 3.807*** (0.536) 4.589*** (0.487) 10.849*** (1.207) migrant children (referenced against non-migrant children) 1.091** (0.410) 0.270 (0.648) 1.074 (0.590) 2.401 (1.461) agricultural household registration (referenced against non-agricultural) 1.627*** (0.351) 1.949*** (0.554) 0.723 (0.504) 4.193*** (1.250) parental education level 1.831*** (0.157) 3.643*** (0.248) 3.650*** (0.226) 9.134*** (0.560) parental occupation classification 1.252*** (0.270) 1.651*** (0.427) 2.427*** (0.388) 5.337*** (0.962) family economic status 1.708*** (0.378) 1.008* (0.493) 1.613*** (0.448) 4.310*** (1.110) central (referenced against eastern region) -0.981* (0.312) -7.848*** (0.634) -1.336* (0.577) 10.130*** (1.429) western (referenced against eastern region) 3.419*** (0.364) -1.416* (0.575) 8.251*** (0.523) 10.340*** (1.296) urban-rural junction (referenced against rural areas (including townships) ) 0.858* (0.402) -0.458 (0.636) 2.269*** (0.578) 2.553 (1.432) central urban area (referenced against rural areas (including townships) ) 4.438*** (0.430) 4.069*** (0.679) 7.106*** (0.618) 15.711*** (1.530) school ranking 2.072*** (0.507) 5.317*** (0.402) 4.465*** (0.365) 11.759*** (0.905) adjusted r 2 0.121 0.098 0.184 0.155 sample size 17,020 17,012 17,013 16,975 notes：1. standard errors are in parentheses. 2. *p<0.05，**p<0.01，***p<0.001. 1. in china, the phenomenon of school choice remains widespread. among all students surveyed, 26.8% made a school choice. among these, the proportion choosing a school by power, such as seeking help from friends, was the highest, accounting for 13.8% of students surveyed. other methods of making a school choice were: choosing a school by score, such as relying on study and expertise, accounts for 6.6%; choosing a school by house, such as buying a house in a school district, accounts for 5.5%; choosing school by household, such as relocating household registration, relocating to relatives or friends’ home accounts for 4.3%; choosing school by money, such as paying additional expenses, accounts for 2.9%; choosing school by power and money such as giving gifts to leaders accounts for 1.9%; and 1.8% of parents choose schools by other means. vol.1, no. 1, 2019 37 2. the proportion of students choosing their school varies depending on individual, family and school backgrounds. the proportion of males choosing their school is higher than that of females. the proportion of only children choosing their school is higher than that of non-only children. the proportion of migrant children choosing their school is higher than that of non-migrant children. the proportion of agricultural children in a school of their choice is significantly higher than that of non-agricultural children. the better the family’s socio-economic status is (parental education level, parental occupation classification, and family economic status), the greater the proportion of students that make a school choice. the proportion of students choosing schools in urban areas is significantly higher than that in rural areas. the proportion of students’ choosing schools in the best-ranked schools is higher than the students in the middle and lower schools. 3. whether students choose their school is mainly influenced by three levels of factors: individual, family and school. when controlling other factors, the probability of school choice for an only child is significantly lower than that of a non-only child. the probability of school choice among migrant children is significantly higher than among non-migrant children. among family factors, parental occupation classification has a significant positive impact on the likelihood of school choice. parental education level and family economic status have no significant effects. among school factors, the probability of school choice of students in urban areas is significantly higher than that of students in rural areas. school ranking has a significant positive impact on the possibility of students choosing school. the higher the school ranks, the higher the probability of students will choose school. 4. based on the classic theoretical model of educational production function established by hanushek, the regression model was used to explore the influence of school choice behavior of “primary-to-junior” on students' academic achievement. it was found that after controlling for individual, family, school and other influencing factors, students' choice of school has a significant negative impact on academic achievement. school choice does not improve students' academic achievement. discussion school choice in china is a common phenomenon, and there are profound cultural, educational, economic and political reasons behind it. from the perspective of cultural reasons, china has been deeply influenced by confucian culture. the concepts of confucian culture that promote paying more attention to education clearly have an important influence on school choice behavior. from the perspective of education, students decide to choose their school in order to obtain better quality educational resources. at present, china’s education system remains dominated by examinations. students can obtain high-quality educational resources by choosing schools, and then gain advantages in entrance examinations. from an economic standpoint, parents wanting to invest more in their children’s education choose a school to gain higher returns. if school choice enables students to receive higher vol.1, no. 1, 2019 38 levels of education in the future and increases the rate of return on education, then it is wise for students to choose their school. raftery’s maximally maintained inequality hypothesis (mmi) (raftery & hout, 1993) and lucas's effectively maintained inequality (emi) (lucas & samuel, 2001) model provide good explanations of political reasons for school choice. according to mmi theory, when compulsory education is not fully universal, educational opportunities for children from different family strata are different. parents with higher socio-economic status are always looking for ways to maximize their children's educational opportunities. only when the demand for education reaches saturation, can the difference in enrollment opportunities between upper and lower status families be reduced. according to emi theory, when compulsory education is popularized, there is a gap in the quality of education between regions, between urban and rural areas, and between schools. the current unbalanced development of compulsory education in china puts the core of competition not for the opportunity to receive education, but for the quality of education, and school choice is the specific manifestation of this competition. families with higher socio-economic status choose schools to help their children obtain higher quality education, and thereby help their children to gain advantages in future education and employment. this effectively maintains educational inequality and the family’s current social status, as well as the social status of future generations. this also explains why the proportion of students from families with higher socioeconomic status choosing their school is significantly higher than that of students from families with lower socioeconomic status. compared with rural areas, the education level in urban areas is higher and the differences between schools are larger. as the quality of education has become the core of competition, the proportion of students in urban areas choosing their school is higher than that in rural areas. families with higher socio-economic status and students from urban areas are more likely to choose their schools, which show that school choice has the function of social reproduction. to some extent, it also reflects educational inequality and social inequality. in addition, it is a concrete manifestation of the gap between the wealthy and the poor, and the urban and the rural areas. with the popularization of compulsory education, although differences in access to education among children from different classes of families are gradually decreasing, there are still gaps in access to education quality. school choice may lead to differences in students’ academic achievement and job opportunities in the future, which consequently maintains society strata and hinders intergenerational mobility. the main reason students choose their school is to obtain high-quality educational resources and improve their academic performance. however, this study finds that school choice does not improve students’ academic achievement, regardless of whether considering a single subject or total grades. high-quality schools may gather excellent teachers and resources, which may affect students' learning attitude and behavior, but this does not have a direct and significant effect on students’ academic achievements. vol.1, no. 1, 2019 39 recommendations 1. the government should take active measures to control school choice behavior and allocate high-quality educational resources more equitably, so that children across all socioeconomic strata can have high-quality educational resources. if school choice behavior continues unchecked, higher quality educational resources will only be available to students from families of higher socioeconomic status. however, the use of high-quality educational resources is inefficient for the higher socio-economic families, which reduces the overall efficiency of the use of educational resources. therefore, only by regulating school choice behavior can highquality educational resources play a greater role, thereby improving the overall efficiency of the use of educational resources, the quality of education, and educational equity. 2. the government should increase the supply of high-quality educational resources, alleviate parents’ demand for school choice, promote the balanced development of compulsory education effectively, and narrow the quality and condition gap among regions, between urban and rural areas, among schools. the current "school choice fever" is indicative of a shortage of high-quality educational resources, whereby people's demand for quality education is greater than the supply of quality schools. therefore, the government should continue to increase the number of high-quality schools by means of precise support to reasonably solve the expectations and demands of parents and society for high-quality educational resources, should better integrate educational resources, and should increase support for economically backward areas and weak schools to promote the balanced development of compulsory education and reduce the demand for school choice. 3. the government should guide parents and students from different socioeconomic strata in urban and rural areas to treat school choice rationally. in particular, families should be made aware that choosing a particular school does not lead to higher achievement benefits for students. further, for those areas and families experiencing poor economic conditions, school choice creates a heavier financial burden. references hu, y. m., lu, k., & xue, h.y. (2008) an empirical study on school choice in primary and secondary schools. j edu stud; 2:74-78. hanushek, e. a. (1986) the economics of schooling: production and efficiency in public schools. j econ lit; 24(3):1141-1177. raftery, a. e., & hout, m. (1993) maximally maintained inequality: expansion, reform, and opportunity in irish education, 1921-75. sociol edu; 66(1):41-62. lucas, & samuel, r. (2001) effectively maintained inequality: education transitions, track mobility, and social background effects. am j sociol; 106(6):1642-1690. vol.1, no. 1, 2019 40 received: 10 november 2018 revised: 22 december 2018 accepted: 23 december 2018 the chinese version of this article has been published in the journal of inner mongolia normal university (philosophical & social science) 2018; 47(3):96-102. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 方晨晨. 小升初择校对学生成绩影响的实证研究. 内蒙古师范大学学报 (哲学社会科学版) 2018; 47(3):96-102. article-chenchen fang_title_20jan2019 article-chenchen fang_main text_20jan2019 an investigation into the impact of mindfulness education on children development – based on the mindfulness experiment on 5th graders of d primary school in w city jing xie, yanguo tu hubei normal university, huangshi, china central china normal university, wuhan, china abstract. this study selected fifth graders from d primary school as subjects and conducted a 12-week mindfulness education experiment using a preand post-test control experiment design. the results can be used to demonstrate that mindfulness education has a significant impact on children’s attention development, emotional balance and development, psychological development and happiness enhancement. these aspects interact with each other to jointly improve the overall development level of children. therefore, activities of mindfulness education are necessary and should be carried out moderately at school, thus giving full play to the positive role of mindfulness education in child development. best evid chin edu 2019; 2(2):229-242. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1049 keywords: mindfulness education; child development; educational experiments correspondence to: yanguo tu, professor at college of education, central china normal university, china. email: tuyg@mail.ccnu.edu.cn. about the author: jing xie, a lecturer at college of education science, hubei normal university, china. email: xiejing1302@163.com. conflict of interests: none. xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 230 n the past ten years, with the rise of the mindfulness movement, training that appeals to the improvement of attention, mental health development and emotional regulation has been increasingly discovered and valued by scholars at home and abroad. mindfulness education is not a fixed course or teaching mode, but refers to various educational activities carried out using mindfulness methods, such as mindfulness reading, mindfulness awareness, mindfulness writing, mindfulness lectures, and mindfulness eating, etc. the united states has implanted mindfulness training into the “k-12” education system. the uk’s mindfulness campus program has benefited more than 7,000 children. the dutch mindfulness upbringing program has had a positive impact on the communication between children and parents. the study of mindfulness in china has just started. researchers have realized that mindfulness training has important values in school education to improve children’s attention, shape children’s moral quality, promote children’s self-regulation, and enhance subjective well-being of teachers and students. in this study, students of grade five in an elementary school were selected to conduct a 12-week mindfulness education experiment using a pre& post-test control experiment design, attempting to reveal the specific effects of mindfulness education on development of children. research methodology the theoretical hypothesis of this study is that experimental interventions through the mindfulness education curriculum adapted from cognitive therapy can effectively promote the development of children’s psychological, social, emotional and cognitive aspects, thus improving the overall development level of children. the research mainly incorporates the combined method of educational experiment and measurement. the educational experiment adopts the preand post-test control experiment design of equal groups. the measurement tools include the “attention stability questionnaire,” the “psychological health scale for primary school students,” the “positive and negative emotion scales,” and the “index of well-being.” subjects d elementary school in w city is a small-scale school with no more than 35 students in each class. the number of students is conducive to the control and implementation of the experiment. in addition to the changes in body growth, children of the fifth grade begin to have more various feelings and emotions than before. compared with children in the early period of primary school, older students can analyze and integrate external affairs in a more detailed manner and regulate their behavior (zhang, 2004). in summary, after a careful discussion between the researcher and the principal of the experimental school and the head teachers, class 1, grade 5 was selected as the experimental group, and class 2, grade 5 was used as the control group. the two classes were equal in number and the two classes included typical students, head teachers and classroom teachers. under the existing manpower and material resources, such class size and class level are just in line with the number and standards of subjects expected by the researcher. i xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 231 there were 20 male students and 11 female students in the experimental group, and one of them is an exceptional child. during the experiment, 4 students either took time off at different times or had events affecting their body and mind within one week to two weeks before the test. after excluding the influence of irrelevant variables, a total of 26 valid samples were obtained. in the control group, there were 19 male students and 12 female students. the subjects who did not meet the requirements were deleted, and a total of 29 valid samples were obtained. the quantity of final samples obtained is shown in table 1. there are 32 boys and 23 girls in the valid sample. research design the experiment used two types of designs. one is the experimental design of the experimental group and the control group between the subjects; the other is the experimental design of the experimental group before and after the test. using the mindfulness education course as the intervention method, and the fifth grade students of d primary school as subjects of the study, quasi-experimental design was adopted as the research design.the researchers conducted preand post-intervention and preand postintervention tests in the class with both the experimental group and the control group. the dependent variable was the total score of each scale before and after the pre& post-tests of experimental group and the control group. in order to control the interference of irrelevant and additional variables and reduce the experimental error as much as possible, this study adopted a variety of technical treatment methods: (i) the number of students, the sex ratio, and the family background of the experimental group and the control group were roughly balanced. (ii) during the experiment period, the teaching methods of the teachers in the experimental group and the control group were the same as before, and they were consistent with the school teaching arrangements. (iii) subjects were excluded who did not meet the experimental requirements by questionnaire. for example, those who have had a major impact on their own development because of family or other factors, as well as those who did not complete the experiment due to taking time off. (iv) the experimental assessor was separated from the researcher. in order to reduce the influence of subjective factors, the researcher only conducted 12 weeks of mindfulness training for the students throughout the experiment. the effect evaluation was supported by the class teacher and third party personnel (doctoral students) to conduct measurement and interview work before and after the experiment. research scenario the children’s mindfulness education in this study is a self-regulation method that teaches children to be physically and mentally active. it is based on the adult mindfulness decompression method or the mindfulness cognitive therapy, and includes a series of courses based on the righteousness intervention program modified by the child’s age teaching method. because children’s mindfulness cognitive therapy is for children with special needs, the course intervention of this study is aimed at the educational effectiveness of ordinary students. it should not be called therapy, but adapted to a kind of xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 232 table 1. sample statistics. total # boys girls valid # boys girls experimental group 31 20 11 26 15 11 control group 31 19 12 29 17 12 suitable mindfulness education program for the learning and education of general students. therefore, in the design of the mindfulness education curriculum, we developed a 12-week course of mindfulness education based on the curriculum structure of foreign children’s mindfulness cognitive therapy and children’s mindfulness decompression therapy (table 2). the experimental group received a 40-minute mindfulness education course once a week, had related homework, and the control group remained the same as they were before this experiment. research instruments measurement scale the research instruments of this study include the attention stability test questionnaire, the mental health rate scale for pupil (mhrsp), the positive and negative affective scale (panas), and the index of well-being (iwb). (1) attention stability test questionnaire: the attention stability test includes two parts, a and b, which consisting of multiple curves starting from the left side and ending on the right side, requiring participants to trace a curve from the left with eyes, and filling the number at the beginning of the curve into the square at the end of the curve on the right. pens or fingers cannot be used as assistance in the whole test, and the correct response number is used as an evaluation index for attention stability. a study by yin hengchan in 2003 showed that the test had good validity (yin, 2003). (2) mental health rate scale for pupil (mhrsp): this scale is a psychological test questionnaire consisting of 80 items. every 10 items constitute a subscale, which in turn includes 8 subscales such as learning disabilities, emotional disorders, personality defects, social adaptation disorders, moral defects, behavior disorder and special disorders. the project adopts a three-level scoring system. each project has three levels of “no”, “occasionally” and “frequently”, with 0 point, 1 point and 2 points in turn. the whole scale is the sum of the scores of each subscale. the higher the score is, the more the mental health problems there are, the lower the psychological level is. (3) positive and negative affective scales: this scale is compiled by watson (1988) and is currently the most widely used positive emotion measurement tool. it consists of 20 words that describe different sentiment and emotion. it is divided into positive affect (pa) and negative affect (na). two dimensions, each with 10 words. chinese scholars have studied the applicability of the chinese version of the scale in china and the cross-cultural consistency between china and the united states. the results show that the scale is suitable for the chinese population, with cross-cultural con xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 233 table 2. children’s mindfulness education course. time course theme course content homework week 1 what is righteous thought: a gift to accompany a lifetime self-introduction; establishing norms; consciously aware of nonjudgment mindfulness exercise week 2 breathing righteous thoughts: experience breathing as an anchor point, come back after each distraction, and observe breathing as a way to cope with difficulties lie, stand, sit and breathe number breath 10 times before going to bed week 3 mindfulness diet: the automatic guidance of the thinking in the process of eating mindfulness eating raisins; mindfulness eating mindfulness diet record; number of breaths 20 times before going to bed week 4 mindfulness awareness: discovering and breaking through inertia thinking the attributes of the five senses as the object of awareness number of breaths 20 before going to bed week 5 body scan: awareness exercises of static body consciously aware of various parts of the body successively mindful awareness exercise; number of breaths 20 times before going to bed week 6 mindfulness sit-in: awareness exercise from the inside out mindfulness, breathing, body, thinking, emotions, behavior, etc. number of breaths 20 times before going to bed week 7 mindfulness stretching: dynamic body awareness exercises learn to be aware of the body through action; mindfulness yoga animal and plant posture week 8 mindfulness walking: dynamic exercises from the outside to the inside, keeping awareness during walking walking indoors and outdoors, experience the feeling of your feet number of breaths 20 times before going to bed week 9 mindfulness listening: exploring the interpersonal communication of mindfulness harmonious relationship; listening to the sound: no choice to detect learn to listen and express; friendly wish list week10 mindfulness life: my thoughts, feelings, physical feelings, behavior 20 minutes of meditation practice; explore the implementation of mindfulness life daily practice such as brushing, bathing, etc.; number of breaths 20 times before going to bed week 11 the road to mindfulness: introspect and review personal growth introspective meditation; share the process through narrative write a letter to yourself week 12 love: thanksgiving practice blessing self-practice xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 234 sistency and good reliability and validity (zhang & yan, 2004). (4) index of well-being (iwb): this scale was compiled by campbell et al. in 1976. the scale includes two subscales: the life satisfaction questionnaire and the overall affective index. iwb has 9 questions; overall affective index has 8 questions; the life satisfaction questionnaire has 1 question; the project uses 7 points; the total score is the sum of the scores of the life satisfaction questionnaire and the average score of the overall affective index. li jing et al. revised the scale. after research, it was found that the correlation between the overall affective index and the happiness survey was 0.53, and the consistency between the overall affective index and life satisfaction was 0.56, which could be used as a tool to measure the happiness index (li et al., 2000). the measurement process is strictly carried out in accordance with the procedures of psychological measurement. the main test is to issue and collect questionnaires on site one week before and one week after the experiment, and to unify the instructions. students are required to carefully fill out the questionnaire according to their actual situation, in order to ensure the recovery rate and efficiency of the questionnaire, the whole process of the questionnaire test is carried out under the joint supervision of the researcher and the class teacher to ensure the authenticity and scientificity of the data. qualitative research instruments the qualitative research instruments we developed of this study include the mindfulness experience log sheet, the homework log sheet, the open questionnaire, and the interview outline. the mindfulness experience log sheet is made by children to record their experiences and feelings during the implementation of the course. for example, what do you think about? what physical feelings are you concerned about? what emotions and feelings have you experienced? the content is designed to match the weekly teaching activities. at the end of each course, the children fill in the forms themselves to understand their learning state, as a reference for correcting teaching, and also as a source of research for researchers. the homework log sheet: after the course, the children go home to complete the homework log sheet. the content design is also matched with the weekly teaching activities. the ideas, feelings, thoughts, affects, words and deeds, etc. perceived in each exercise are recorded. the researcher conduct family work every week. reviewing the assignments and give appropriate guidance and encouragement to form a quality of mindfulness and better integrate mindfulness into life. the open questionnaire: in addition, the researcher compiled a questionnaire and presented the interview questions in the form of a questionnaire to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the experiment results. finally, the researcher conducted formal interviews or random interviews on children during the experiment. the formal interview was based on the interview outline prepared in advance to obtain the overall perception of children in the teaching of xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 235 mindfulness courses. random interviews paid more attention to the real feelings during class, through the perspective of individual differences, to obtain children’s different views on mindfulness education curriculum. data processing using spss 20.0, the researcher analyzed the results of attention stability test questionnaire, mental health scale, positive and negative emotion scale, happiness scale, etc. in this study. the statistical analysis method used in this study can meet the research needs. results and analysis through the comparative analysis of the difference results of pre-test and post-test between the experimental group and the control group and the results of pre-test and posttest of experimental group, we found that mindfulness education has extremely significant effects in promoting children’s attention development, mental health development, emotional balance, and happiness. analysis of homogeneity test results between the experimental group and the control group in order to test whether the two groups were homogeneous, the independent sample t test was used to examine the difference of pre-test. the results showed that there was no statistically significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in the attention stability test, mental health rate scale for pupil, positive and negative emotion scales, and the index of well-being (table 3). therefore, students in these two classes can be used as an experimental group and a control group. analysis of the difference between the results of the experimental group and the control group before and after the experiment according to the independent sample t test, it can be seen from table 4 that there is a statistically significant difference in the scores of the attention stability test between the experimental group and the control group before and after the experiment (p = 0.003); the mean value of the difference of the experimental group before and after the attention stability test (m = 4.31) was significantly higher than that of the control group (m = 0.03), indicating that the stability of the attention of the experimental group was better than that of the control group. the mental health problems of the students in the mindfulness experimental group were significantly improved compared with the control group. there was a statistically significant difference in the total score of the mental health rate scale for pupil (p = 0.000), and the mean difference of the total score of the mental health rate scale for pupil of the experimental group (post-test score minus pre-test score) (m = -9.27) was significantly larger than that of the control group (m = -1.48). it shows that the psychological improvement of the students in the experimental group, whether it is the xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 236 table 3. homogeneity test results. t p attention stability test -0.325 0.746 mental health rate scale for pupil -0.019 0.985 positive emotion scale 0.296 0.768 negative emotion scale -0.088 0.930 index of well-being -0.228 0.821 table 4. comparison of the difference. subscale exp. (n = 26) ctrl. (n = 29) t p m sd m sd ast a test 0.46 0.905 -0.07 0.842 -2.252 0.028* ast b test 3.85 7.103 0.10 0.724 -2.824 0.007** ast total test 4.31 7.287 0.03 1.085 -3.123 0.003** mhrsp learning disability -0.96 2.690 -0.10 0.939 1.613 0.113 emotional disorder -1.62 2.174 -0.17 0.759 3.356 0.001*** personality defect -1.81 3.124 -0.24 0.830 2.602 0.012* social adaptation disorder -1.69 2.526 -0.21 0.774 3.016 0.004** moral defect -0.12 2.123 -0.28 0.797 -0.379 0.706 bad habit -1.08 2.911 -0.10 0.772 1.736 0.088 behavior disorder -1.85 2.694 -0.21 0.819 3.123 0.003** special obstacle -0.15 1.736 -0.17 0.658 -0.053 0.958 mhrsp total score -9.27 8.263 -1.48 2.278 4.877 0.000*** positive emotion 4.54 8.353 0.17 0.928 -2.798 0.007** negative emotion -2.65 6.066 -0.31 0.850 2.060 0.044* overall emotion scale 4.58 8.941 0.17 1.256 -2.627 0.011* life satisfaction questionnaire 0.73 0.919 0.03 0.944 -2.765 0.008** overall affective index 5.31 8.749 0.21 1.656 -3.082 0.003** note: *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001; the higher the mental health score, the more negative psychological state; the higher the negative emotion score, the worse the mood. the same below. exp.: experimental group; ctrl.: control group. overall level or mental health, personality defects, adaptation disorders and behavioral disorders, is significantly ahead of the control group after the mindfulness training. the results of the mindfulness education experiment are very significant. there are no statistical differences in mental health, including learning disabilities, moral defects, bad behavior, and mental disorders. before and after the experiment, the difference between the positive and negative emotion scales of the experimental group and the control group was statistically significant (p = 0.007; p = 0.044). the mean value of the difference before and after the positive emotion scale test of the experimental group (m = 4.54) was significantly xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 237 larger than that of the control group (m = 0.17); the mean value of the difference before and after the negative emotion scale of the experimental group (m = -2.65) was significantly smaller than that of the control group (m = -0.31). it shows that the mindfulness education experiment can effectively promote children’s emotional development. the index of well-being indicates that mindfulness education is effective for improving student well-being. there was a significant difference in the scores of happiness before and after the test between the experimental group and the control group (p = 0.003). the mean difference of pre-test and post-test of happiness in the experimental group (m = 5.31) was significantly higher than that of the control group (m = 0.21). comparison between pre-test and post-test results of the experimental group after performing the paired sample t test for the data of rating scale of attention (ast) in the experimental group before and after the test, the results showed (as shown in table 5): there was a significant difference between the overall data of attention between pre-test and post-test (p = 0.006), and the total average score of post-test of attention (m = 32.65) was significantly higher than the total average score of the pretest of attention (m = 28.35); the a and b subtests also obtained the same result. the average score of the experimental group’s post-test on mental health (mhrsp) is significantly different from that of pre-test (p = 0.000), and the average score of mental health in post-test was nearly 10 points less than that of the pre-test, indicating that the mindfulness education largely promotes students’ development of mental health. specifically, the mindfulness education has different degrees of influence on the various dimensions of students’ mental health. according to the extent of effects by the mindfulness education, those dimensions can be successively arranged from top to the bottom in such order as behavioral disorders, personality defects, social adaptation disorders, emotional disorders, bad habits, and learning disabilities. after analyzing the data of the positive and negative emotion scales of the experimental group after the experiment, it can be seen that there are significant differences between the positive and negative emotions (p = 0.010), and the total average score of post-test of the positive emotion scale are 4.53 points higher than that of the pretest. the total average score of the negative emotion scale of post-test is 2.65 points lower than that of the pretest. it shows that mindfulness education can enable students to gain more positive emotions and to promote the transformation from negative emotions to positive emotions. the students in the experimental group have got better emotions. the scores of the overall affective index were statistically significant (p = 0.015), and the total average scores of the overall emotional index of post-test (m = 43.31) were significantly higher than the total average scores of the overall affective index of pretest; the scores of the life satisfaction questionnaire of pretest and post-test were significantly different (p = 0.000), and the total average score of post-test (m = 5.42) was higher than that of the pretest (m = 4.69); the total scores of the index of well-being of pretest and posttest were statistically significant (p = 0.005), and the average score of the post-test of xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 238 table 5. descriptive statistics of pretest results of the experimental group (n = 26). subscale pre-test post-test t p m sd m sd ast a test 9.46 0.859 9.92 0.392 -2.601 0.015* ast b test 18.88 8.788 22.73 3.915 -2.761 0.011* ast total test 28.35 9.082 32.65 4.009 -3.014 0.006** mhrsp learning disabilities 4.85 3.283 3.88 2.422 1.822 0.080 emotional disorders 6.15 1.515 4.54 1.392 3.789 0.001*** personality defects 6.54 3.455 4.73 3.471 2.950 0.007** social adaptation disorders 5.35 1.573 3.65 2.591 3.416 0.002* moral defect 2.65 1.788 2.54 1.944 0.277 0.784 bad habits 4.27 4.035 3.19 2.698 1.886 0.071 behavioral disorders 6.15 2.444 4.31 2.363 3.495 0.002* special obstacle 3.19 2.713 3.04 2.615 0.452 0.655 mhrsp total score 39.15 11.471 29.89 13.382 5.720 0.000*** positive emotion 30.12 9.905 34.65 8.275 -2.770 0.010** negative emotion 22.92 8.275 20.27 7.102 2.231 0.035* overall emotion scale 38.73 8.586 43.31 6.078 -2.610 0.015* life satisfaction questionnaire 4.69 0.970 5.42 0.987 -4.055 0.000*** overall affective index 43.42 8.650 48.73 6.472 -3.093 0.005** table 6. correlation analysis of total scores of attention, mental health, positive and negative emotions, and happiness (pearson). 1 2 3 4 5 1 attention 2 mental health -0.777** 3 positive emotion 0.690** -0.727** 4 negative emotion -0.658** 0.687** -0.867** 5 happiness 0.767** -0.818** 0.727** -0.781** note: ** significantly correlated at .01 level (two-tailed) the index of well-being was 5.31 points higher than that of the pretest. correlation analysis results pearson product-moment correlation was used to analyze the difference between attention, mental health, positive emotion and negative emotion, and happiness. the correlation between each variable is shown in table 6. it can be seen that there is a significant positive correlation between attention and happiness (r = 0.767), positive emotions (r = 0.690); there is a significant negative correlation between attention and negative emotions, mental health. there is a significant negative correlation between mental health xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 239 and attention, positive emotions, and happiness; there is a significant positive correlation between mental health and negative emotions. there is a significant positive correlation between happiness and positive emotions; there is a significant negative correlation between happiness and negative emotions. there is a significant negative correlation between positive emotion and negative emotion. it shows that when children’s attention is developed, their psychological barriers decrease, positive emotions increase, and happiness increases. once children’s psychological disorders and negative emotion decrease, then their attention, positive emotions, and sentiment will develop. as children’s emotional index and happiness increase, their negative emotions decrease, positive emotions increase, and their psychology tends to develop well. conclusions and implications according to the above analysis, the mindfulness education experiment promotes the children’s attention development, mental health development, social development, emotional balance and development, happiness improvement, and also has an interactive effect, thereby promoting the overall development of children. in this study, mindfulness education can improve children’s attention stability and significantly improve their attention development. in the questionnaire, student s wrote, “when i am distracted, i can accept it and turn my attention back.” student l said, “i copied the text from the first row to the third row before, but i don’t do this now.” undoubtedly, mindfulness education can significantly reduce students’ learning pressure and improve their mental health. however, this study only found that the effects on emotional disorders, personality defects, social adaptation disorders and behavior disorders in mental health were significant; the effects on learning disabilities, moral defects, bad habits and mental disorders were not obvious, but according to interviews and questionnaires, mindfulness education has an effect on children’s learning disabilities, morality and bad habits to some extent. for example, student g said, “when i write homework, i can write it more quietly. i made many mistakes before, but now i can get an a for many times.” student d said frankly, “when i do homework or write words, i can write with mindfulness. when i can’t solve the problem, i can calculate it with a pen seriously." it explains that through mindfulness education children can develop good habits. this experimental study also proves that cultivating students to master the method of mindfulness through mindfulness education can make them control and evade negative emotions, gradually observe and feel the novelty and beauty of the present life, understand thoroughly the happiness contained in the depths of the soul, and thereby, the experience of positive emotions can be strengthened and gathered. in addition, the study also finds that the improvement of the level of mindfulness plays a significant mediating role in improving the effect of happiness, which is consistent with the research results of the researchers (xu et al., 2015; liu et al., 2013) and also with the qualitative findings of this study. for example, student w said, “i changed a lot after taking the mindfulness class, from fear to calm, from impatient to tolerant. i am more xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 240 patient with things.” “when i am angry and unhappy, i can breathe and calm down. when i take the mindfulness class, i feel very happy. mindfulness adds color to my life.” according to the above analysis, this experiment has achieved certain results and can provide some guidance for the practice of mindfulness education. however, if we want to ensure that mindfulness education plays a positively leading role in the children development, we need to do the following work. (1) raising awareness, actively creating conditions, and appropriately carrying out mindfulness education children are in a critical period of physical and mental development, with physical and psychological development and changes in study habits and school environment, they will face psychological problems affecting, interpersonal communication, personality development, self-awareness and the pressure of study and life. through the findings, as a new form of school education, mindfulness education plays a unique role in promoting children’s development and it is an effective way to achieve children’s all-round development and healthy growth. this study has shown that children mindfulness education plays a significant role in regulating children’s negative emotions and promoting children’s happiness. in the state of mindfulness, the student’s parasympathetic (relaxation) nervous system is maximally activated, and can experience a state of joy, peace, calmness, and happiness. in mindfulness education, techniques such as body scans, mindfulness sensory awareness, mindfulness movement, mindfulness breathing, etc. are guiding students to consciously think, pay attention to and extend the awareness of the present. mindfulness emphasizes non-judgment and acceptance; it promotes children’s cognitive reassessment, and creates the conditions in order to accept the current situation. all these attributes can cultivate deeper empathy and good qualities in children. therefore, it is necessary to add more mindfulness education and training for children, improve the quality of mindfulness, and then can promote the all-round development and healthy growth of children. (2) strengthening the mindfulness teaching ability of educators and improving the overall development level of children when educators conduct mindfulness training for children, they should pay attention to guiding children to observe their physical or psychological feelings, so that children can learn to observe and accept their current state as much as possible without any evaluation, so as to guide the emotions and ideas to be expressed. the purpose of mindfulness education is not only to achieve the goals of the established educational activities, but more importantly, how to integrate the attitudes and methods of focusing on and understanding the mind and body experience, open acceptance, and non-judgment in the whole process of education and teaching. therefore, the words and deeds of educators are the most direct demonstration of mindfulness to students. this requires educators to have mindfulness learning experiences and continuous mindfulness practices and further education. the most important thing is to be able to practice in daily life. only when educators are aware of themselves can they constantly feel the needs of children xie & tu. mindfulness education on children development vol.2, no. 2, 2019 241 to be in the “being mode,” which in turn helps to accomplish improved educational achievement and the overall development level of children. (3) drawing nourishment from related mindfulness projects and localizing western mindfulness education many countries in the west have established social institutions such as the “mindfulness education association,” “mindfulness education network,” and “school of mindfulness” to actively apply mindfulness education within schools. for example, nan tien institute (australia) provides a special course for mindfulness, education transforming teachers’ in-service training to enhance mindfulness teaching helping teachers better integrate “mindfulness” into specific teaching practices. in china’s taiwan region, the “mindfulness development association” and the “chinese mindfulness decompression center” have also been established, where the positive mindfulness training practice has been actively carried out in the primary school life curriculum action research, and has achieved certain results. the development of mindfulness education projects such as these provides abundant nutrients for the orderly implementation of mindfulness education in mainland china. however, any kind of educational theory is not a universally applicable truth, but has its relevance or cultural constraints. if the practice of mindfulness education is to be carried out in an orderly manner and achieve the expected results, it is necessary to construct a “localized” mindfulness education theory that is locally compatible, so as to provide theoretical support. to this end, we need to combine the chinese national conditions, based on local situations and reality, to localize the western mindfulness education theory this will encourage educators to actively carry out the exploration and practice of mindfulness education, to accomplish experiences and achievements, and construct a mindfulness education model with chinese characteristics, thus creating conditions for laying the foundation to improve the development of children in china.■ acknowledgements we would like to thank professor marc shelton for providing helpful comments on earlier drafts, and made suggestions for further revisions. despite such support, this article is bound to contain errors which are, of course, the entire responsibility of the authors. references huang, f.y. 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(2004) cross-cultural psychological measurement of positive and negative emotions: a test of dimensional structure of panas. psychol sci, 27(1):7779.■ received: 29 may 2019 revised: 11 june 2019 accepted: 09 july 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in educational research and experiment 2018; 6:23-28. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 谢晶, 涂艳国. 正念教育对儿童发展影响的研究—基于武汉市某小学五年级的正念实验. 教 育研究与实验, 2018; 6:23-28. article-jingxie-bece_title_31july2019 article-jingxie-maintext-bece_31july2019 bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 1011 the effect of harsh parenting on smartphone addiction of adolescents by qi, d., lin, y., & liu, q. correspondence to: qinxue liu, associate professor, central china normal university, china. email: qinxueliu@mail.ccnu.edu.cn ased on the questionnaire statistical results of 3,219 students from two non-boarding key secondary schools from wuhan and shiyan, the study published in psychological development and education research established the mediation effect model, regulating effect model, and intermediary effect model with regulation to explore the mediating effect of core selfevaluation in the process of smartphone addiction through harsh parenting among adolescents, and also the regulating effect of friendship quality. the main results are as follows:  according to the analysis of harsh parenting, core self-evaluation, friendship quality. and smartphone addiction, it is concluded that all the variables were significantly correlated. thereinto, harsh parenting has a significant negative correlation among core self-evaluation and friendship quality; core self-evaluation has a significant negative correlation among smartphone addiction and friendship quality; harsh parenting smartphone addiction; core self-evaluation was significantly positively correlated to friendship quality.  a mediating effect model was established with harsh parenting as the predictive variable, smartphone addiction as the dependent variable, core self-evaluation as the mediating variable, and gender & grade as the control variables. the results showed that core selfevaluation plays a partial mediating effect between harsh parenting and smartphone addiction.  a moderating effect model was established with harsh parenting as the independent variable, friendship quality as the moderating variable, core self-evaluation as the dependent variable, and gender & grade as the control variables. the results showed that friendship quality had a significant moderating effect on the prediction effect of harsh parenting on core self-evaluation. for the high friendship quality group, the core self-evaluation of adolescents decreased significantly with the increase of harsh parenting degree, while comparing b vol.7, no.2, 2021 1012 to the low friendship quality group the decline degree of the high friendship quality group was considerably high.  using the structural equation technology to conduct the integrated model examination of the two steps above-mentioned. the results showed that harsh parenting had a direct effect on adolescent smartphone addiction and also an indirect effect on adolescent smartphone addiction through core self-evaluation. meanwhile, the effect of harsh parenting on core self-evaluation was moderated by friendship quality. source: psychological development and education, 2020; 36(6):677-685. a review of the largest online teaching in china for elementary and middle school students during the covid-19 pandemic longjun zhou, 1,2 fangmei li 3 1. jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, china 2. engineering research center of digital learning support technology, ministry of education, changchun 130000, jilin, china 3. nanjing dianji institute of psychological education, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china abstract. in order to reduce the impact of covid-19 pandemic on teaching, online teaching with the goal of “school is out, but class is on” was launched throughout china, and had achieved the “school is out, but class is on” of more than 200 million people. this special period of education has attracted great attention from chinese scholars, and has conducted research on the theme of online teaching during the pandemic. based on the relevant data of cnki and other foreign open databases, this article reviewed and summarized the relevant researches of covid-19 pandemic online teaching by survey and analysis. through the statistical analysis of related research, the current research on online teaching mainly focuses on the selection of online teaching platforms and resources, the overview of online teaching organization, the implementation and the evaluation of problems. best evid chin edu 2020; 5(1):549-567. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.re040. keywords: covid-19; “school is out, but class is on”; chinese elementary and middle school; online teaching about the author: fangmei li, nanjing dianji institute of psychological education, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china. email: 1037576462@qq.com; correspondence to: longjun zhou, professor, jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu; and research scientist, engineering research center of digital learning support technology, ministry of education, changchun 130000, jilin, china. email: 294437034@qq.com. conflict of interests: none. zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 550 background ovid-19 has engulfed most countries and regions in the world. according to the statistics of the world health organization (who), as of april 20, 2020, 211 countries and regions have reported confirmed cases, and the cumulative number of confirmed cases has reached more than 2.3 million (who, 2020). affected by covid-19 pandemic, a record number of students worldwide cannot continue their normal school life. according to the monitoring of the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco), as of april 20, beijing time, 191 countries have implemented nationwide school suspensions, affecting approximately 1.575 billion students which accounting for 91.3% of the total number of registered students worldwide (unesco institute for statistics, 2020). because of it, countries began to seek respond ways actively to minimize the impact of the pandemic on education. among them, online teaching has become an important measure for many countries to learn during the school suspension. they had deployed distance education and tried to solve its complexity to promote the “class is on” during the covid-19 pandemic. in this process, from elementary, middle school to college, from europe, asia to north america, all countries affected by the pandemic have become large-scale experimental sites for online teaching. the chinese government launched “school is out, but class is on”, integrating all teaching resources, using the internet and informatization technology, implementing distance learning and home learning for over 200 million students during the delayed spring semester period, which greatly guarantees the continuity of learning during the pandemic (ding & yu, 2020). with the continuous spread of the pandemic, the global school suspension has become server. many countries and education researchers pay attention to how china conducts online teaching during the pandemic, and it has become a hotspot in the fields of education management, information technology, policy science and decision-making consulting around the world. based on this, the research on chinese online teaching during covid-19 pandemic needs to be analyzed and reviewed. so that to further summarize the hotspots, difficulties and the existing problems during the pandemic, and to reflect on the weak points in order to conduct a more in-depth study. this review is based on the published data from cnki, foreign open databases, and relevant official websites of china. it combined with relevant research reports, and provides a reference for the current implementation of global online teaching. literature retrieval this article reviewed and summarized the relevant researches of covid-19 pandemic online teaching by survey and analysis. we conducted research on the cnki database and foreign open databases represented by ssrn, use “school is out, but class is on”, “covid-19”, and “online c zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 551 teaching” as keywords to search public information on other related websites. after screening irrelevant documents, as of april 18, 2020, a total of 156 articles were obtained (103 from cnki, 42 from foreign open database, and 11 from other valid documents), of which there are 105 articles related to “elementary and middle school”. after reviewed and analyzed these 156 articles, we found that the research on online teaching has developed rapidly and continuously. as far as research objects, they include national or local education departments, college education researchers, elementary and middle school teachers, and social education researchers. among them, college educators, elementary and middle school teachers are the major. as far as the number of journal articles, before march 2020, there were 34 relevant articles in the cnki database, only 8 were journal articles, and most of them were reported by newspapers. however, after a month and a half, the number of related research journal articles had reached 48, and there were 8 research reports published on related websites. so we can see that the number of research about covid-19 had developed rapidly, and the research quantity and quality had also increased constantly. as far as the research types, they were more diversified, including research on the specific description of online education, survey reports through questionnaires on the implementation of online teaching, and experimental research on the effects of online teaching. as far as the research content, the main points were the construction of online teaching environment and resources, and how to carry out teaching guidance. “cloud classroom”, “network environment”, “live broadcast class”, and “teaching strategy” are high-frequency keywords, which indicate that the teaching platform, resource content, school (teacher) and family-related guidance were the primary concern during the pandemic. online teaching platform and resources as a new type of teaching method, online teaching provided students with real-time and non-real-time teaching guidance. in this pandemic, national, local or educational informatization companies had provided a variety of platforms and resources, and provided teachers with different possibilities. therefore, it is one of the research key points. classification of online platform the rich types of online teaching platforms allow teachers to have more choices. teachers can choose different types of platforms to carry out teaching activities according to their individual teaching needs and preferences. yutong zhao once divided common online teaching platforms into three types in his research: communication platforms, such as qq, wechat, etc.; document delivery platforms, such as email, dingtalk, moodle, micro-classes, etc; and webcast platforms, such as tiktok, kuaishou, obs, zoom, etc. (zhao, 2017) zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 552 the outbreak of the pandemic has made online teaching more popular. therefore, the researchers have further subdivided their classification. for example, in a report on interactive research on online education jointly published by the new media communication research center of beijing normal university and guangming daily educational research center, 39 online education products that are widely used in the market are divided into the following seven categories: (i) social tool: social software that supports daily communication and corporate office. a variety of teaching functions such as wechat, qq, and dingtalk are realized through the integration of group chats, video and audio conferences, and extension programs. (ii) communication tool: with online video conference as the core, it supports simultaneous live teaching, such as zoom and xiaoyu link. (iii) platform service: provide a digital teaching environment to assist teachers to complete the entire process of online teaching, and realize functions such as course selection, course scheduling, announcement, online interaction, batch assignments, data management and analysis, such as seewo and xueleyun platform etc. (iv) teaching tool: a tool that assists offline or online teaching to realize the digitization and high efficiency of one or several links in teaching, such as 17zuoye. (v) public resource: provide digital public teaching resources such as microclassrooms and teaching materials, the national elementary and middle school network platform and the people’s education tv station. (vi) subject content: subjects’ online learning resources which based on the learning courses, such as tencent classroom and people’s open class. (vii) comprehensive tutoring: online education institutions independently developed online teaching platforms, teaching aids and curriculum systems. it integrates education and scientific research and teaching together, and the institutional teaching team provides students with a comprehensive learning experience, such as zhibozuoyebang, tal education etc. according to this statistic (teacher’s choice of educational products are multiple choices), among these seven types of online teaching platforms, social communication software such as wechat and qq, mobile office platforms represented by dingtalk and national elementary and middle school network platforms, became the first choice for teachers to carry out online teaching. in addition, zuoyebang, tencent classrooms, tal education, and electronic textbooks from people’s education press have all become important products for the online teaching (new media communication research center of beijing normal university, guangming daily education research center, 2020). the specific analysis statistics are shown in figure 1: at the same time, the east china normal university curriculum and teaching research institute also investigated the specific use of online teaching platforms by elementary and middle school teachers. according to the questionnaire analysis of elementary and middle school teachers in 23 provinces and cities in the report, zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 553 dingtalk(56.65%) and wechat group (52.75%) were the primary choices for teachers’ online communication and management; as far as live broadcast platforms, more teachers chosed platforms such as tencent classroom (36.95%), zoom (27.72%), tencent conference (26.01%), mooc(13.55%), cctalk (8.54%). (yang & zhang, 2020) through the above several research reports, it can be seen that before the “school is out, but class is on”, online education platforms and related tools had been enriched and expanded. in addition to the country, more education information companies focused on online teaching environment and the development of tools, provided a richer supplement to the online teaching support platform during the pandemic. in addition, teachers had a deeper understanding of the new online teaching technology and functions. in addition to common social tools such as wechat and qq, dingtalk and the national elementary and middle school network platform, tencent classroom, etc. had also become the main choice (figure 1). strategy selection of online teaching platform huang (2020) believed that the choice of online teaching tools should consider the convenience, that is, the tools should help teachers to quickly and easily produce and manage resources, publish notifications and manage students; help students obtain resources and participate in learning activities quickly and easily; help teachers and students to communicate conveniently and quickly; help teachers, parents, and schools to keep updated of students’ learning dynamics, and better communications. from the perspective of overall regional planning, qing zhang and others believed that the network platform was the carrier and means of online teaching. choosing a suitable platform and being able to operate proficiently have a great significant meaning for smoothly developing online teaching. therefore, it is recommended that each subject in the same grade of each school can only use one platform for online teaching, to avoid switching back and forth during learning, increasing the difficulty of operation, but meanwhile it is allowed one or two assistant platforms for announcement (zhang & wu, 2020). more research was focus on how online education was implemented in schools. for example, daxiang dai’s research specifically explained how the school used the teaching platforms at all levels to solve the learning needs of different grades during the outbreak (dai & lin, 2020). the article introduced that for the review stage of the first and second year of middle school students, they were required to watch the local tv education channel (jiangsu education channel) and listen to the “gulou online review course” to conduct home-based independent review. for ninth grade students （the last year of middle school), the school organized students to learn independently by watching the news channels of local tv stations. in the new content teaching stage, on the one hand, the school used the teaching platform like “jiangling teachers’ class in the air-jinling micro school” in jiangsu province, “pukou eqixiao” in pukou district, and the online learning mobile app “wosu” in jiangsu to conduct online teaching, on the other hand, use the office communication platform “dingtalk” to carry out online group live broadcasting, and online interactive teaching through the network live broadcasting zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 554 figure 1. statistics of online learning platforms in china. platform. at the same time, the school also used public communication platforms such as qq or wechat to establish a communication group for each class, so that teachers can answer and solve questions in a timely manner. the construction and development of online resources zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 555 the quality of teaching resources has an important influence on the effect of online teaching. therefore, in addition to online teaching platforms, the development and integration of online teaching resources had also attracted the attention of researchers. the construction of online teaching resources was not an overnight effort. some scholars had done research on the basis of online teaching resources in china this time. according to the data of the ministry of education’s cyber security and informatization leading group in 2020 quoted by longjun zhou, as of 2019, the national system has launched a comprehensive collection of high-quality basic education resources for the entire society, bringing 290 units together and a total of 457 teaching applications. through the activity of “one teacher one excellent class, one excellent teacher one class”, it attracted more than 2.28 million teachers to participate, collected 3.14 million online courses, recommended 17,312 provincial excellent courses, and selected 1,005 ministerial excellent courses, and generated 8 million resources. therefore, the article claimed that the achievements of the construction of digital teaching resources from the beginning of this century have provided strong resource support for the large-scale online teaching activities during the pandemic (zhou, et al, 2020). researchers have also seen that during the pandemic, the large-scale online teaching has benefited from the interaction of various parties in the society. in order to provide rich online teaching resources, the state, local governments and enterprises had made efforts. as reported in the 11th edition of the people’s daily on february 3, the chinese government has, since february 17, opened the national elementary and middle school network cloud platform and online courses for free to students from elementary to high school. on the other hand, china education television provided to nationwide elementary students, 8th and 12th grade students with free “new education elementary school edition textbook synchronization class”, “mathematics, physics, chemistry courses”. at the same time, for some rural areas and remote poverty-stricken areas where there is no internet or slow internet speed, courses and resources will be broadcast through tv channels to ensure that the essence and effect of online and offline teaching are the same (zhao, 2020). in addition, local governments have also organized teaching and research teams to study teaching methods and learning resources suitable for the region. for example, tianjin municipality organized kindergarten teachers and researchers in response to the needs of young children’s family education, based on “guidelines to learning and development for children aged 3-6”; they recorded 10 video games for young children (tianjin education commission, 2020). for the 8th and 12th grading student, fujian province organized teaching and research teams to develop suitable teaching methods and learning resources, and sent the course content to students as “curriculum” to ensure that those students can successfully pass the end of grade test (fujian education department, 2020). in addition to national and local governments, educational information-based enterprises such as bytedance, yuanfudao, zhibozuoyebang, vipkid and other compazhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 556 nies provided free online live teaching systems to all elementary and middle students. the provision of a large number of high-quality online teaching resources provided a solid foundation for this large-scale online teaching activity (zhao, 2020). the selection strategy of online teaching resources high-quality and rich learning resources were not equivalent to effective learning. they need to be closely related to the teaching object and content, and match the physical and mental characteristics of the learner. therefore, how to choose appropriate online teaching resources was also one of the major focuses. regarding how to select appropriate online teaching resources, huang et al. (2020) believed that the following points should be considered: (i) appropriate content, that is, the learning resources must be highly related to the learning object and content and can arise the interest of the students, or they are necessary to solve the problems; (ii) appropriate difficulty, that is, the content is moderate in difficulty and moderate in size, and will not make students overloaded; (iii) appropriate structure, that is, the structure of the learning content is clear and the organization is reasonable, and it will not make students confused; (iv) appropriate media, the presentation form of the media is easily accepted by students to prevent visual fatigue, especially for young students; (v) proper resource organization. that is to effectively organize the selected learning resources (such as video, animation, text, electronic textbooks, virtual reality, etc.) to ensure that the navigation layout is clear and the depth is moderate, and the students will not lose their way. in the specific implementation process, different schools have integrated and enriched online resources according to their own conditions. for example, the zhenjiang experimental school in jiangsu province digitized the textbook guidance materials to form a digital guidance draft, which provided more targeted teaching materials (xia, 2020); the no. 2 daxie elementary school in ningbo, zhejiang province organized each teacher to design a guidance program (task list) based on the learning objects and the students’ learning situation, which made the knowledge organized and systematic (xie & yang, 2020); the second experimental middle school of henan province independently developed online curriculum resources during the pandemic. the 164 online courses not only enriched online learning resources, but also allowed the 12th grade students to further adapt to online learning (zhou, 2020). the organization and implementation of online teaching teachers, students and parents are the main participants in education. under the impact of the pandemic, normal classroom teaching could not be carried out, and it shifted from offline to online. the change of learning methods, the assistance and cooperation zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 557 of parents are important guarantees for online teaching. therefore, how to organize and implement online teaching has become a topic online teaching methods the form of teaching organization is a link between teachers and students, and it is a way to organize teaching activities according to certain teaching ideas, purposes, content, and subjective and objective of teaching conditions. the emergence of online teaching in the pandemic relies on the strength of teachers, demonstrating their practical ability and real level. implementation overview of online teaching at the beginning of this large-scale online teaching development, the teaching and research of education department of the zhejiang province organized all provincial teaching and research departments to carry out a survey on the online learning of middle and ordinary high school students in the province. the results showed that 96.0% of the students who have participated or are participating in online teaching activities organized by the school, while only 4.0% have not participated. this showed that online teaching has become the main method of education and teaching for the middle and high school during the pandemic in zhejiang province (the education department of zhejiang province, 2020). later, a survey report issued by the academy of educational sciences of hunan province involving 31 provinces, cites, autonomous regions and hong kong, macao and taiwan regions also responded. in this report, 79.34% of the research objects had already conducted online teaching, urban area is 83.41% and urban area is 77.42%. it was concluded that online teaching had become very norm in china during the pandemic. about 80% of schools in hunan province, whether it is urban or rural, had launched online teaching, and teachers had tried every method to teach students. teaching methods was also diverse. the data showed that 36.48% of the schools were mainly relied on “learning public teaching resources”, 31.56% were “teacher recording or using existing resources”, 11.6% were “teacher live teaching” (academy of educational sciences of hunan province, 2020). classification of online teaching organizations some scholars believed that the organizational form of online teaching should follow the idea of “flexible teaching”. each element in teaching does not stick to the inherent model, and makes corresponding adjustments according to the actual situation, to be able to learn easily, devotedly and effectively (ma & du, 2002). some scholars summarized the online teaching mode of this period. for example, zhiting zhu and hongchao peng (2020) had proposed three application modes – direct teaching, self-learning, and flip learning; jianli jiao and xiaoqing zhou (2020) had summarized several typical solutions – online courses, online live broadcast teaching, student self-learning, and television air classroom, etc ; dongdong wang et al. (2020) proposed four common zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 558 online teaching and service models based on platform selection: “tv teaching video”, “live classroom”, “resource class communication” and “self-selected resources + online q & a”. selection strategies of online teaching organization regarding the selection of teaching organization methods, some scholars pointed out: “schools should allow teachers to flexibly choose suitable teaching organization forms for different learning contents according to the teaching resources and local network facility (huang, 2020) . for example, the first middle school in changyuan city, henan province, through a guided learning program, launched online teaching activities, combined with students ‘independent learning methods, created a six-step teaching method (cai & wang, 2020); the experimental elementary school of xiamen did not blindly follow the advanced educational products at the beginning of online teaching, but required all teachers and students to use qq groups as an platform to ensure that them can be smoothly involved in a short time. after a stable period, the school encouraged everyone to try other systems such as the national education digital resource network to ensure that online education activities can be carried out more efficiently and stably (liu, 2020). the combination of reality, innovation, and development of distinctive teaching organizations guaranteed the quality of online teaching. online learning methods learning methods refer to all learning methods and forms adopted by learners in various learning situations with different motivational orientations, mental processing levels and learning effects. it includes not only the learning methods and strategies that focus on the individual level of students, but also the learning methods of teachers and students (pang, 2010). affected by the pandemic, classroom teaching could not be carried out under normal circumstances, the learning environment had changed, and the learning methods had also been changed. therefore, how to divide learning methods, which learning methods are mainly adopted by students, and how to let students to choose different learning methods according to their learning characteristics had become a topic. some scholars believed that different learning methods are suitable for different scenarios and students, and the tools they rely on are also different. based on this, the online learning methods during the pandemic are divided. for example, huang (2020) believed that the choice of learning methods should considered the characteristics of the learner, the level of cognitive processing, learning participation and etc. based on this, relevant education departments represented by beijing city had advocated teachers screened learning resources and guided learning content according to the learning characteristics of their students. teachers should strengthen offline guidance to students, and especially use this opportunity to guide students to try offline selflearning (shi, 2020). parents cooperating with online teaching zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 559 family and school co-education is to cultivate students through family education and school education, to promote the overall development and healthy growth of students. during the postpone school period, the family has become the only place for students to learn, and parents have become an important partner in student learning. communication and cooperation between school and family is an important measure to promote “school is out, but class is on” (cheng, 2020). therefore, parents’ knowledge of online teaching and how to strengthen cooperation had become one of the research topics. parents’ knowledge of online teaching the department of education of heilongjiang province conducted a questionnaire survey on the satisfaction with online teaching of parents across the province. according to the report, up to 39.84% were very satisfied, 19.71 % were less satisfied, 38.01% were relatively satisfied, and only 2.44% of were not satisfied (figure 2). 92.33% of parents felt that “schools and teachers actively contacted them and communicated the cautions and arrangements for online learning.” they were very satisfied with it (heilongjiang provincial department of education, 2020). in wang’s (2020) report, we can see that parents have another attitude towards online education: on the one hand, 49.2% of parents were expecting the school to take remedies for online teaching, but on the other hand, some parents worries for various reasons, such as the choice of online courses 64.1%, unfamiliar network operation 52.4%, insufficient network and equipment conditions 14.7%, affected vision 59.9%, concertation 57.3%, online temptation 49.2%, unanswered questions 43.9%, and poor learning effectiveness 40.9% have all become concerns for parents. measures for home and school cooperation in order to better manage home learning, the school organized room-teacher to establish a class communication management platform. through multiple channels such as class qq group, wechat group or school platform, school official wechat, etc., the school had established a positive, smooth and effective communication to maximize the support and cooperation of parents. and through the communication platform, the school can statistics and monitor the students’ online viewing of online courses and homework submissions to better control the students’ home learning (cheng, 2020). for example, jiangsu zhenjiang experimental school built a platform for online learning and a homeschool co-education network platform through the province, city and school platforms. in addition, it also realized remote interaction with parents through the public communication platform qq and wechat group. at the same time, the school replied on the education bureau of the province and cities to develop online learning resources to deeply dig out parent resources, and enrich home learning resources. in addition, in order to better achieve home-school co-education, the school had specific requirements for teachers and parents to ensure the quality of online learning (xia, 2020). zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 560 figure 2. satisfaction of online learning. the achievements and deficiencies of online teaching implementation with the pandemic situation getting better in china, education will gradually return to normal. as of april 20, 26 provinces in china have started back to school (wang & wang, 2020), and the implementation of “school is close, but class is on” will also come to an end. how effective it is and what are the deficiencies have become concerns. the effectiveness of online teaching launching online teaching nationwide is the first attempt in chinese education history. compared with traditional teaching methods, can online teaching bring new enlightenment to students in a home learning environment? which teaching method can improve teaching efficiency? can online teaching better promote individualized teaching and the balance of quality education? the effectiveness of online teaching has attracted the researchers’ attention. for example, yao used evidence-based research method to study 1,024 samples from no. 8 guiyang middle school and another school with the same educational conditions and students. they analyzed the impact of two online teaching methods, recording and broadcasting, and live broadcasting, on student performance, and concluded zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 561 that more get involved by teachers is an effective way to improve teaching efficiency. (yao et al, 2020) hui et al. (2020) also conducted research on the effect of technology on online teaching, and concluded that the accurate support of big data reduces the student’s academic burden, guarantees the normal development of teaching, and improves teaching efficiency. although the research on this part is not sufficient at present, as the normal teaching gradually recovered, the research on the effectiveness of online teaching will also be continuously supplemented and enriched. the problems existing in online teaching since the implementation of “school is out, but class is on” in china, large-scale online teaching had replaced the normal classroom teaching, and various regions had also taken actions to respond to this change, ensuring the continuity of learning. however, some scholars had seen that in the specific implementation process, the implementation of large-scale online education had been affected by infrastructure construction, unadoptable teaching methods, and unequal information literacy of the participants. the infrastructure in a few areas is weak that affects the implementation effect compared with developed regions, underdeveloped regions still have some problems in terms of home learning terminals and the coverage, availability and stability of network conditions. some scholars said that it is the first time in china’s basic education that large-scale online teaching replaced normal school teaching. the infrastructure preparation for large-scale online education is insufficient, and large-scale concurrent accesses greatly exceeds the platform’s regular service capabilities, online teaching platforms (such as cloud classrooms, rain classrooms, and dangding dong) were usually overwhelmed (zhang et al, 2020), and problems such as stuck and frequent offline seriously affected the learning experience (li, 2020). in the later period, the power of the national social enterprise had greatly improved the network operation ability, and online teaching support environment had been improved. the lack of scientific property and applicability of some teaching plan affected the teaching effect teaching plan should be designed and implemented according to the actual situation of the school to ensure the pertinence and scientific property of teaching. however, in terms of specific implementation, some schools had a relatively simple practice model, especially in the early days of online teaching. they used the same teaching method as offline teaching, or the same time schedule as the original, without comprehensive consideration, evaluation and design of the teaching content of different levels and different disciplines. zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 562 according to the questionnaire survey of the education research office of the department of education of zhejiang province, there are 7 online learning methods (live broadcast, recording, resource pack, live broadcast + recording, live broadcast + resource pack, recording + resource pack, live broadcasting + recording + resource package), pure live broadcast got the highest proportion, reaching 51.8%, but in a survey of student satisfaction, the resource package (the teacher does not teach, just provides learning resources for students to learn by themselves) was the learning method with the highest student satisfaction. in addition, the questionnaire also counted the way students submit their homework, the number of daily courses, and the time of each course. from the survey, problems such as long class hours and study time, electronic homework, and online punch-in were still highlighted (the research office of the department of education of zhejiang province, 2020). in this regard, the report recommend that schools arrange and adjust online learning from the perspective of improving the physical and mental health of students, and design teaching programs that meet the actual situation. in addition, wang also emphasized that during the implementation of online teaching, encourage “one school one teaching plan”, “one class one teaching plan”, “one teacher one teaching plan” (wang et al, 2020). inadequate literacy of some subjects the lack of information literacy was another practical problem faced by this large-scale online teaching implementation. some scholars said that many teachers, students and parents were unable to follow the online teaching. in the absence of relevant guidance from the school, the participants showed inordinate “out of control” and “anxiety” during the implementation process (jiao et al, 2020). more scholars have analyzed from the survey report that there may be problems in the information literacy of the subjects. teachers’ online teaching abilities are different according to the relevant research report of the institute of curriculum and teaching of east china normal university, most teachers have self-study experience with online platforms (45.22% are frequently used and 37.69% are occasionally used). and most teachers are not stranger to online education (40.29% knew very well and 45.50% knew better). however, for large-scale teaching using online platforms, 41.26% of teachers still found it difficult, even 21.80% considered very difficult (yang & & zhang, 2020). in the relevant survey report of beijing normal university (wang, et al, 2020), this situation had also been verified, and 42% of teachers were anxious about carrying out large-scale online education. the main reason does not know how to interact with students online, how to organize teaching activities, and how to deal with equipment operations. teachers also generally are lack of online teaching experience and cannot quickly adapt to and exert the advantages of network technology. the lack of online self-learning ability of students and difficult to guarantee the participation of learning zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 563 in the questionnaire survey of 9,824 parents of elementary students in 9 counties in sichuan province by pu et al (2020), parent thought that children were not concentrate (44.48%) and irregular learning time (44.06%) are the main problems of online education. the results showed that 38.54% of the students had insufficient confidence in adapting online learning quickly; 37.1% believed that they had poor initiative in online learning, and 45.79% considered that need the supervision of teachers and parents to complete the task of online learning. as a result, students’ independent learning ability had become an important factor that affects the final results of online learning. insufficient parents’ ability to assist children in online learning parental assistance is of great significance to online learning. according to a survey of elementary and middle school teachers, students, parents, and educational institutions in seven major regions including east, central, and south china conducted by the zhongguancun internet education innovation and the collaborative innovation center established by the ministry of education and the balanced development of informatization and basic education in china, during the pandemic, 23.4% and 29.6% of the parents indicated that they have been or often accompanied their children for online learning, and 38.1% just occasionally, but 7.9% were not (wang & fu, 2020). according to the survey results of jiang et al. (2020), 52.4% of parents reported that they were not familiar with the operation of online learning, and there were no active and effective solutions to the problems that may occur in online learning. based on this, xie suggested that in addition to strengthening technical guidance and design theory guidance for teachers’ online teaching, schools should also pay attention to relevant guidance for students and parents. this can train students to learn and manage independently, and establish a good home-school collaboration mechanism. under the premise of respecting different school periods, different grades, different students’ cognition laws and home learning laws, according to the unevenness of parents’ education, experience, and ability, so as to ensure the implementation of online teaching (xie et al. 2020). perspective in this large-scale online teaching activity, the transformation of educational space forced the participants of various educations to quickly adjust and adapt to changes. this is not only a new problem that schools, families and students have ever encountered, but also an important challenge facing china’s basic education. it can be seen from the currently published studies that the content of online education research during the pandemic mainly focused on the following aspects. (i) the rich education platform and resources are the strong support for this online teaching. based on this study, we can see that under the state of suspension of classes across china, the chinese government has combined various forces to provide a diverse teaching platform and rich teaching resources for online teaching, which has better supported the distance learnzhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 564 ing of students across the country. this ensures the continuity and scientific property of education and teaching in an extraordinary environment, thereby promoting the healthy development of students’ physical and mental health at home. (ii) teaching guidance and home-school cooperation are the guarantee of online teaching. at the same time, we also noticed that how to make education technology and teaching more deeply integrated to better serve education and teaching, and then ensure the continuity of education in the abnormal environment has become the main problem of teaching. therefore, changes in the teaching environment have changed both teaching methods and learning methods. appropriate guidance from teachers and autonomous learning of students has become a new model under the implementation of online teaching. at the same time, parental assistance and joint participation ensure online teaching. (iii) exerting effectiveness is fundamental to online teaching. after a period of implementation, we found that online teaching at this stage has achieved some results. the integration of educational technology and teaching makes the teaching more personalized, and the teacher’s online guidance makes online teaching more adaptable to students’ learning needs. although there is not much research on this aspect at present, we believe that with the continuous resumption of classes across the country, online teaching will enter the stage of convergence with classroom teaching, and research on its effectiveness will be supplemented and enriched. however, it should be pointed out that there are also limitations in the implementation of large-scale online teaching in the outbreak, such as: the infrastructure in a few areas is relatively weak; the teaching methods or contents are not suitable; and the level of informatization of some education participants was inferior. existing research has certain limitations in terms of both research methods and research content. (i) insufficient evidence-based research in education. from the perspective of research methods, the existing research is more qualitative research, and the evidence-based research in education is slightly insufficient. it can be seen from the literature that educational surveys and educational experimental research account for less than 25%, which makes the research evidence insufficient. (ii) too much bias towards educational technology. from the literature, most of them were biased to educational technology, but less substantial discussion of the implementation and operation of online education during the pandemic. these questions are also forcing us to keep thinking: how do we design toplevel education for similar public health emergencies? how can schools respond quickly and comprehensively? how to formulate an adaptation plan based on actual needs? zhou & li. a review of the largest online teaching in china during the covid-19. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 565 how to provide more professional guidance to teachers, students and families? these will become important issues for education after the epidemic. how to cite: zhou, l., li, f. (2020) a review of the largest online teaching in china for elementary and middle school students during the covid-19 pandemic. best evid chin edu, 5(1):549-567. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.re040. references cai, r.c., wang, q.z. 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(2020) all-media learning ecology: a practical solution to the problem of going to school during a largescale pandemic. chin audiovis edu, (03):1-6. received: 22 april 2020 revised: 30 april 2020 accepted: 08 may 2020 article-longjunzhou-bece_title_15may2020 article-longjunzhou-bece_maintext15may2020 1 editor’s remark n 2016, the center for research and reform in education at johns hopkins university, led by professor robert slavin, kicked off an e-newsletter called best evidence in brief (beib) which presents the latest empirical studies in education from the world’s top academic journals. today this effort expands to the uk, hong kong, and spain, including the institute for effective in education of the university of york and the centre for university and school partnership faculty of education of the chinese university of hong kong, and the la caixa foundation. currently the majority of the selected studies in beib are from english-speaking countries. in 2018, the international research center for educational development and evaluation at nanjing normal university joined the beib family to further promote evidencebased reform in education in the chinese speaking region. one of the main focuses of the beib in china is evidence-based research studies published in chinese educational academic journals since its launched, the chinese beib has been well-received by the chinese educational communities. during the past 40 years, reform and development in china have undergone earth-shaking changes, including the extensive use of rigorous research methods in research. an increasing number of researchers have applied sophisticated research methods to explore the link between theories and educational reform, and dialectical thinking and scientific thinking. with the exchanges in educational circles from home and abroad, more and more researchers have learned the latest educational methods from europe and north america. many young researchers, who have the overseas training, are familiar to those concepts, including research samples, research hypotheses, research variables, effect sizes, causal relationships, and related relationships. these are the days that chinese educational academic journals should pay attention to both evidence-based reforms and experimental research results in education. happily, the proportion of empirical research studies published in chinese education-related journals is growing. in order to introduce the achievements of china’s educational research, especially the results of chinese empirical researches, to the world’s educational research peers, our team at nanjing normal university partnered with insights publisher in the united states to establish the journal of best evidence of chinese education so that countries around the world can fully understand the present situation of china’s educational research. the journal’s founding has been strongly supported by world-class educational empirical research experts. professor robert slavin, a world-famous scholar from johns hopkins university, has been invited to be the chair of the editorial board. many professors from world-renowned universities serve as editors of i vol.1, no.1, 2019 2 journals. professor alan cheung of the chinese university of hong kong is the editor-in-chief of the journal. we believe that with the support of so many world-renowned scholars, best evidence of chinese education will become a valued contributor to the field of reporting educational empirical research. best evidence of chinese education focuses on evidence-based researches concerning china’s education reform and development. its content is drawn mainly from the best evidence in brief newsletter in china. any manuscript selected by an expert review can be translated into english for full-text publication or abstract publication. with the efforts of scholars and editorial team of best evidence in brief, our journal will contribute to the introduction of educational research results in china and the diversification of world education research. correspondence to: alan cheung editor-in-chief best evidence of chinese education the chinese university of hong kong email: eif.bece@basehq.org jijun yao executive editor-in-chief best evidence of chinese education nanjing normal university e-mail: eif.bece@basehq.org. conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ed002 bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 1001 which is more important, schooling or parenting? by hu, y., & yuan, j. correspondence to: yongmei hu, professor, faculty of education, beijing normal university, china. email: huym0718@bnu.edu.cn ased on the questionnaire and assessment from elementary and middle schools in 16 cities of 5 provinces in eastern and central china, a study published in journal of east china normal university (educational science) explored the impact of parenting and schooling on students’ standardized test scores, through the hierarchical linear model (hlm). also, the researchers employed shapley and owen decomposition method to identify the input factors that have a greater impact on school output. furthermore, identify whether there are differences in the impact of parenting and schooling on primary school students and secondary school students’ academic performance. lastly, according to the results, several suggestions are listed. the study adopted academic performance as the dependent variable and set the input of parenting and schooling as independent variables. in the aspect of parenting input, parental participation and educational expectations act as the proxy variables of social capital, while the time of spending on private supplementary tutoring acts as a proxy variable of economical capital. as for schooling input, the quality and quantity of teachers and school conditions as proxy variables:  parenting factors are more important for primary school students while schooling factors are more important for secondary ones.  parental participation and educational expectation have significantly positive effects on students’ academic performance. what’s more, parental participation contributes more to the variance of average academic performance in primary schools, while parental educational expectation has a greater contribution to the variance of average academic performance in secondary schools.  in addition to the student-teacher ratio, school input factors such as school conditions and teacher quality have significantly positive effects on students’ academic performance. comparing with school conditions, teacher quality contributes more to the variance of average academic performance in primary and secondary schools. moreover, compared with primary schools, teacher quality has a greater contribution to the variance of average academic performance in secondary schools. b vol.7, no.2, 2021 1002 source: journal of east china normal university (educational science), 2021; 39(1):1-25. an empirical study of the influence of continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan chang-qing liu 1 , jeffrey hugh gamble 2 , i hua chen 3 1. panyapiwat institute of management, nonthaburi, thailand 2. national chiayi university, taiwan 3. qufu normal university, shandong, china abstract. despite the importance of lifelong education and its reported benefits for graduates entering the workforce, few empirical studies have evaluated the relationship between continuing education on entrepreneurship. in order to address this research gap, this study conducted secondary data analysis from the 2015 adult education survey in taiwan (aest 2015) conducted by the taiwan ministry of education. the purpose of this study was to determine the proportion of youth engaged in entrepreneurship (as measured by self-employment) and evaluate the relationship between continuing education and youth entrepreneurship. a sample from taiwan was purposefully selected due to cultural factors which balance eastern and western approaches to education, allowing for better generalizability to a variety of populations. data from a total of 2,696 valid participants was utilized. the results are as follows: a) the rate of youth entrepreneurship in taiwan is moderate, at 8%; b) participation in continuing education demonstrated no significant relationship on youth entrepreneurship; c) entrepreneurial youth tend not to participate in continuing education, citing reasons including “lack of time” and “lack of necessary courses” at a frequency higher than nonentrepreneurial youth; and d) in terms of opportunities for future participation in continuing education, entrepreneurial youth placed less emphasis on the importance of transportation costs and tuition fees as compared to non-entrepreneurial youths. the results of this study suggest that continuing education courses are not currently meeting the liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no.2, 2019 332 needs of young entrepreneurs. conclusions and suggestions are provided in terms of the evaluation of youth self-employment and continuing education opportunities for the promotion of entrepreneurship. best evid chin edu 2019; 3(2):331-346. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1261. keywords: taiwan youth; self-employment; entrepreneurship; continuing education correspondence to: jeffrey hugh gamble, department of foreign languages, national chiayi university. taiwan. e-mail: gamble@mail.ncyu.edu.tw. about the author: chang-qing liu, panyapiwat institute of management, nonthaburi, thailand. e-mail: lcqing619@foxmail.com. i hua chen, chinese academy of education big data, qufu normal university, shandong, china. e-mail: aholechen@gmail.com. funding: jining social science research project (project no. 19jsgx018). conflict of interests: none. liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 333 introduction elf-employment ideally allows theoretical knowledge to be applied directly to gain advantages in the employment market, including increased savings, wealth creation, and social mobility (quadrini, 1999). greater attention is being paid to the cultivation of practical and applied skills to meet the demands of industry, leading to a boom in research related to self-employment in recent years (jia, et al., 2018). in terms of youth entrepreneurial, early advances in universities near silicon valley (bates & bates, 1997) began to establish links between the pragmatic demands of society and industry and university course content, overturning traditional theoryof higher education while simultaneously prompting an upsurge in youth entrepreneurship education around the world. in china, for example, “popular innovation, entrepreneurship” has become a central educational policy aimed at promoting china’s economic transformation, upgrading and improving the quality and efficiency of teaching and learning, and promoting the development of an innovative and competitive nation (state council of the people’s republic of china, 2015). in fact, it is considered a fundamental social goal of developed and developing nations to foster the value-creation and “job making” potentials of youth through entrepreneurship initiatives (arend, 2019). many scholars have begun to scrutinize the issue of youth entrepreneurship, focusing on how institutes of education can provide suitable curricula to meet the needs of students for fostering entrepreneurship at both the secondary and post-secondary levels. in terms of courses provided to high school students, some research has found an improvement in students’ perceptions of the feasibility of entrepreneurial endeavors, but no change in their intention to seek self-employment, with extra-curricular entrepreneurial experiences and students’ propensity towards entrepreneurship more predictive of entrepreneurial intention (cardoso, et al., 2018). in terms of college students’ entrepreneurship, bao et al. (2018) urge universities to strengthen courses emphasizing innovation and creativity while providing relevant practical training activities. a recent study of nigerian college students analyzed their feelings regarding entrepreneurship education courses offered by the university, reporting a positive impact on selfemployment and recommending that universities provide opportunities for students to interact with industry partners and engage in small-scale projects or business ventures (afolabi, et al., 2017). as a post-secondary education is increasing valued by youth seeking employment, college education and youth entrepreneurship should be closely linked. nevertheless, although universities provide systematic and well-designed courses intended to have a direct effect on youth entrepreneurship, the role of continuing education must be evaluated. that is, the relationship between continuing education opportunities offered to youth after graduation and youth entrepreneurship should be evaluated. due to the lack of continuing education institutes emphasizing entrepreneurship, developing related curricula is a critical issue, particularly given the strong link between academic institutions and economic development (chowdhury, et al., 2019). s liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 334 research on entrepreneurship education at the university level noted that youth entrepreneurship could not solely rely on cultivation through curricula, but must take advantage of resources outside of the university (afolabi et al., 2017). in fact, continuing education is seen as pivotal in enhancing the “start-up” and “human capital” aspects of entrepreneurship (ács, et al., 2018). in fact, according to lim, et al. (2019, p. 74) continuing education must include instructional factors that can “(a) effectively deliver learning content, (b) model ways of being, (c) cultivate ways of thinking, (d) facilitate self-efficacy, and (e) contribute to forming a better society.” part of this involves experiential and hands-on learning, thus meeting the criteria of scholars who promote increased use of projects and links to industry partners (afolabi, et al., 2017; bao, et al., 2018; cardoso, et al., 2018). in sum, current studies on entrepreneurship education have largely concentrated on formal higher education environments, neglecting the potentially powerful role of continuing education in promoting youth entrepreneurship. the few studies on continuing education and entrepreneurship (liberto, 2005; wada & muhammad, 2010) have failed to empirically evaluate the relationship between continuing education and youth entrepreneurship. to bridge this literature gap, this study used data from the 2015 “adult education survey in taiwan” (aest 2015) released by taiwan’s ministry of education (2018) and conducted secondary analysis. the rationale for using data from taiwan is due its unique blend of western and eastern cultures (sun & huang, 2018) leading to what yang (2019, p. 15) refers to as “a mix of globalization, internationalization, religion, historic legacy, national policy, and local knowledge.” the difference between eastern and western environments has also been discussed in relation to youth entrepreneurship (wang & millington, 2011), finding that chinese students were more strongly influenced by work experience, while americans considered family background factors more seriously. taiwan, on one hand, is deeply influenced by western culture (especially the united states), but also embraces chinese traditional culture. thus, this study uniquely seeks to use data from taiwan to test the relationship between continuing education and youth education from a perspective where both eastern and western principles are valued, thus allowing us to cautiously generalize these results in order to provide suggestions and contributions for researchers and practitioners internationally. based on data selected from the aest 2015 that investigates the participation of young people in continuing education and the nature of their current employment, we can clarify how continuing education should be planned so as to have a positive effect on youth entrepreneurship. the four research questions of this study are:  what is the frequency of entrepreneurship (self-employment) among youth?  what is the frequency of participation in continuing education among youth?  does continuing education influence the entrepreneurial behaviors of youth?  what differences exist between entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial youth in terms of reasons for and against enrolling in continuing education? literature review liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 335 in recent years, there is a growing emphasis on the importance of self-employment. in terms of the influence of self-employment in individuals, research highlights both the benefits, such as potential mental and physical health benefits (nikolova, 2019) and autonomy and work-life balance (ortlieb, et al., 2017), as well as the drawbacks, such as stress and insomnia (kollmann, et al., 2019) and relative insecurity and instability (nazio & gábos, 2017). within the context of self-employment, international scholars have paid increasing attention to youth entrepreneurship, in particular. however, most studies discuss the incentive policies of local governments (eg., rapp, et al., 2018) and policy support for innovation and entrepreneurship curriculum design by universities (liu, 2018). research on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan while the government in taiwan has proposed policies to encourage youth entrepreneurship (ministry of education, 2009), few studies have been conducted related to entrepreneurship. most studies related to youth entrepreneurship have evaluated university environmental or policy factors unrelated to continuing education (eg., yu, et al., 2017). one empirical study found in the literature was by chen et al., (2015) who found no significant improvement in entrepreneurial intention after offering lectures by entrepreneurial industry experts, stating that hands-on experiences are more influential, while other traditional formal educational approaches add little to the promotion of youth entrepreneurship. another study compared taiwanese and hong kong university students, emphasizing the role of personality (hsu & wang, 2019), which is certainly a potential factor, but does not provide any recommendations for educational approaches for fostering youth entrepreneurship. another paper offered general policy recommendations, without evaluating empirical data (feng, 2016). most scholars, in fact, have explored the issue of youth employment from a broader perspective, largely emphasizing factors predicting youth employment instead of focusing on entrepreneurship. for example, ding and yan (2011) examined potential relevant factors influencing college students’ employment, investigating the mediating effect of self-cognition and interpersonal relationships. from an even broader perspective, liu and lin (2011) explored the relationship among individual-level factors, learning outcomes, and graduation trends for different types of college students. research on continuing education in taiwan in addition to the lack of studies on youth entrepreneurship, very few studies related to continuing education in taiwan have been published, apart from some which relate to adult education that target older segments of the population. among the few examples in the literature with relevance to continuing education for youth are papers focused on the need for innovation (lu, et al., 2016) and learner loyalty (wang & hsu, 2016) to enhance the competitiveness of continuing educational institutes. while innovative practices for enhancing youth entrepreneurship and attracting and retaining students in continuing education programs are important issues, the literature from taiwan is lackliu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 336 ing in providing any suggestions related to entrepreneurship of any kind. likewise, while other studies have been conducted with institutions for continuing education, the focus has been overwhelmingly on the health profession, such as nursing, which is not an appropriate avenue for self-employment. thus, some recommendations for continuing education must be found from the international literature. however, here too the literature is scant. of the few papers found relevant to youth entrepreneurship in the context of continuing education are the following examples. in the context of non-formal education, overall, pantea (2015) suggests that curricula should emphasize raising awareness of the social challenges facing young entrepreneurs. bhat and khan (2014) found that, while not currently being successfully executed, continuing education for entrepreneurship should provide research-based and needs-based instruction with more available courses. karimi, et al. (2010) reiterate the general recommendations most commonly cited in the literature, such as the need for clear policy, industry-academic collaboration, embeddedness across the school curricula, and the use of hands-on projects to foster youth entrepreneurship. evaluating the relationship between continuing education and youth entrepreneurship as the concept of lifelong learning becomes more prevalent, continuing education is has become more important and valued. in particular, technical and vocation education (tve) in taiwan has received a great deal attention from policy-makers, and funding for continuing education for tve has been increased, with the ministry of education [moe] (2010, p. 42) noting that “occupational continuing education must be more strongly promoted, and designed with a key focus on flexibility and practicality.” as such, the moe advocates for developing creative thinking, increasing entrepreneurshiprelated courses, skill-based instruction, rewards for entrepreneurial performance, and offering business planning and counseling services (moe, 2010) . thus, compared to school-based entrepreneurial courses emphasizing theory and lacking in practical skills training, continuing education should emphasize the synergy of knowledge and practice (jin, 2008). logically, continuing education should be associated with youth entrepreneurship by instilling key competences required for youth entrepreneurship, and the motivation to pursue self-employment opportunities. demonstrating this close relationship between continuing education and youth entrepreneurship, liao (2013) pointed out that both the taiwan and the japanese governments provide courses specifically for young entrepreneurs. although a positive relationship between continuing education and youth entrepreneurship is expected, some specific questions must be explored. for example, the lack of relevant empirical evidence related to the role continuing education in developing youth entrepreneurship, and data on which continuing education pipelines are most effective. the evaluation of specific factors related to continuing education, such as tuition, class time, and course content, have yet to be clearly evaluated based on empirical data in terms of their contribution to youth entrepreneurship. as such, this study liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 337 uses responses from youth, aged 18 to 35, in relation to their entrepreneurship (evaluated by self-employment) and their participation in and perspectives towards continuing education. research method this study adopted data from the aest 2015 survey in order to conduct secondary analysis. this section describes the data source, the background of subjects, and the corresponding data which was analyzed. data source and the background of subjects since 2009, the ministry of education (moe) of taiwan has conducted a nationwide large-scale adult education survey every three years, entitled “adult education survey in taiwan”. the last survey was conducted in 2015 and released by the moe in 2018 (ministry of education [moe], 2018). the result of the survey released by the moe serves as the source of the data used in this study. in the aest 2015 survey, the population included adult over the age of 18 who were not currently enrolled in a formal educational institute (while students in continuing educational institutions were included). the survey was conducted through telephone interviews which asked respondents to answer all items from a questionnaire. random sampling was carried out based on an established electronic database of telephone numbers from each town and urban area in taiwan. the telephone interview was conducted with a random digital dialing (rdd) method for computer-assisted telephone interviewing (cati). the data were evaluated for outliers, which were then removed systematically. at a confidence level of 95%, the sampling error was estimated at ±0.93% overall and between ±3.00% and ±5.66% for each county surveyed (moe, 2018). expert validity for the instrument was established a) through consultation meetings with experts before the questionnaire was finalized and b) the use of the questionnaire on four separate occasions. the representativeness of the questionnaire results in terms of location and gender were established through chisquared tests. from the entire dataset of 11,000 participants, a sample of 2,696 youth between the ages of 18 and 35 was selected (1,249 males and 1,447 females; 1,412 unmarried and 1,284 married) for analysis. measurement among the variables evaluated by the aest 2015, respondents were asked about their current work and participation in continuing education during their past year. for the purposes of this study, we have selected the following four relevant aspects for secondary analysis. work in the past year liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 338 according to the data from aest 2015, we further classified respondents into two categories: “self-employed” and “employed by others” according to question 7 of the demographic section posed to participants, which reads “what was your employment situation last year?” with options of “employer,” “privately hired,” civil servant,” “unpaid family work,” and “self-employed,” in addition to “unemployed.” involvement in continuing education the demographic section of the aest 2015 also asks respondents regarding their participation in continuing education during over the past year. question 8 asks students “which of the following type educational organization do you belong to?” with a total of 18 possible items including various forms of continuing education (e.g. study courses organized by government or private organizations) in addition to options including various types of universities. if respondents indicated that they have participated in continuing education, a code of 1 was used for the data set. for respondents who did not participate in continuing education, a code of 2 was used. reasons for not participating in continuing education in the “adult education” section of the aest 2015 survey, question 23 asks respondents “what is the most important reason why you did not participate in learning activities last year?” reasons for not participating in any continuing education include “economic considerations,” “lack of time,” and “traffic inconvenience” and are listed in full in table 3 below. participants were restricted to the selection of one choice which was considered most important to them. reasons for willingness to participate in continuing education in the future in view of whether the participants will participate in continuing education in the future, the “adult education” section of the aest 2015 includes question 26, “if you have the opportunity to participate in education in the future, how important are the following factors? responses to five-point likert-type responses ranging from very important to very unimportant, including eight items, such as class time, tuition fees, and location, which are listed in full in table 4 below. data analysis for the first research question regarding the frequency of entrepreneurship (selfemployment) among youth the proportion of young entrepreneurs in taiwan, and the second research question regarding the frequency of youth participating in continuing education, relevant data were first evaluation by descriptive statistics, including the percentage of youth reporting self-employment. then, z-tests were used to test whether the difference between the proportion of entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs was statistically significant, as well as to compare the results of entrepreneurship and continuing education reported in the literature. a z test was the suitable analysis for determining liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 339 whether a difference in observed counts is significantly different from the expected proportion. for the third research question, evaluating the relationship between continuing education and youth entrepreneurship, we first conducted a chi-squared analysis to evaluate the correspondence between involvement in continuing education and entrepreneurship. to answer the fourth research question, two approaches were needed. since responses regarding reasons for not enrolling in continuing education utilized count data (single option), chi-squared analysis was used to determine the significance of adjusted residuals, in order to determine the significance of differences between entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial youth. the data for reasons related to being willing to participate in continuing education in the future was based on likert-type responses. as such, we used independent t-tests to evaluate the significance of the difference between the two groups in terms of the importance placed on each item. results the proportion of entrepreneurship in taiwan youth descriptive statistics show that from the 2,696 youth aged 18 to 35 years that were surveyed, only 234 (8%) were classified as entrepreneurs, with the remaining 2,459 (94%) classified as non-entrepreneurial. the results of the z-test demonstrate that the proportion of entrepreneurs differed significantly from random chance, or a proportion of .5, (z = -42.91, p <0.01), with the number entrepreneurial youth significantly lower than non-entrepreneurial youth. a more reasonable comparison, based on a report by international labour office (2017), would be the estimated global self-employment rates of 6.8% for upper-middle income countries and 23% for low-income countries. using these proportions, taiwan’s youth entrepreneurship is actually higher than the average rate for upper-middle income countries (z = 3.87, p<0.01), while lower than the average rate for lower-income countries (z = -17.67, p<0.01). when compared to the youth selfemployment rate in mainland china of around 15%, estimated by calculating employment and self-employment values from the report by wang, bao, cao, and kring (2016), taiwanese youth have a relatively lower level of self-employment (z = -9.19, p <0.01). as compared to japan, with an overall self-employment rate of 4.6% (niiyama, et al., 2018), taiwanese youth demonstrated greater entrepreneurship (z = 10.11, p<0.01). the proportion of youth participating in continuing education descriptive statistics show that from the 2,696 youth aged 18 to 35 years that were surveyed, 889 (33%) enrolled in continuing education, with the remaining 1,804 (67%) not taking any form of continuing education. the results of the z-test demonstrate that proportion of students enrolled or not enrolled in continuing education differed significantliu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 340 ly from random chance, or a proportion of .5, (z = -17.68, p<0.01), with the number of youth in continuing education significantly lower than those who were not. a more reasonable comparison, based on a report by organization for economic co-operation and development (2010), would be the average continuing education enrollment rate for oecd countries of 40%. using these proportions, taiwan’s continuing education enrollment rate is lower than the average rate for oecd countries (z = -7.45, p <0.01), and lower than the averages of other asian countries, such as japan (42%) and korea (50%), as reported in (oecd, 2018). the relationship between continuing education and the entrepreneurship of taiwanese youth in order to address the third research question, chi-squared analysis was conducted (see table 1), with the results showing that the enrollment in continuing education did not affect entrepreneurship (χ 2 = 0.07, p = 0.80). the importance of factors influencing youth future enrollment in continuing education to answer the fourth research question, we first examined differences in terms of the reasons for not participating in continuing education between entrepreneurial and nonentrepreneurial youth. the overall chi-square test results demonstrated that there were differences within the cross column table (χ 2 = 26.61, p = 0.01) (see table 2). since adjusted standardized residuals match the t-distribution, adjusted residuals greater than an absolute value of 1.96 are significant at p < 0.05. the items for “lack of time” and “not providing the required course” met this criterion. finally, regarding factors influencing willingness to enroll in continuing education in the future, independent t-test results show that the two groups only have significant differences in terms of “tuition fees” and “transportation costs” (see table 3). these items were perceived as less important by entrepreneurial respondents as compared to non-entrepreneurial respondents: tuition fees (t = 3.29, p = 0.01, d = 0.24) and transportation (t = 2.76, p = 0.04, d = 0.20). it should also be noted that course content, while not significantly different for the two groups, “course content” was deemed the most important factor, along with class time and location. discussion considering the importance of lifelong learning, continuing education has been advocated and promoted globally (karimi et al., 2010). however, despite the global upsurge of youth entrepreneurship (jia et al., 2018), most studies focus on traditional college education with no studies empirically evaluating the role of continuing education. in order to bridge this gap, this study conducted secondary analysis of taiwan’s aest 2015 data set, since taiwan is considered to represent elements of both eastern and western cultures (sun & huang, 2018; yang, 2019), and thus can serve as a valuable liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 341 table 1. cross column table for entrepreneurship × enrollment in continuing education. enrolled not enrolled entrepreneurs n 79 155 % 33.8% 66.2% non-entrepreneurs n 810 1649 % 32.9% 67.1% table 2. cross column table of entrepreneurship× reasons for not participating in continuing education. reasons for not participating counts entrepreneurs non entrepreneurs total adjusted residuals work restrictions 150 11 161 .8 economic considerations 17 0 17 1.3 lack of time 792 92 884 2.7* family responsibilities are too heavy 117 6 123 1.5 traffic inconvenience 13 3 16 1.5 disqualification 3 0 3 .5 required courses are not provided 52 11 63 2.6* improper course time 20 4 24 1.4 don't know course information 143 7 150 1.8 health factors 19 0 19 1.3 not interested in learning 315 21 336 1.7 lack of confidence in learning 8 0 8 .9 total count 1,649 155 1,804 notes: χ 2 (df = 11, n = 1,804) = 26.61, p =0.01. *indicates adjust residuals at the p < .05 level. liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 342 table 3. summary of t-tests for factors influencing intent to enroll in continuing education. mean (sd) t p effect size (d) entrepreneurs (n=194) non entrepreneurs (n=2,050) course content 1.62 (0.68) 1.64 (0.65) -0.33 0.74 0.03 institutional reputation 2.40 (1.08) 2.37 (1.03) 0.48 0.63 0.03 teacher 2.02 (1.01) 1.90 (0.84) 1.75 0.08 0.14 class time 1.97 (0.85) 1.87 (0.81) 1.66 0.09 0.12 location 1.96 (0.86) 1.90 (0.85) 0.88 0.38 0.07 transportation cost 2.27 (1.07) 2.07 (0.97) 2.76 0.04* 0.20 tuition fee 2.40 (1.06) 2.16 (0.99) 3.29 0.01* 0.24 interpersonal factors 3.28 (1.08) 3.25 (1.14) 0.38 0.71 0.00 notes: the higher the value, the less significant it is. according to cohen (1998), the effect size for independent t-tests adopt the d statistic with values below 0.2 indicates a small effect size. benchmark, as well as providing some generalizable results for other nations and cultures. the first finding is that only 8% of taiwan’s youth reported self-employment. while within the range of reported youth self-employment in europe, but the range was from 4.3% to 11.1% in germany (ortlieb et al., 2017). based on z-score analysis, taiwan’s youth entrepreneurship was higher than the average rate for upper-middle income countries, including japan (niiyama et al., 2018), while lower that the average rate for lower-income countries, including china (wang et al., 2016). similarly, youth in taiwan tend to not take the initiative towards pursuing continuing education, with far less participation than oecd countries and other developed asian countries, such as japan and korea (oecd, 2018). we speculate that these phenomena reflect the blended nature of taiwan’s academic culture, positioned between traditional chinese culture and western culture. thus while, chinese culture, based on credentialism, tends to hold traditional academic higher education as a virtue at the expense of advocating youth independence and self-employment. credentialism also places lower value on continuing education. this fits with the findings of thomas (2009) who argues that academic pressure is a major factor hindering young entrepreneurs’ willingness to start a business. on the other hand, western aspects of taiwan’s educational culture emphasize individualism, which encourages entrepreneurship (wang, & millington, 2011). therefore, even though the taiwan government strongly advocates and rewards youth entrepreneurship and promotes continuing education (ministry of education, 2009, 2010), full implementation of policy has yet to yield strong results. liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 343 based on our findings, continuing education is not associated with youth entrepreneurship. that is, enrollment or non-enrollment in continuing education demonstrated no relationship with youth entrepreneurship. this result is surprising, but may be due to the insufficiency of current continuing education programs in attracting, retaining, and inspiring learners to engage in entrepreneurship. thus, in order to evaluate this finding, respondents’ reasons for not taking continuing education were evaluated for entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial taiwanese youth. specifically, young entrepreneurs were reluctant to take continuing education due to two reasons: “lack of time” and “not providing the required courses”. this can be explained by the fact that entrepreneurs often less free time (kollmann et al., 2019) and may choose not to continue their studies as a result. however, the primary reason for their decision not to take continuing education courses is due to the reality that many neither official nor private continuing education institutions in taiwan are currently providing the courses considered important for young entrepreneurs. this finding is potentially linked to the fact that entrepreneurs tend to be more autonomous and, as such, make responsible life decisions (ortlieb et al., 2017). for entrepreneurship education, it is crucial to provide appropriate curriculum content which is research based (bhat & khan, 2014) and is integrated and includes hands-on activities (karimi et al., 2010). this corresponds to the recommendations of yang, et al. (2019), who claim that the main reason why entrepreneurship education in universities fails in its expected role is that the curriculum is more theoretical than practical. furthermore, by analyzing the factors influencing the willingness of youth to participate in continuing education in the future, young entrepreneurs are less concerned with tuition fees and transportation issues than non-entrepreneurs. this might suggest that, if the course content fitted entrepreneurs’ needs, factors such as tuition fees and commuting time would not affect their perception of the value of the program and resulting willingness to enroll. conclusions and limitations this study utilized aest 2015 data collected by the government, with good reliability and validity. however, the data is based on interviews that may have been conducted up to five years and, thus, may not adequately reflect the current situation in taiwan. nevertheless, the results are a contribution, insofar as they demonstrate, with empirical data, the lack of correspondence between continuing education and entrepreneurship for youth, and the importance of factors such as time, course content, and classes fitting learners’ needs, and the relative lack of importance based on tuition and travel expenses, for entrepreneurial youth. continuing education units must adapt to meet the challenges of increased competition, decreased funding, and widespread changes in educational delivery methods by fostering increased entrepreneurial activities (downey, et al., 2006). however, according to our secondary analysis of aest 2015 data, there is no strong relationship between continuing education and youth entrepreneurship in taiwan. we suggest that educational reforms continue (moe, 2010), according to the suggestions of scholars in liu, et al. continuing education on youth entrepreneurship in taiwan vol.3, no. 2, 2019 344 the area of youth entrepreneurship and continuing education, such as providing more practical experiences, and offering courses that will meet the needs of potential entrepreneurs (afolabi, et al., 2017; bao, et al., 2018; cardoso, et al., 2018). furthermore, this study demonstrated that youth entrepreneurship in taiwan is higher than more developed countries, but lower than developing countries, as well as mainland china. while this might be due to taiwan’s unique culture educational culture blending eastern and western values, it should be noted that the majority of selfemployment in developing countries, as well as china, are family-based, agricultural, temporary, or non-contractual (international labour office, 2017). self-employment is also associated with several negative outcomes, such as stress and insomnia (kollmann et al., 2019) and insecurity and instability (nazio & gábos, 2017). as such, both the value and assessment of entrepreneurship should be further evaluated and other potential proxy variables explored in future studies. references ács, z.j., szerb, l., lafuente, e., & lloyd, a. 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(2017). a comparative study of entrepreneurship education between singapore and taiwan. manag dec, 55(7), 1426-1440. received: 12 september 2019 revised: 09 october 2019 accepted: 05 november 2019 article-ihchen-bece_title_30nov2019 article-ihuachen-bece_maintext30nov2019 research on the influence of teacher variables on students’ mathematical achievements shengnan bai, jiwei han, canhui li northeast normal university, changchun, china abstract. based on the timss2015 data, this study applied a hierarchical linear model to explore the influence of teacher variables on students’ mathematics scores. teacher variables were composed of teacher characteristic variables, teacher teaching variables, and teacher professional development variables. the teacher’s characteristic variables were teaching age, gender, education, mathematics major, and mathematics education. teachers’ teaching variables were teaching expectations, teaching cooperation, teaching enthusiasm, classroom discussion, multimedia use, attention to homework, and emphasis on exams. teacher professional development variables had mathematics knowledge training, mathematics education training, and mathematics curriculum training. multi-layer linear analysis found that in the teacher’s characteristic variables, the teacher’s teaching age, gender, education, and mathematics major have a significant effect on the students’ mathematics scores; in the teacher’s teaching variables, teachers’ teaching expectations, teaching enthusiasm, class discussion, and multimedia use have a significant impact on students’ mathematics scores. in the teacher professional development variables, participation in mathematics knowledge training and mathematics education training had a significant positive impact on students’ mathematics scores. best evid chin edu 2019; 3(2):347-360. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1266. keywords: teacher characteristic variables; teacher teaching variables; teacher professional development variables; mathematics scores correspondence to: jiwei han, ph.d., professor, school of mathematics and statistics, northeast normal university, changchun, china. email: hanjw617@nenu.edu.cn. about the author: shengnan bai, ph.d., school of mathematics and statistics, northeast normal university, changchun, china. email: baisn012@nenu.edu.cn. bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 348 problem n the evaluation of education quality, the learning effect of students has always been regarded as an important dimension to examine the effect of education. among them, student achievement is one of the main indicators reflecting the effect of learning. teachers are often considered to be the main factor affecting students’ academic performance. therefore, exploring the influence of teacher variables on students’ academic performance through research has always been an essential research issue in educational research. the research of this problem can provide theoretical basis for improving students’ learning, promoting the fair distribution of educational resources and the effective training of teacher education. it is a critical problem that has been continuously explored in the field of education. throughout the study of the influence of teacher variables on students’ academic performance, it can be roughly divided into three categories. the first category was to study the influence of teacher characteristic variables on students’ academic performance. the conclusions from this problem study are not the same. huang and xin found that teachers’ gender, teaching age, education, and majors had no significant influence on students’ academic performance (huang & xin, 2007); whereas zhang found that teachers’ gender, teaching age, and majors had a significant impact on student achievement (zhang, 2012). the second category was to study the influence of teachers’ teaching variables on students’ academic performance. teachers’ teaching variables such as teacher’s teaching plan, teaching behavior ( peterson, et al., 1978) (class introduction, classroom language, classroom questions, classroom feedback, class waiting, class summary (huang, et al., 2009; zhou & bao, 2012; huang, 2016; gao & zhang, 2016; cao & yu, 2017), teaching strategy (walsh-cavazos, 1994), teaching attitude (bülent & erden, 2006) were important factors affecting students’ academic performance, and some teachers’ teaching variables such as teacher’s teaching cooperation and classroom discussion had no significant influence on students’ academic performance (zhang, 2010). the third category was to study the influence of teacher professional development variables on students’ academic performance. zhang and xin found that teachers’ preparation methods, peer listening courses, and teaching and research participation had no significant effect on student achievement (zhang, 2010); but zhao and yan found that teachers’ preparation ways, training participation, peer-to-peer assessment, and teaching and research participation have a significant impact on student achievement (zhao, et al., 2013). from these studies we can find that although the teacher variables were closely related to the students’ academic performance, the conclusions had not yet reached a consistent agreement. there are two reasons for this: first, the measurement tools developed by the researchers were different, and the quality of the different measurement tools was directly related to the research results. herlihy et al about the author: canhui li, school of mathematics and statistics, northeast normal university, changchu, china. email: lich380@nenu.edu.cn. conflict of interests: none. i bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 349 indicated that the validity and reliability of the teacher evaluation system affect the conclusion of the role of teacher variables on student achievement (herlihy, et al., 2005); second, the statistical analysis methods of choice are different, previous studies have not considered the hierarchicaled nesting structure of teacher and student data, and traditional regression analysis of teacher variables and student variables as independent variables may cause bias in the results. the research on the influence of teacher variables on students’ academic performance has made two new developments in recent years. on the one hand, the quality of the measuring tools has improved. with the international emphasis on basic education, the emergence of international evaluation projects such as timss and pisa has largely contributed to the improvement of the quality of measurement tools, which has led researchers to pay attention to the development of measurement tools, thereby promoting the quality of measurement tools. on the other hand, the methods of education statistics have been improved and improved. samples of social science research often come from different levels and units. the resulting data is usually multi-level nested data, and the general statistical methods have problems for the processing of nested data. therefore, with the continuous development of social sciences, hierarchical linear models have begun to enter the eyes of educational researchers. this model solves the limitations of traditional regression analysis in dealing with multi-level nested data and becomes a new method of educational statistics research. in this context, we try to directly use the eighth-grade measurement data in timss2015, and use the hierarchical linear model (hlm) to analyze the influence of teacher variables on students’ mathematics scores. in order to find teacher variables that can promote student achievement, this study proposes the following three questions:  question 1: how does the teacher characteristic variable affect student mathematics scores?  question 2: how does the teacher’s teaching variable affect student mathematics scores?  question 3: what effect does the teacher’s professional development variable have on student mathematics? methodology data selection the timss project focuses on the development of students’ mathematical and scientific academic achievements. timss2015 collects information from students, teachers, and schools and encodes data by standardizing tests, questionnaires, and observing video lessons. in timss2015, a total of 45 countries participated in the eighth-grade standardized test. this study selected data from all countries participating in the eighth grade test and referred to it as timss2015 data. all data is from the official timss website (http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2015/). http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2015/ bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 350 the subjects of this study were selected from the data of timss2015. after eliminating the missing values of the relevant variables and satisfying at least 20 students per teacher, there are 45,321 student samples, the ratio of male to female is 1:1.4; the number of teachers is 1,806, and the ratio of male to female is 1:1.2. variable selection and description based on the data of timss2015, this study explored the influence of teacher variables on students’ mathematics scores based on the control of student variables in the nested relationship between students and teachers. based on previous researches, the recent exploration of student family factors, teacher teaching factors and teacher professional development factors were introduced. at the same time, the timss2015 standardized test questions and questionnaires were also adjusted and introduced into the study. therefore, the dependent variable of this study is the student’s mathematics score. the independent variable is divided into two layers:  the first level is the student variables, which are divided into student background variables and learning motivation variables. among them, student background variables: gender, age, family book collection, home computer, home learning desk, mobile phone, parental education (mother education, father education); learning motivation variables: mathematics learning interest, mathematics self-confidence. according to the pearson correlation analysis, the mother’s education and father’s education are highly correlated, so the principal component analysis is used to form a new variable of parental education; other variables are not highly correlated. table 1 shows the definition and scoring of student variables.  the second level is the teacher variable, which is divided into teacher characteristic variables, teacher teaching variables and teacher professional development. among them, teacher characteristic variables: teaching age, gender, education, mathematics major, mathematics education major; teacher teaching variables: teaching expectation, teaching cooperation, teaching enthusiasm, classroom discussion, multimedia use, attention to homework, emphasis on exams; teacher profession development variables: mathematics knowledge training, mathematics education training, mathematics curriculum training. after pearson correlation analysis, the teacher variables did not reach a high level of correlation. table 2 shows the definition and scoring method of teacher variables. data analysis based on the data of timss2015, this paper uses spss22.0 to organize data and use hlm6.08 for hierarchical linear analysis. taking the student’s mathematics score as the dependent variable, without adding the independent variable, a zero model is established to test whether the sample data is suitable for hierarchical linear analysis. on this basis, students and teacher variables are added to the previous model one by one to es bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 351 table 1. definition and scoring of student variables. variable variable description scoring method student variable age calculated from the year of birth and month continuous type gender student gender discrete 2point scoring, 1 for women, 2 for men family collection family book collection discrete 5point scoring, the higher the score, the more books home computer is there a computer in the house? discrete 2point scoring, 1 is yes, 2 is no home desk does the student have a desk? discrete 2point scoring, 1 is yes, 2 is no mobile phone does the student have a mobile phone? discrete 2point scoring, 1 is yes, 2 is no parental education (new variables formed by mother's education and father's education) math interest do students like to learn mathematics? discrete 4point scoring, the higher the score, the lower the mathematical interest mathematics selfconfidence learning mathematics confidence discrete 4point scoring, the higher the score, the lower the confidence tablish five models. for example, model 2 is based on model 1 to add student learning motivation variables, and finally form a complete hierarchical linear model. on the basis of controlling student variables, the influence of teacher variables on students’ mathematics scores is investigated. the specific model is expressed as follows: first level: student level dependent variable: second level: teacher level subscripts "j" and "i" in the expression of the hierarchical linear model represent the teacher’s number and the student’s individual number, respectively, and "ij" is the i th student in the j th class. β0j represents the mathematical average of the students taught by the j th teacher. if the difference between teachers reaches a significant level, it is necessary to further analyze which factors of the teacher make the students’ mathematics scores show significant differences. the establishment of a hierarchical linear model is presented in table 3. bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 352 table 2. teacher variables of the definition and scoring. variable variable description scoring method teacher variable teacher characteristic variable teaching age years of teaching continuous type gender consistent with student gender education discrete 7point scoring, the higher the score, the higher the education mathematic major whether the field of study is mathematics discrete 2point scoring, 1 is yes, 2 is not mathematics education is the field of study a mathematics education? discrete 2point scoring, 1 is yes, 2 is not teacher teaching variable teaching expectation teachers' expectations for classroom teaching discrete 5point scoring, the higher the score, the lower the expectation teaching cooperation degree of cooperation between teachers discrete 4point scoring, the higher the score, the lower the cooperation frequency teaching passion degree of love for teaching discrete 4point scoring, the higher the score, the lower the level of enthusiasm class discussion frequency of discussion among students in the classroom discrete 4point scoring, the higher the score, the lower the discussion frequency multimedia use whether to use multimedia in classroom teaching discrete 2point scoring, 1 is yes, 2 is not pay attention to homework frequency of arranging math assignments discrete 5point scoring, the higher the score, the more important pay attention to the exam emphasis on classroom tests discrete 3point scoring, the higher the score, and the less important it is. teacher professional development variable mathematical knowledge training whether to participate in mathematics knowledge training discrete 2point scoring, 1 for participation, 2 for not participating mathematics education training whether to participate in mathematics education training discrete 2point scoring, 1 for participation, 2 for not participating mathematics course training whether to participate in mathematics training discrete 2point scoring, 1 for participation, 2 for not participating results according to the statistical principle of the hierarchical linear model, in order to explore the influence of teacher variables on students’ mathematics scores, the first is to establish a zero model to estimate the contribution of teacher-to-teacher differences and intra-teacher differences (student differences) to the total difference, if the difference bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 353 table 3. establishment of hierarchical linear model. student variable teacher variable zero model model 1 student background variable: gender, age, family book collection, home computer, home desk, mobile phone, parental education model 2 students learn motivation variables: mathematical learning interest, mathematics self-confidence model 3 teacher feature variables: teaching age, gender, education, mathematics major, mathematics education model 4 teacher teaching variables: teaching expectations, teaching cooperation, teaching enthusiasm, class discussion, multimedia use, attention to homework, and emphasis on exams model 5 teacher professional development variables: mathematical knowledge training, mathematics education training, mathematics course training between teachers is significant, it is necessary to further analyze which teacher variables make the students’ mathematics scores show significant differences. the zero model results are presented in table 4. it can be seen from table 4 that the intra-class correlation coefficient icc of the student’s math score is 0.68, which means that about 68.42% of the total difference in the student’s math score is caused by the teacher variable. at the same time, when the icc is greater than 0.138, the difference between groups is significant (dedrick, et al., 2009). this indicates that there is a significant difference between teachers, that is, the difference in mathematics scores of different teachers has reached a significant level (p < 0.001), which is consistent with previous empirical findings (li & ni, 2006). because of the significant differences among teachers, this study adds the three aspects of teacher variables to the second level of independent variables, and examines their influence on students’ mathematics scores, thus providing some theoretical references for the improvement of teachers’ teaching process. due to space limitations, the full results of each model are listed in table 5. the influence of teacher characteristic variables on students’ mathematical achievements bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 354 table 4. estimation of differences between teachers and within teachers in mathematics scores. variance standard error contribution rate inter-teacher 8,900.70 94.34 68.42% intra-teacher 4,107.92 64.09 31.58% model 3 is to examine the impact of teacher characteristic variables on students’ mathematical performance. the survey results showed: teacher’s teaching age (b = 1.09, p < 0.001), gender (b = -8.98, p = 0.025), education (b = 48.84, p < 0.001), mathematics major (b = 12.20, p = 0.005). the impact on students’ mathematics scores has reached a significant level. compared with teachers with shorter teaching ages, teachers with longer teaching ages will have better mathematics scores for teachers who teach older classes. female teachers have better math scores than those taught by male teachers. the higher the teacher’s academic qualifications, the better the mathematics scores of the students in the taught class will be. students in classes taught by non-mathematics teachers have higher math scores than those who were taught by teachers who graduated from mathematic major. in addition, the teacher characteristic variable explained 15.12% of the student’s average math score difference. the influence of teachers’ teaching variables on students’ mathematical achievements model 4 includes the teacher’s teaching variables based on model 3, aiming to examine the influence of teacher’s teaching variables on students’ mathematics scores. the results of model 4 indicate: teacher’s teaching expectations (b = -23.53, p < 0.001), teaching enthusiasm (b = 9.72, p = 0.002), class discussion (b = 18.01, p < 0.001), multimedia use (b = -11.90, p = 0.005) has a significant impact on students’ math scores. the higher the teacher’s teaching expectation and the higher the frequency of multimedia use, the more helpful the mathematics scores of the students in this class. the higher the number of class discussions, the less effective the teaching. the teacher’s enthusiasm for teaching has a negative predictive ability for students’ mathematics scores. this may be due to the occurrence of the "simpson’s paradox" or the poor original grades of the corresponding students of the teachers. the specific reasons still need further investigation and research. in addition, the teacher’s teaching variables reduce the variance of students’ mathematics scores to 6556.75, explaining 8.85% of the students’ average math scores. the influence of teachers’ professional development variables on students’ mathematical achievements bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 355 model 5 is based on model 4 and incorporates three variables of teacher professional development. the main examination is the influence of teacher professional development (mathematics knowledge training, mathematics education and mathematics training) on students’ mathematics scores. the results of model 5 analysis show that teachers’ mathematics knowledge training (b= -9.98, p = 0.041) and mathematics education training (b = -14.15, p = 0.005) have significant influence on students’ mathematics scores. the mathematics course training (b = 8.11, p = 0.078) had no significant effect on the student’s mathematics scores. this shows that teachers’ participation in mathematics knowledge training and mathematics education training will have a positive effect on classroom teaching, so that the average mathematics score of the students taught is higher. these three variables explain the student’s average math score difference of 1.13%. conclusion and discussion teachers are a pivotal factor influencing students’ learning outcomes. the study found that, in overall, the addition of teacher variables has led to a significant decline in teacher variability. the teacher characteristic variable explained 15.12% of the difference in the average mathematics score of the students; the teacher teaching variable explained 8.85% of the difference in the average mathematics score of the students; the teacher professional development variable explained 1.13% of the difference in the average mathematics score of the students. specifically, the results of each variable’s impact on student mathematics are also presented in table 5. these findings provide a basis for improving teachers’ classroom teaching, strengthening teachers’ professional development, and formulating relevant educational policies. the teacher’s teaching age has a significant impact on the student’s mathematical performance the results in table 5 show that the teacher’s teaching age can have a significant predictive effect on students’ mathematics scores. at the same time, in the literature that has explored the relationship between teachers’ teaching age and students’ mathematics scores, the conclusions are not completely consistent. for example, the relationship between teachers’ teaching age and the student’s learning is positively related, or only affects the student’s learning to a certain extent, or the two do not matter (huang & xin, 2007; zhang, 2012; zhang, 2010; xie, et al., 2008; xin, et al., 2004). this shows that it is not the teacher’s teaching age that has a direct impact on the students’ mathematics scores. however, these factors affect teachers’ understanding of the knowledge and grasp of the teaching process, making teachers with a longer teaching age pay more attention to the combination of mathematical knowledge and students’ cognitive level and laws, thus showing that the students' mathematical results will be better. this shows that relevant education departments and schools should not exclude new teachers. they should pay more attention to the development trend of new teachers and provide more bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 356 table 5. the influence of teacher factors on students' mathematics scores. fixed effect random effect hierarchical linear model variable regression coefficient (b) sem interteachers intrateachers interpretation rate zero model 8,900.70 4,107.92 model 1 7,196.61 3,822.46 19.15%/6.94% student background variable gender 4.04*** 0.70 age -6.92*** 0.61 family book collection 7.87*** 0.31 home computer 7.31*** 0.67 home desk 0.19 0.75 mobile phone 1.38 0.83 parental education 8.66*** 0.50 model 2 8,474.77 3,204.58 /16.16% student learning motivation variable mathematical learning interest -7.31*** 0.39 mathematics selfconfidence -25.23*** 0.52 model 3 7,193.02 3,204.52 15.12 % / teacher characteristic variable teaching age 1.09*** 0. 18 gender -8.98* 4.01 education 48.84*** 3.36 mathematic major 12.20** 4.26 mathematics education -5.25 3.82 model 4 6,556.75 3,204.09 8.85 % / teacher teaching variable teaching expectation -23.53*** 2.45 teaching cooperation 3.94 2.29 teaching passion 9.72** 3.11 class discussion 18.01*** 2.33 bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 357 (continued) multimedia use -11.90** 4.20 pay attention to homework -1.13 1.84 pay attention to the exam -5.21 3.90 model 5 6,482.58 3,204.15 1.13 % / teacher professional development variable mathematical knowledge training -9.98* 4.89 mathematics education training -14.15** 4.94 mathematics course training 8.11 4.61 note: *: p<0.05, **: p<0.01, ***: p<0.001. interpretation rate refers to the percentage of decrease in teacher-to-teacher variation between teachers and teachers compared to the previous model after adding a new factor. channels for the communication between new teachers and expert teachers. this is more conducive to narrowing the differences in teaching mathematics among students. teacher’s academic qualifications, mathematics knowledge training, and mathematics majors will significantly affect students’ mathematics scores the results in table 5 show that the higher the teacher’s academic qualifications, the better the mathematics scores of the students in the taught class will be. students who have participated in mathematics knowledge training have better math scores. students in classes taught by non-mathematics teachers have higher math scores than those who were taught by teachers who graduated from mathematic major. generally speaking, teachers with high academic qualifications have more knowledge of mathematics, and teachers who participate in mathematics knowledge training will have a better understanding of the methods of teaching mathematics. comparing the influence of these three variables on students’ mathematics scores, it is found that the mathematics knowledge and methods of teaching that teachers have had positive effects on students’ mathematics scores. however, students in classes taught by non-mathematics teachers will have higher math scores. there may be two reasons for this. first, compared to non-mathematics teachers, those graduated from mathematic major have more knowledge, but their ability to teach mathematical knowledge to students in the corresponding grade is not as good as non-mathematics teachers. second, the focus of the two types of teachers is different from that of the current basic education. teachers without background of mathematics major will pay more attention to the training of students’ mathematics skills. teachers of mathematics majors pay more bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 358 attention to the cultivation of students’ mathematical thinking and mathematics thinking. however, for the improvement of students’ test scores, it is better to train students’ math skills. in addition, mathematics education is designed to help students master the mathematics, skills, ideas, and methods necessary for modern life and further learning. therefore, in the process of teaching, teachers can not choose the sea tactics solely for the test results, nor can they focus only on the improvement of mathematical thinking and neglect the students’ ability to accept at this stage. this shows that the cultivation of mathematical knowledge and skills, mathematical ideas and methods complement each other. teachers should pay attention to this and organically combine them, so that students can understand the ideas and methods of mathematics in the training of mathematics knowledge and skills. at the same time, it is recommended that the education department or school regularly organize mathematics knowledge training to provide more ways for teachers to master the methods of teaching mathematics. the influence of teachers’ mathematics education major and mathematics education training on students’ mathematical achievement the results in table 5 show that there is no significant difference in the mathematics scores of the students taught by the mathematics education majors and the nonmathematics education teachers. students who have participated in mathematics education training have better math scores. comparing the influence of two variables on students’ mathematics scores, it is found that teachers master more mathematics education theories have positive effects on students’ mathematics scores. however, the teaching effects of teachers in mathematics education and non-mathematics education teachers are not significantly different. the reason may be that the teaching of traditional mathematics education theory does not use actual cases as a carrier. therefore, teachers cannot truly apply the learned education theory to classroom teaching, thus making the effect of educational theory learning greatly compromised. in view of this, it is recommended to combine educational theory and practice when teaching educational theory, to provide teachers with more practical teaching cases, or to answer the problems encountered by teachers in real teaching. in addition, the relevant education departments are also encouraged to regularly organize mathematics education training, and strive to implement education theory into classroom teaching. overall, the study has made some meaningful conclusions. at the same time, there are problems in this study, through the interpretation of inter-teacher variation. we find that the addition of teacher variables does cause a large decline in teacher-toteacher variation, but there are still large inter-teacher differences. there are two reasons for this: first, the timss study is conducted once every four years, so the student’s math scores are not continuous, and the characteristics of the student’s current math scores cannot be linked to the teacher factors at this time. secondly, the student’s academic performance itself is affected by many factors, and is also affected by the initial mathematics scores, and the students’ mathematics scores themselves may also difbai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 359 fer. therefore, the influence of teacher variables on students’ mathematics scores is still somewhat exploratory. references bülent, a., & erden, m. 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(2012) the strategy of forming students’ high level mathematical thinking: the viewpoint of frontline teachers. j math edu, (4): 37-39. bai, et al. teacher variables and students’ mathematical achievements. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 360 received: 02 august 2019 revised: 22 september 2019 accepted: 19 october 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in teacher edu res 2019; 31(3):70-76. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 白胜南, 韩继伟, 李灿辉. 教师变量对学生数学成绩影响的研究. 教师教育研究, 2019, 31(3):70-76. article-shennanbai-bece_title_30nov2019 article-shennanbai-maintext-bece_30nov2019 how does parental involvement affect children’s academic development from a core literacy perspective? wenyan liang, ran sun, xiaomei ye beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. this study explores the influence of parental involvement on children’s academic development, and comprehensively defines the indicators of children’s academic development from the perspective of core literacy. based on urban and rural household registration status and regional migration, children in china are divided into four categories. three main findings are as follows. first, parents’ direct learning participation can hardly benefit children’s academic development, regardless of what type of children. specifically, this type of parental participation has a significant negative impact not only on academic test score of all children, but also on all academic development dimensions of children who have rural to urban migrant experience. second, parents’ emotional participation behavior can effectively promote the academic development of children, regardless of migration type. third, parents’ cultural participation has a positive effect on local urban children’s academic development, while it has a negative effect on the learning willpower and curiosity of urban-urban migrant children who move from one urban area to another in different provinces/districts. under the background of mass internal migration and rapid urbanization, our findings provide implications for parents to better participate in their children’s education in the context of rapid population movements and urbanization. best evid chin edu 2019; 1(2):109-130. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1026 keywords: parental involvement; academic development; core literacy; rural hukou (household registration); regional migration liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 110 research background and problem xploring the impact of parental involvement on children’s academic development is a key research issue, while helping parents improve their participation is regarded as a way to promote children’s academic development (fan & chen, 2001). for example, the united states has implemented some homeschool cooperative programs such as “head start” 1 and “success for all” 2 to help parents from disadvantaged groups to better participate in their children’s learning (currie, 1997; hill & tyson, 2009). in china, some researchers have tried to explore the influence of parental involvement on children’s academic development based on different samples from different regions or different educational stage. however, as china has experienced rapid internal rural-urban migration or regional migration, and almost all of public welfare such as education is depending on household registration, then further studies are required to explore the research question mentioned above. on the one hand, most related studies only focus on children’s test scores (hill & tyson, 2009; altschul, 2011; jona et al., 2013; wilder, 2014), while a single dimension of outcome would be no longer in line with the demand of future society. in fact, there will be full of uncertainty and challenges in the future, it requires that children’ academic development should be comprehensive and diverse. as heckman et al. (2006) pointed out that the disciplinary knowledge taught by schools in the era of information and globalization is depreciating at an accelerating rate; as a result children must not only acquire subject knowledge, but also acquire the literacy and skill of adapting to varied complex situations. that means if we overlook children’s developments in areas which are not measured by subject test scores; we will not only hinder children’s ability to have a high quality and happy life, but also affect the country’s labor quality and social well-being. in the existing literature, only very limited number of scholars express concern regarding the effects of parents’ participation on children’s academic developments other than test score: self-educational expectations (brooks et al., 1997; gonzalez et al., 2002), learning effectiveness (fan & williams, 2010), learning autonomy (shao, et al., 2016), et al. however, these studies are mostly carried out by psychologists and not educators, measures of parental participation are decentralized and sporadic. without a common framework, it is difficult to obtain a holistic conclusion through existing researches. about the author: ran sun, anhui, master’s student of the department of education, beijing normal university, email: ransunsunny@163.com xiaomei ye, henan, ph.d. candidate, department of education, beijing normal university, email: iikeer@163.com. correspondence to: wenyan liang, ph.d., associate professor, institute for economics of education, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china, email: liangwenyan@bnu.edu.cn or wenyan_liang@163.com. funding: major research projects of the ministry of education ”the research on the relationship between education and economic development and the contribution of them (15jzd040)”, special fund for disciplinary construction in 2017 by the department of education of beijing normal university. conflict of interests: none. e liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 111 on the other hand, among the previous related researches which focused on urban children’s education development under the background of internal population migration, authors just focuses on rumc (zhou & wu, 2008; shao, et al., 2016). in fact, according to population migration and existing hukou (household registration, in chinese “户口”) segmentation policy, the urban resident children can be divided into four types: local urban children (luc) without any migrant experience; ruralurban migrant children (rumc) moving from rural to urban areas within the same province/district; urban–urban migrant children (uumc) moving from one urban area to the other in different provinces/districts; and children who had moved from rural to urban areas in different provinces/districts with dual mobility experience (dmc). and ensuring each type of children gain better education is the basis for promoting social integration. obviously, focusing only on dmc cannot explore the complete relationship between parental involvement and children’s academic development in rapidly urbanizing china. then it cannot provide specially and helpful suggestion for the improvement of parental involvement for different kinds of children. compared with the existing researches, this current study tried to gain improvements in the following two aspects. first, based on the framework of core literacy, we construct a more comprehensive indicator for the measurement of children’ academic development. these indicators will cover both test-score and non-test score indicators. second, according to hukou and regional mobility situation, we divide urban resident children into four types: luc, rumc, uumc and dmc. then, we explore and compare the relationship between parental involvement and children’s academic achievement in such four children categories. literature review and research hypothesis indicator framework for children’s academic development on the framework of core literacy children’s academic development indicators can be mainly divided into two categories: 1) existing and directly available test performance indicators. these indicators can measure the academic achievement aspects of subject knowledge and other literacy skills; 2) specially designed and collected non-test score indicators. these indicators can measure the academic achievement aspects of learning abilities and attitudes (chu, 2016). studies regarding children’s academic development have traditionally focused on the first category. though it is important for children’s education and social economic achievement (hanushek & woessmann, 2008), it is insufficient to adapt the demand of the uncertain and challenging in future society (chu, 2016). although the second category indicators are often overlooked, they have benefits for children’s long-term development and social well-being (heckman et al., 2006). what specific indicators should be included in assessment of a child’s academic development? the “china student development core literacy” report, released in 2016, provides us a guided framework. among the six aspects of core literacy proliang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 112 posed by the above report, the three aspects – cultural literacy, scientific spirit, and learning to learn-are closely related to academic development. specifically, the aspect of cultural literacy emphasizes the basic ability of applying knowledge and skills; it includes indicators such as test scores and grades. the aspect of scientific spirit emphasizes value standards, thinking modes and behavioral expressions formed during the student’s learning process; it includes indirect academic development indicators such as learning willpower and learning curiosity. the aspect of learning literacy emphasizes students’ choice of learning methods, the performance of the learning process assessment and regulation; it includes indicators such as t self-learning ability, self-education expectations and other indirect academic development. among the existing literature, many scholars have studied children’s academic development under the core literacy framework based on theoretical discussion (yang, 2017) or international comparison (chu, 2016). however, few scholars conduct empirical research based on the perspective of core literacy to assess the influence of parental involvement on children’s academic development. this is the focus of current research. parental involvement on children’s academic development referring to the study of grolnick and slowiaczek (1994), we divide parental involvement into three categories: direct learning participation, emotional participation, and cultural participation. firstly, direct learning participation (dlp) refers to parents directly intervening in the child’s learning process, including checking homework, guiding homework, attending parent meeting, etc. in the existing literature, only a few studies conclude that parents’ dpi significantly improves children’s test scores (li, 2017). most studies have found that such parental participation behavior has no positive effect on children’s academic test scores and can even have negative effects. (sui-chu & willms, 1996; patall et al., 2008; zhao & hong, 2012; li & zheng, 2016). nonetheless, some studies that use non-test scores as a result variable suggest that such participation has a positive effect, for example, to enhance children’s learning willpower (gonzalez et al., 2002; fan & williams, 2010), learning adaptability (plunkett et al., 2008) and self-educational expectations and learning autonomy (gonzalez et al., 2002). the second type of parental involvement is emotional participation (ep) that refers to parental communication with their children and corresponding responsiveness to their children’ needs. such participation includes parents communicating with their kids and discussing matters related to school and study. research suggests that ep can improve children’s academic test scores (sui-chu & willms, 1996; zhao & hong, 2012), promote children’s self-learning ability (he & li, 2000), learning willpower (huang & huo, 2014), learning autonomy (liu & teng, 2016) and other nontest scores. finally, cultural participation (cp) refers to parents guiding their children to participate in various cultural activities, including accompanying children to read, liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 113 visiting museums, and watching cultural performances. studies suggest that parental cp behavior not only helps improve children’s academic test scores (grolnick & slowiaczek, 1994; altschul, 2012; sibley & dearing, 2014), but also enhances children’s interest in learning, their learning power, etc. (brooks et al., 1997; wang & sheikh-khalil, 2014). however, cultural participation has higher requirements for parental literacy, and its positive impact is mainly observed in the upper middle class (sibley & dearing, 2014). furthermore, after reviewing related literature, we found that the indicators chose by existing researches are scattered and not system. each author only chose a few indicators in each paper, which restricts the comprehensiveness and comparability of research conclusions. in current research, we study the impact of the above three types of parental involvement on children’s academic development under a unified analytical framework and outcome indicator framework. we propose the following three hypotheses: h1: the more parents’ dlp, the better their child’s academic development would be. h2: the more parents’ ep, the better their child’s academic development would be. h3: the more parents’ cp, the better their child’s academic development would be. migration, hukou segmentation, and parental involvement as mentioned above, children living in cities are divided into luc, rumc, uumc and dmc. compared to children of the first category, the last three categories of children experience migration across of rural-urban or urban-urban or both. in a sense, rumc, uumc and dmc can be regarded as “outsiders” towards their current living city. due to the long-term existence of the urban-rural and regional divides in china, luc, rumc, uumc and dmc differ in family socioeconomic status. first, parent of non-agricultural hukou, which are luc and uumc, have higher educational attainment, higher-level occupations and more stable jobs than the parent of other two types of children (feng & chen, 2016: 67-70). second, local parents, which are luc and rumc, are more familiar with the local labor market than other two types of non-local parents. thus, local parents are more likely to have local social resources which lead to advantage in better job market (xie, 2012). third, as there exist different requirement for job skill among different regional labor market, then adult would face inescapable mismatch in inflow areas’ labor market, so non-local parents’ income level, job stability and flexibility would be affected (xie, 2012). presumably, we infer that, among such four types of children, their social and economic status of households sorting from highest to lowest would be: luc, uumc, rumc and dmc. previous studies have shown that, parental involvement behavior is closely related to family socioeconomic level. first, among disadvantage families, lower economic income, longer and less flexible working hours, and higher unemployment risks would limit parent participate in their children’s learning and life (wu et al., 2017). second, among disadvantage families, as parents have lower levels of liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 114 knowledge and cultural literacy, which would limit them attach importance to their children education and have higher expectation for their children. as a result, these parents are more likely to lack planning in their children’s educational involvement, especially ignore emotional participation and cultural participation (altschul, 2012). in contrast, among advantage families, parents would have higher quality involvement. owing to they own high-level learning experience, they can not only teach their children knowledge and learning strategies in subtle ways, but also carry out parent-child communication more effectively (wu et al., 2017). third, according to the theory of social reproduction, schools have the attributes of the upper middle class, which makes it difficult for parents from disadvantage families to adapt to the culture and ideology of the school when communicating with teachers or participating in school activities (sui-chu & willms, 1996; li & zheng, 2017). at the same time, some researchers even found that schools may show discrimination against such parents (wu et al., 2017). fourth, specific to immigrant groups, they would also face the obstacles in the aspects of cultural customs, social rules, languages, et al., this would inevitably hinder such parents carry out parent-teacher communication or cp behaviors (altschul, 2011). as a result, the quantity and quality of parental involvement for luc, uumc, rumc and dmc would be descending. according to relevant research, the influence of parental involvement behaviors of different socioeconomic groups on children’s development cannot be completely determined (nguon, 2012; li & qiu, 2016). thus, in current research, whether the effect of parental involvement on academic development would have difference among such four children types is uncertain. if such impact effects are different between among such four children types, targeted guidance information is required for each type of parent to help them better involved in children’s education. since many related studies in the past only focus on some of these types (zhou & wu, 2008; liu & teng, 2016), the conclusions may not be comparable, they cannot provide targeted and effective information for parental involvement in special type of children either. to this end, we attempt to verify hypotheses 1-3 for each type of children group. data and variables data data in this study are collected from the china education panel survey (ceps) baseline database. in current paper, we do not include all samples of ceps, but only keep grade 8 (junior) students who study and live in urban areas. furthermore, to ensure consistency of the sample, this study retains 9727 children with no missing values for all dependent, explanatory and control variables. we define place of residence and household registration in the same province as local, and the household registration in the province as a flow. combining urban and rural household registration and mobility, the research sample is divided into four groups (number of individuals in group): luc (4688), rumc (2973), uumc (785), and dmc (1231) (the composition ratio is shown in figure 1). liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 115 variables academic development variables based on the core literacy framework, the academic development variables include two types: 1) test score indicator, specifically, the class scores of children’s selfevaluation 3 , and 2) non-test score indicators, including learning willpower, learning curiosity, and self-learning ability and self-education expectations. among these, learning willpower is based on responses to “even if the body is a little uncomfortable, or there are other reasons to stay at home, i will still try to go to school” and “even if the homework takes a long time to finish, i will continue to do my best.” learning curiosity is measured by reported agreement with the statement “i am very curious about new things.” self-learning ability is measured by response to “i can learn new knowledge quickly.” 4 self-education expectation is highest expected by the students’ reported expectations 5 . parental involvement parental involvement is divided into three categories 6 : dlp, ep, and cp. the aspect of dlp includes four items: 1) how frequently parents check their children’s homework; 2) how frequently of parents guide children as they do their homework; 3) parents willingness to participate in parent conferences; and, 4) the frequency of parents’ active contact with teachers. the aspect of ep includes two items: 1) the frequency of parents and children discussing school events; and 2) the frequency of parents and children discussing the child’s relationship with teachers. the aspect of cp includes four items: 1) frequency of parents and children reading together; 2) frequency of parents and children exercising together; 3) frequency of parents and children visiting museums and zoos together; and 4) frequency of parents and children watching a game or performance together. to facilitate interpretation of results, we conduct a factor analysis 7 for the items in each category and take the first common factor score to synthesize data as indexes for each aspect of parental involvement. control variables to reduce estimation bias and identify true effects as much as possible, we introduce control variables from three resources: individual, family and school. individual level control variables include gender, grade, cognitive test scores, number of siblings, agricultural household registration, and inter-provincial mobility. family-level control variables include the parents’ maximum number of education years 8 , the family’s economic status 9 , and whether the child was living with their parents. school-level control variables include teacher ratios of bachelor, school conditions 10 , and school rankings (1 = lower middle, 2 = upper middle, 3 = best). liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 116 description and comparison of variables to better understand the characteristics of the four categories of children, table 1 describes the values of different types of children in each variable. in terms of parental involvement, the parents of luc scored highest in the three types of participation behaviors, followed by the parents of uumc parents, and the last two are parents of rumc and dmc. in terms of children’s academic development, luc score the highest in terms of test score ranking, self-learning ability and self-education expectation, followed by uumc, and finally two types are also rumc and dmc. fortunately, the two types of children who experience rural-urban migrant have shown a slight advantage on the aspects of learning willpower and curiosity. as a result, from the perspective of absolute value comparison, comparing to regional migrant status and such hukou segmentation, rural-urban migrant status and such hukou segmentation show larger negative influence on parental participation behavior and three aspects of children’s academic development. in terms of control variables, there are also some meaningful findings. for example, for the cognitive ability test scores, the scores of luc, uumc, rumc and dmc decrease sequentially, which perfectly mirrors the ranking of the four groups in the test-based academic development score? the rank of cognitive ability test scores is identical with academic test score that means we could solve the “negative choice” problem” – the worse the score, the more parents participate in child’s education”. in addition, the average values of the parental maximum educational level and family economic status of rumc and dmc are lower than the other two types of children significantly. besides, rumc are far ahead in the indicator of not living with parents compared with other three types of children. this is because the parents of rumc send their children to local urban areas for further education and rumc are more likely to choose to stay with relatives, teachers or live at schools due to the similarity of cultural backgrounds and the richness of social relations. the influence of parental involvement on the academic development of different types of children based on the research framework presented above, we take the academic development as the dependent variable and the parental involvement behaviors as the main explanatory variables for constructing a regression model for estimation. since the data has a nested structure of student within school, this study sets up a two-level model. to test hypotheses 1-3 for each type of children group respectively and compare the heterogeneous effects of different children groups, this study will introduce the interactions among hukou segmentation, migration status and parental involvement behaviors in the model. the benchmark model of this study is: level 1: liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 117 (1) level 2: (2) here, equation (1) is the individual-level model, where xueye s ij denotes the s th academic outcome of interest (s = 1, ..., 5) for an individual i, residing in school j and pi e ij denotes the e th parental involvement indicator(e = 1, 2, 3) 11 . further, the dummy variables – rural and migrant – reflect hukou segmentation and regional migration status respectively. besides, contr_ind and contr_fam are individual-level and familylevel control variables, e0ij is an individual-level random error term. equation (2) is the school-level model, where contr_sch are the school-level control variables, and 0j is the school-level random error term. we will introduce academic development indicators respectively in turn and construct five models. table 2 presents the results from all aforementioned estimating regressions. next, in models 1-5, we calculate the linear combination of which includes the coefficient of parental involvement behavior , the coefficient of the interaction between parental participation behavior and rural , the coefficient of the interaction between parental participation behavior and migrant , and the coefficient of the interaction among parental participation behavior, rural and migrant . after that, we conduct statistical tests and identify the impact of parental involvement behaviors on academic development of each type of children group in detail (table 3). what’s more, comparing the heterogeneous effects among different types of children is our focus (table 4). based on the results presented by tables 3 and 4, we draw the following conclusions: the impact of parental involvement on children’s test score indicator firstly, parents’ dlp has a significant negative impact on the test scores of luc, rumc and dmc, which is contrary to hypothesis 1. only in uumc, there is a nonsignificant negative effect, but hypothesis 1 is still not verified. in terms of intergroup, the negative effects of parents’ dlp on the test scores of rumc and dmc are significantly greater than that of uumc, and the negative effect of parents’ dlp on the test scores of dmc is also significantly greater than that of luc. in sum, parents’ dlp cannot improve the academic test scores of any type of children, and sigliang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 118 table 1. the description of characteristics based on hukou and migration status samples. dimension index luc rumc uumc dmc parental involvement dlp direct learning participation behavior index 0.090 -0.097 0.99 -0.099 cp cultural participation behavior index 0.129 -0.178 0.124 -0.102 ep emotional participation behavior index 0.065 -0.030 0.042 -0.094 academic development test score indicator last final test class ranking 3.222 2.991 3.122 3.017 non-test score indicators learning willpower 3.340 3.406 3.274 3.339 learning curiosity 3.515 3.542 3.478 3.498 self-learning ability 3.117 2.965 3.019 2.942 self-education expectations 17.36 16.49 17.03 16.17 control variables individual level gender ( 1= female, 0= male ) 0.511 0.488 0.508 0.491 grade 9 ( 1=9 th grade, 0=7 th grade) 0.482 0.487 0.375 0.389 cognitive ability test score 0.309 0.015 0.111 -0.044 single child ( 1= yes, 0= no) 0.741 0.349 0.536 0.269 rural hukou ( 1=yes, 0= no) 0.000 1.000 0.000 1.000 migration status(1= yes, 0=no) 0.000 0.000 1.000 1.000 family level father/ mother maximum education years 12.91 9.715 12.97 9.633 family's financial situation 2.972 2.775 2.987 2.833 parental living conditions parents are at home 82.57% 74.10% 82.55% 86.03% father is not at home 8.85% 10.12% 9.55% 4.96% mother is not at home 3.20% 2.76% 3.18% 2.52% parents are not at home 5.38% 13.02% 4.71% 6.50% school a level school running conditions 0.710 0.679 0.725 0.705 the ratio of teacher with bachelor degree or above 0.898 0.781 0.932 0.877 school ranking 2.332 2.025 2.061 1.894 note: a-the indicator for this dimension is the inter-school level average of the schools where the various groups of children are located liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 119 table 2. two-level regression model of the effect of parental involvement on children’s academic development. test score indicator non-test scores indicators learning willpower learning curiosity selflearning ability self-education expectations model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 model 5 dlp ( λ1 ) -0.103*** 0.077*** 0.064*** 0.033** -0.015 (0.021) (0.014) (0.016) (0.016) (0.061) ep ( λ2 ) 0.183*** 0.091*** 0.048*** 0.097*** 0.408*** (0.023) (0.015) (0.017) (0.017) (0.066) cp (λ3 ) 0.095*** 0.010 0.013 0.097*** 0.226*** (0.024) (0.017) (0.019) (0.019) (0.071) dlp*rural hukou (ρ1) -0.031 -0.043* -0.075*** -0.018 -0.108 (0.034) (0.023) (0.026) (0.026) (0.099) ep*rural hukou (ρ2) 0.020 -0.001 -0.010 -0.008 0.123 (0.035) (0.024) (0.027) (0.027) (0.104) cp*rural hukou (ρ3) -0.048** -0.005 -0.036 0.032 -0.313*** (0.025) (0.027) (0.030) (0.030) (0.115) dlp*migration status ( 1) 0.072 0.007 -0.037 0.99 -0.140 (0.053) (0.036) (0.041) (0.041) (0.157) ep*migration status ( 2) 0.016 -0.022 -0.071 -0.014 0.002 (0.057) (0.038) (0.044) (0.044) (0.166) cp*migration status ( 3) -0.056** -0.073* -0.105** -0.060 -0.000 (0.029) (0.042) (0.047) (0.047) (0.179) dlp*rural hukou* migration status( 1) -0.135* 0.005 0.091 0.018 0.051 (0.073) (0.049) (0.056) (0.056) (0.213) ep*rural hukou* migration status ( 2) -0.039 -0.019 0.058 -0.006 -0.104 (0.076) (0.051) (0.059) (0.058) (0.222) cp*rural hukou* migration status ( 3) 0.082 0.102* 0.074 0.020 0.494** (0.082) (0.056) (0.064) (0.063) (0.241) constant term 2.637*** 3.600*** 3.619*** 2.803*** 14.978*** (0.122) (0.075) (0.076) (0.089) (0.444) individual control variables yes yes yes yes yes family control variables yes yes yes yes yes school control variables yes yes yes yes yes random residual standard deviation school level 0.145 0.080 0.065 0.099 0.606 student level 0.992 0.675 0.770 0.767 2.907 school sample 66 66 66 66 66 student sample 9677 9677 9677 9677 9677 note: 1. *indicates significance at the level of 0.1, **indicates significance at the level of 0.05, and *** indicates significance at the level of 0.01 liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 120 table 3. the impact of parental involvement on the academic development of four types of children groups. test score indicator non-test scores indicators learning willpower learning curiosity self-learning ability self-education expectations coefficient t value coefficient t value coefficient t value coefficient t value coefficient t value dlp luc (λ1) -0.103*** [-4.934] 0.077*** [5.457] 0.064*** [4.014] 0.033*** [2.067] -0.015 [-0.25] rumc (λ1+ρ1) -0.134*** [-4.918] 0.034* [1.827] -0.011 [-0.522] 0.015 [0.714] -0.123* [-1.638] dmc (λ1+ρ1+φ1+ζ1) -0.196*** [-4.74] 0.046* [1.625] 0.043 [1.326] 0.042 [1.307] -0.212* [-1.747] uumc (λ1+φ1) -0.031 [-0.623] 0.084*** [2.487] 0.027 [0.716] 0.042 [1.107] -0.156 [-1.073] ep luc (λ2) 0.183*** [8.126] 0.091*** [5.961] 0.048*** [2.726] 0.097*** [5.595] 0.408*** [6.175] rumc (λ2+ρ2) 0.203*** [7.417] 0.09*** [4.846] 0.037* [1.869] 0.089*** [4.224] 0.531*** [6.596] dmc (λ2+ρ2+φ2+ζ2) 0.180*** [4.25] 0.049* [1.696] 0.024* [1.723] 0.070*** [2.133] 0.428*** [3.448] uumc (λ2+φ2) 0.199*** [3.819] 0.069** [1.965] 0.024 [0.584] 0.084*** [2.087] 0.409*** [2.686] cp luc (λ3) 0.095*** [3.897] 0.01 [0.617] 0.013 [0.71] 0.097*** [5.19] 0.226*** [3.177] rumc (λ3+ρ3) 0.047 [1.484] 0.005 [0.237] -0.023 [-0.941 0.129*** [5.306] -0.087 [-0.932] dmc (λ3+ρ3+φ3+ζ3) 0.073 [1.58] 0.034 [1.093] -0.054 [-1.51] 0.090 [1.526] 0.407 [1.021] uumc (λ3+φ3) 0.038 [0.676] -0.062* [-1.615] -0.091** [-2.074] 0.038 [0.863] 0.226 [0.356] note: 1. *indicates significance at the level of 0.1, **indicates significance at the level of 0.05, and ***indicates significance at the level of 0.01. 2. the values in parentheses are t values. 3. the values in the “coefficients” column in the table indicate the specific effects of parental involvement on the academic development of each type of children. liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 121 table 4. inter-group differences in the influence of parents’ participation in the development of four types of children’s academic development. test score indicator non-test scores indicators learning willpower learning curiosity self-learning ability self-education expectations coefficient t value coefficient t value coefficient t value coefficient t value coefficient t value dlp rumc v.s. luc (ρ1) -0.031 [-0.924] -0.043* [-1.888] -0.075*** [-2.887] -0.018 [-0.698] -0.108 [-1.087] rumc v.s. uumc (ρ1-φ1) -0.103** [-1.829] -0.05 [-1.305] -0.038 [-0.881] -0.027 [-0.629] 0.033 [0.199] dmc v.s. uumc (ρ1+ζ1) -0.166*** [-2.579] -0.038 [-0.865] 0.015 [0.305] 0.000 [-0.009] -0.057 [-0.301] dmc v.s. rumc (φ1+ζ1) -0.063 [-1.275] 0.012 [0.361] 0.054 [1.404] 0.027 [0.706] -0.090* [-0.182] dmc v.s. luc (ρ1+φ1+ζ1) -0.094*** [-2.044] -0.031 [-0.997] -0.022 [-0.61] 0.99 [0.245] -0.197** [-1.963] uumc v.s. dmc (φ1) 0.072 [1.344] 0.007 [0.182] -0.037 [-0.893] 0.99 [0.222] -0.14 [-0.897] ep rumc v.s. luc (ρ2) 0.02 [0.574] -0.001 [-0.046] -0.01 [-0.373] -0.008 [-0.293] 0.123 [1.19] rumc v.s. uumc (ρ2-φ2) 0.005 [0.080] 0.021 [0.532] 0.061 [1.341] 0.006 [0.122] 0.121 [0.706] dmc v.s. uumc (ρ2+ζ2) -0.019 [-0.278] -0.02 [-0.442] 0.047 [0.911] -0.014 [-0.272] 0.019 [0.096] dmc v.s. rumc (φ2+ζ2) -0.023 [-0.462] -0.041 [-1.21] -0.014 [-0.351] -0.02 [-0.504] -0.103 [-0.697] dmc v.s. luc (ρ2+φ2+ζ2) -0.003 [-0.062] -0.042 [-1.306] -0.024 [-0.644] -0.028 [-0.746] 0.021 [0.147] uumc v.s. dmc (φ2) 0.016 [0.275] -0.022 [-0.58] -0.071* [-1.922] -0.014 [-0.309] 0.002 [0.011] cp rumc v.s. luc (ρ3) -0.048** [-1.924] -0.005 [-0.193] -0.036 [-1.199] 0.032 [1.051] -0.313*** [-2.723] rumc v.s. uumc (ρ3-φ3) 0.008 [0.137] 0.068 [1.538] 0.069 [1.372] 0.091** [1.828] -0.313* [-1.649] dmc v.s. uumc (ρ3+ζ3) 0.034 [0.47] 0.097** [1.956] 0.038 [0.67] 0.052 [0.921] 0.181 [0.85] dmc v.s. rumc (φ3+ζ3) 0.026 [0.467] 0.029 [0.776] -0.031 [-0.724] -0.04 [-0.929] 0.494*** [3.05] liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 122 dmc v.s. luc (ρ3+φ3+ζ3) -0.022 [-0.429] 0.024 [0.683] -0.067 [-1.678] -0.008 [-0.196] 0.181 [1.194] uumc v.s. dmc (φ3) -0.056** [-1.919] -0.073* [-1.746] -0.105** [-2.209] -0.06 [-1.259] .000 [-0.002] note: 1 and 2 are the same as above; 3.the values in the coefficient column of the table indicate the difference in the effect of tntergroup taking the latter group of children as the reference group. liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 123 figure 1. the composition of children according to hukou segmentation and migration status. nificantly reduces the academic test scores of all except uumc. especially for rumc and dmc, the negative effects are strongest. secondly, parents’ ep has a significant positive impact on the test scores of all types of children, which supports hypothesis 2. no significant differences between groups are observed. this shows that if parents can communicate more with their children about their schools and teachers, academic test scores of all types of children would be improved significantly. what’s more, the effects do not differ from each other due to hukou segmentation and migration status. finally, parents’ cp has a significant positive impact on the test scores of luc, while the impact is not significant in the other three types of children groups. therefore, hypothesis 3 is only verified in luc. in terms of intergroup, the effects of parents’ cp on the test scores of rumc and uumc are significantly lower than that of luc. this means that only luc can improve their academic test scores through more parents’ cp. the impact of parental involvement on children’s non-test score indicators in this section, we similarly uncover the effects of parental involvement on each nontest score indicator of each type of children from the perspective of parents’ dlp, ep and cp. learning willpower liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 124 firstly, parents’ dlp has a significant positive impact on the learning willpower of all types of children, so hypothesis 1 is supported in each type of children groups. in terms of intergroup, the effect of parents’ dlp on the learning willpower of rumc is significantly lower than that of luc, but there is no significant difference among the other children groups. secondly, parents’ ep has a significant positive impact on the learning willpower of the four types of children, supporting hypothesis 2. pairwise comparisons between groups reveal no significant intergroup differences upon this effect. finally, parents’ cp has a significant negative impact on the learning willpower of uumc, which rejects hypothesis 3. meanwhile, there are positive but non-significant effects in the other three categories of children and hypothesis 3 is not verified, either. in terms of intergroup, the influence of parents’ cp on the learning willpower of uumc is significantly different from that of luc and dmc. learning curiosity firstly, parents’ dlp can significantly improve the learning curiosity of luc, which means hypothesis 1 is verified in this type of children. in contrary, the effects of parents’ dlp on the learning curiosity of rumc, uumc and dmc are non-significant and hypothesis 1 is not supported. in terms of intergroup, the effect of parents’ dlp on rumc’s learning curiosity is significantly lower than that of luc. secondly, parents’ ep can significantly improve the learning curiosity of luc, rumc and dmc. thus hypothesis 2 is supported in above three types of children groups. but there is positive but non-significant effect in uumc, reflecting hypothesis 2 is not testified in uumc. focusing on the intergroup, the effect of parents’ dlp on uumc is significantly lower than that of luc. finally, parents’ cp can significantly impede the learning curiosity of uumc and hypothesis 3 is rejected. meanwhile, the effects of parents’ cp on the other three types of children groups are not significant, and hypothesis 3 is not supported. focusing on the results of pairwise comparisons, we can conclude that the impact of parents’ cp on uumc is significantly lower than that of luc. self-learning ability firstly, parents’ dlp can promote the self-learning ability of luc significantly, but has a non-significant positive effect on the other three types of children groups, which means hypothesis 1 is only supported by luc. further, no significant differences are observed between groups. secondly, parents’ ep has a significant positive impact on the self-learning ability of all types of children. as a result, hypothesis 2 is supported in all children samplings. similarly, there is no significant difference in terms of intergroup. lastly, parents’ cp can significantly improve self-learning ability of luc and rumc so that hypothesis 3 is supported in above two groups. however, the effect of this behavior on the self-learning ability of uumc and dmc are not significant, of which hypothesis 3 is not verified. focusing on the results of liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 125 pairwise comparisons, what draw our attention is that the effect of parents’ cp on rumc is significantly higher than that of uumc. self-education expectations firstly, parents’ dlp has a significant negative impact on the self-education expectations for rumc and dmc, and a non-significant negative impact on the selfeducation expectations for luc and uumc. thus, hypothesis 1 is rejected in all types of children groups. among these groups, the negative impact of parents’ dlp on dmc is significantly stronger than luc and rumc. secondly, parents’ ep can promote the self-education expectations of all four types of children significantly, and hypothesis 2 is testified completely. what’s more, no differences between groups are observed in terms of intergroup. finally, parents’ cp can significantly improve the self-education expectations of luc, supporting hypothesis 3. however, in the other three groups, hypothesis 3 is not accepted. among these groups, the influence of parents’ cp on the self-education expectations of luc is significantly lower than that of the other three types of children. conclusion and discussion the first finding of our study is that parents’ dlp has a limited effect on children’s academic development. especially for most academic development indicators of rumc and dmc, there are significant negative effects. parents’ dlp not only fails to improve the academic test scores and self-education expectations of any type of children, but also has a significant negative impact on the academic test scores and the self-education expectations of luc, rumc and dmc. moreover, the improvement of learning curiosity and self-learning ability occurs only in luc. in contrast, in terms of learning willpower, improvement occurs in all types of children groups. focusing on the results of the comparison between groups, the negative impacts of parents’ dlp on the academic test scores of rumc and dmc are significantly stronger than that of luc and uumc. besides, the negative impact of parents’ dlp on the self-education expectations of dmc is significantly stronger than that of luc and rumc. we speculate the reason of showing above results is that there is a long-term imbalance between urban and rural education in china, with the conditions for running schools in rural areas lagging behind cities, resulting in agricultural household parents with low level education 12 , poor self-learning strategies, lack of long-term goals, and falling into low social classes. as a result, they not only lack professionalism and effectiveness in guiding and supervising children’s learning process, but also may generate frustrating emotions due to classes’ segmentation when communicating with teachers (wu zhonghan et al., 2017). hence, low-quality dlp is likely to convey ineffective learning strategies, repetitive and boring learning content, and resistance to school and learning, which is not conducive to children’s academic develliang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 126 opment (sui-chu and willms, 1996; zhao yandong and hong yanbi, 2012). it should be noted that while some scholars (sun, 1998) believe that the “negative selection” problem may lead to overestimating the negative effect of dlp, in this study we introduce the students’ cognitive ability score as a control variable to address this problem. at the same time, since the negative selection problem theoretically exists mainly in the estimation of the test score as the dependent variable, the three non-test indicators of self-education expectation, learning curiosity and self-learning ability are consistently estimated, and thus we think that negative selection has little effect on our results and the research results are robust. the second finding of this study is that parents’ ep has a significant role in improving all aspects of academic development for all children groups 13 , and there is no significant difference in terms of hukou segmentation and migration status. this finding is consistent with existing literature (sui-chu and willms, 1996; jr. mcneal, 1999; zhao yandong and hong yanbi, 2012; huang shuang and huo liyan, 2014). we believe that this result is due to the fact that through communicating with their children more about learning, schools, and teachers, parents can build a closer relationship and trust with their children, and form social closure with their children, the classmates of children, teachers, school and the parents of their children’s classmates, which not only enables children to feel the great attention that parents pay to their learning, but also reduces the information asymmetry of parents on children’s learning process. accordingly, parents’ ep is a great social capital that can encourage and promote the development of children’s academic development. meanwhile, communicating with their children is relatively less constrained by the parents’ own literacy; therefore, parents’ ep can enhance academic development in different types of children groups. the third finding of this study is that the positive impact of parents’ cp is mainly reflected in luc. this effect is not significant or even negative in rural hukou and non-local children’s groups and, in particular, there is a significant negative effect on learning curiosity and learning willpower in dmc, indicating that the regional division restricts the beneficial effect of parents’ cp on the development of non-local children’s academic development. we speculate the reason is that there are cultural, social, and psychological integration problems for the migrant children. specifically, due to the differences on cultural and social aspects between the growing surroundings and the local region, migrant children’s parents tend to have some difficulties in choosing suitable urban cultural resources. moreover, migrant children may not be able to resonate and gain benefits when they participate in relevant recreational activities, conversely, they are more likely to feel bored or discriminated against in their activities, which may restrict the positive effects of parents’ pe eventually. in summary, the findings of this study provide some guidelines when parents participate in their children’s education. first, in the process of teaching students, the school cannot extend the responsibility of direct learning intervention, such as guidance and counseling knowledge, to students’ parents; knowledge conveying should remain teacher-led. due to the lack of professionalism, parents’ dlp not only negaliang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 127 tively affect multiple academic development indicators of the socioeconomic disadvantaged rural hukou children groups, but also plays a limited role in the academic development of relatively high cultural level children groups. second, schools should encourage parents to communicate more with their children about learning and school at home. the social capital built by parents through this kind of emotional participation behavior is the key to make up for the weaknesses of class teaching system and collective education, which can effectively strengthen positive emotions and weaken negative emotions of children, thereby helping children to achieve comprehensive academic development. further, above effectiveness will not change due to the difference in hukou and migration status. third, under the background of accelerating urbanization, the regional differences of cultural systems cause problems of educational integration for migrant children. thus, schools should make good use of modern media such as the internet platforms to provide the parents of rural hukou and migrant children with more appropriate recreational activities-related information. in the future, we can consider to improving the study based on the following aspects. first, this paper discussed children’s academic development under the framework of key competences comprehensively and systematically, but the indicators used were children’s self-reported data. hence, the measurement tools need to be modified further. second, although this paper introduced students’ cognitive ability test scores to solve the endogenous problems such as “negative selection”, it was still difficult to ensure that we obtained the causal effect of parents’ involvement on children’s academic development. therefore, relevant researches need to be improved based on quasi-experimental design and other means. third, based on the hukou and migration status, we divided all the children into four types and uncovered, compared the effect of parental involvement on the academic development of four types of children respectively, thereby offering parents targeted suggestions. however, due to the change of migration status and migration periods, the relationship between parental involvement and children’s academic development may be change correspondingly, so relevant researches need to analyze based on longitudinal data. notes 1 the most important and distinctive part of the “head start” program is to help parents better get involved in their children’s learning and life, for example, “providing parents with the trainings about home literacy skills and parenting skills in order to develop their skills to communicate with their children. see: http://www.nhsa.org/. 2 the “success for all” program aims to interfere with the learning of students from disadvantaged families by guiding family support effectively, for example, “the program requires parents to accompany their students to read at home for 20 minutes every night, and teachers to provide appropriate guidance for parents.” see: http:// www.successforall.org/. 3 since there is no uniform academic standardized test in the existing large public databases, it is feasible to use the student self-reported score ranking as a test score indicaliang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 128 tor. although above act may be affect the accuracy and comparability of the measurement, considering that the study focuses on estimating the directionality of the impact (positive or negative), we think it is a compromise. 4 the items of learning willpower, learning curiosity and self-learning ability are all ordered variables of 1-4. the higher the value, the better the academic development of the corresponding dimensions. 5 the assignment rules of self-education expectations: “quit now” = 6 years (seventh grade) or 8 years (ninth grade); “middle school graduation” = 9 years; “secondary school/technical school” or “vocational high school” = 11 years; “high school” = 12 years; “college” = 15 years; “four-year bachelor” = 16 years; “graduate” = 19 years; “doctor” = 22 years. 6 in terms of parental involvement, except for “whether the parents are willing to show up the parent meeting” (dummy variable, 1= yes, 0=no), all the other variables are 14 ordered variables, and the higher the value, the higher the frequency of the corresponding behavior. 7 in the three types of parental involvement, the variance contribution rate of the first common factor is more than 90%, indicating that it can represent most of the information in the items included in each parental involvement dimension. 8 “no education” = 0 year; “primary school” = 6 years; “middle high school” = 9 years; “secondary school/technical school” and “vocational high school” = 11 years; “high school” = 12 years; “college” = 15 years; “four-year bachelor” = 16 years; “graduate and above” = 19 years. 9 the assignment rules of family economic conditions: 1 = poor, 2 = middle, 3 = wealthy. 10 in the school questionnaire, 10 questions such as “is there a laboratory”, “is there a swimming pool” (1 = yes, 0 = no) are weighted and summed according to the reciprocal of the proportion, and then standardized. 11 strictly speaking, an ordered logit model should be constructed, but this is not convenient for interpreting the interaction term coefficients. to this end, we construct a common two-level regression model with each academic development variable as a continuous variable, although the size of coefficients is biased, considering the main focus of the study, the directionality of coefficients will not be influenced. 12 in fact, combined with the data in table 1 and the existing literature (xie guihua, 2012; ma xiaohong, 2014), the cultural quality of rural hukou parents is significantly lower than that of urban hukou parents, while the cultural quality of local parents are lower than non-local parents in terms of migration status. 13 the positive impact of learning curiosity is not significant only for uumc. liang et al. parental involvement and children’s academic development vol.1, no. 2, 2019 129 references altschul, i. 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(2008) educational performance of migrant children and its influencing factors: multi-level linear model analysis. population research; 32(4):22-32. received: 20 february 2019 revised: 07 march 2019 accepted: 19 march 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in china economics of education review 2018; 3(3):40-60. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 梁文艳, 孙冉, 叶晓梅. 核心素养视角下父母参与如何影响儿童的学业发展?基于城乡户籍 和区域流动状况的差异分析. 教育经济评论 2018; 3(3):40-60. article-wenyanliang-bece_30march2019 article-wenyanliang-maintext-bece_30march2019 bece. newsletter vol.6, no.2, 2020 886 the influence of parent-child separation on the development of children: evidence from the survey of migrant children in beijing by li, b. & yin, l. correspondence to: li, b. email: libobnu@163.com ased on a survey of 2,367 fourth-grade migrant children in beijing’s functional development zone (2016-2017), this article explores the impact of parent-child separation on children’s development from three dimensions: academic performance, non-cognitive development, and physical health. the brief is as follows:  the research focuses on the following issues: first, will the separation of parent and child have an impact on children’s academic performance, non-cognitive abilities, and physical health? second, is there any difference in the impact of separation between father and mother? third, whether this difference will be heterogeneous based on the gender of children.  data source and variable description: the survey follows the principle of three-stage cluster sampling. the surveyed students were all from fourth grade of primary school and are at the same education level, so the student development indicators are horizontally comparable. the core variables of this study include core explanatory variables and explained variables. among them, the core explanatory variables are dummy variables of parent-child separation. including separation from father and mother. the core explained variables include academic performance, non-cognitive development, and institutional health.  research results: i. the impact of separation from parent-child on children’s academic performance: separation from mother has a stronger impact on children’s academic performance than separation from father. ii. the impact of parent-child separation on children’s noncognitive abilities: separation from mothers has no significant impact on non-cognitive abilities in all dimensions; however, separation from the father has a significant negab vol.6, no.2, 2020 887 tive impact on children’s self-esteem, self-control, interpersonal communication, school adaptation, leadership, and cooperation. iii. the impact of parent-child separation on children’s physical health: separation from mothers has a significantly greater impact on children’s physical health than separation from fathers. iv. analysis of the heterogeneity of the impact of parent-child separation on children’s development: parent-child separation differs a lot in gender; for boys, separation from mothers has a significant negative impact on their academic performance, but separation from fathers has no significant impact on male academic performance, while for girls, separation from their mothers significantly affects their english scores, and separation from their fathers significantly affects their mathematics scores; but separation from their mothers has no significant impact on girls’ mathematics and chinese scores. similarly, separation from fathers has no significant impact on girls’ language and english scores.  conclusions and policy recommendations: i. change the misconception of “pay attention to money, not the time” that exists in progress of children’s growth, and do a good job in the important duty of guiding children. ii. schools and teachers should concentrate on students who have separated parent-child, ask more about their problems and difficulties in study and life, and promptly guide and communicate; at the same time, the school should establish relevant psychological counseling institutions or groups to promptly discover and ease the psychological problems of students. iii. relevant departments should gradually abolish the discriminative policies related to household registration division on employment, education, and medical, so as to reduce the occurrence of parent-child separation from the source. source: china economics of education review, 2019; 4(6): 93-108. school governance structure and its impact on student performance: a comparative study between four provinces of china and the pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies decheng zhao, 1 luhuan wang 2 1. beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china 2. northeast normal university, changchun 130024, china abstract. improving the school governance structure and establishing a modern school system are the current research focuses in elementary and middle school management. through a comparative analysis of the school governance structure of four provinces and cities in china (beijing-shanghai-jiangsu-guangdong, bsjg) and pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies, we found that the school autonomy in seven major aspects including “teacher selection, teacher dismissal, evaluation policy, enrollment policy, textbook selection, curriculum content, and curriculum design” in bsjg schools was significantly lower than that of high-scored countries/economies. the average decision-making of bsjg principals and teachers in various affairs was also substantially lower than the high-scored countries/economies. the multilevel analysis found that the impact of school governance structure on student performance presented different patterns between bsjg and high-scored countries/economies. therefore, china needs to (i) expand the autonomy of school management further and establish a new government-school relationship; (ii) give priority to curriculum management and ensure its autonomy in schools; (iii) improve the principal accountability system, and strengthen the principal’s power and responsibility in school management; (iv) strengthen democratic management, thereby promoting teachers’ participation in the decision-making of school affairs. best evid chin edu 2020; 6(2):825-843. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar072. how to cite: zhao, d. & wang, l. (2020). school governance structure and its impact on student performance: a comparative study between four provinces of china and the pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies. best evidence in chinese eduzhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no.2, 2020 826 cation, 6(2):825-843. keywords: pisa2015; school governance structure; school autonomy; principal accountability system about the authors: luhuan wang, research intern, personnel division, northeast normal university, changchun 130024, china. email: 1029772753@qq.com. correspondence to: decheng zhao, professor, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: zhaodecheng@bnu.edu.cn. conflict of interests: none. © 2020 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 827 introduction overnance structure refers to the relationship between various interest groups in a public or private organization. it achieves the balance of relations by allocating power and operating mechanisms to ensure the organization’s effective operation (wang, 2007). in china, research on governance structure originated in the field of corporate management. after the “decision of the central government on several issues concerning the establishment of a socialist market economic system” was issued in the 1990s, many large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises were reorganized into corporate enterprises. and then the establishment of an effective corporate governance structure is the core of the corporate reform (ma, 1994), so improving the corporate governance structure and establishing a modern corporate system have gradually become hot issues in the field of corporate management. with the strengthening of theoretical research, the improvement of legal policies, and the vigorous promotion of practice, a consensus has been reached on the ideal governance structure. it is believed that the ideal governance structure should be a relationship with clear responsibilities and rights, mutual restriction and balance, and mutual assistance based on clear property rights (wu, 1996; zheng & wang, 2000; yuan, 2000). however, in practice, due to various subjective and objective reasons, the governance structure of many companies is still far from the ideal state. in elementary and middle school management, china has been implementing the principal accountability system since 1985. in may 1985, the “central government’s decision on educational system reform” required that “schools should gradually implement the principal accountability system, and schools with conditions should establish a small, prestigious school committee chaired by the principal as a review body. it is necessary to establish and improve the faculty representative assembly system with teachers as the main body and strengthen democratic management and supervision.” (central government of china, 2017) the “china education reform and development program” issued by the central government and the state council in 1993 pointed out the principal accountability system should be implemented in all elementary and middle schools. “the principal must fully implement the nation’s educational policy and rely on faculty and staff to run the school.” (central government of china, state council, 2017) since then, various related policy documents have been reiterated to adhere to and improve elementary and middle school principals’ principal accountability system. therefore, the principal accountability system outlines china’s elementary and middle school governance structure’s basic framework. compared with the principal accountability system under the party branch’s leadership, the elementary and middle school government structure overcomes the nonseparation of party and government, separation of powers and responsibilities, and the low quality and efficiency decision-making (xiao, 1985). however, it needs to be pointed out that with the deepening of reforms; this governance structure has gradually exposed some urgent problems to be solved. it mainly includes (chen, 2002; feng, 2005; chai, 2009): (i) the elementary and middle school principal is generally appointed g zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 828 by the superior administrative department or the government and is responsible to the superior, so they must manage the school per the educational administrative department’s regulations. the school lacks autonomy. the power of the principal is relatively limited. moreover, it is difficult for the principal to be genuinely responsible for school affairs. (ii) in some schools’ actual operations, the principal’s power is too concentrated and lacks adequate supervision. then “rule by the voice of one man alone” or “patriarchy” management appeared. (iii) the internal democratic management mechanism of some schools is not sound. the power of teachers, students, parents, and members of the public to participate in school governance is not fully protected. their voices are blocked; thus, the school power relationship is unbalanced, and the school loses development vitality. in recent years, with the release of the “outline of china’s medium and longterm educational reform and development plan (2010-2020)” (hereinafter referred to as the “outline of the plan”), we have promoted the separation of government and schools and the separation of management and running schools and expanded the autonomy of schools. improving elementary and middle school principals’ principal accountability system, restructuring the school governance structure, and establishing a modern school system has gradually become the research focus in elementary and middle school management. many studies have centered on related topics such as principal accountability system, modern school system construction, separation of management and operation, expansion of school autonomy, and school governance structure. however, after an in-depth analysis, it is found that the existing research mostly adopts speculative research or a standardized research paradigm, lacking the support of empirical data and preliminary quantitative analysis. this has led to an in-depth analysis of the nature of the problem, the degree of performance and related factors, and the suggestions provided lack pertinence. what is the distribution of power in the management practice of elementary and middle schools in china? how much autonomy is the school running? how does this governance structure affect student performance? this study intends to use the extensive sample data of pisa2015 to compare the governance structure of beijing-shanghai-jiangsu-guangdong (bsjg) middle schools with high-scored countries/economies for quantitative analysis of its impact on student performance. it is hoped that some experience can be used to solve the problems that need to be solved and provide opinions and suggestions on the continuous improvement of the school governance structure and the construction of a modern school system in china. methods data sources the program for international student assessment (pisa) is a multinational student ability evaluation project coordinated and implemented by the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd). this project evaluates 15-year-old school students in participating countries/economies to see if they have the knowledge and skills required to enter society. the pisa test is implemented every three years. zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 829 the test content includes science, mathematics, and reading, but each assessment has a different focus. the focus of the pisa2015 test is scientific literacy. the oecd announced the test results of pisa2015 at the end of 2016, and at the same time, published the data, coding tables, and technical reports on the official website (http://www.pisa.org/pisa). this study selected bsjg data and high-scored countries/economies data from the pisa2015 student database and school database for indepth analysis. participants participants in this study included two groups of 15-year-old school students and school leaders. schools include junior high schools, high schools, complete high schools, vocational high schools, etc. we collectively refer to the heads of all these schools as the principals. participants are from bsjg and pisa2015, high-scored countries/economies. high-scored countries/economies refer to countries or economies where students’ scores in science, mathematics, and reading are significantly higher than the average level of oecd countries in the pisa2015 test. these countries include belgium, denmark, estonia, finland, germany, and ireland, the netherlands, norway, poland, slovenia, canada, australia, new zealand, japan, south korea, and partner countries/economies such as singapore, hong kong, and macau. bsjg and the countries mentioned above/economies had a coverage rate of more than 91.38% for 15-year-old students in the region, and the coverage rate of the principal sample was more than 78.57%. variable selection our study first described the power distribution of major business decision-making in bsjg and pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies, aiming to reflect the outline of the school’s governance structure, and then conducted a multilevel analysis using the scientific literacy test scores of 15-year-old students as the dependent variable. this is to observe the impact of governance structure on student development. the selected variables are as follows. the power value of principals, teachers and other subjects in determining major school affairs who decides and is responsible for the school’s significant affairs reflects the school’s governance structure. in the pisa2015 school questionnaire, the principal was asked to answer who has the most power in major issues’ decision-making process. the options were principals, teachers, school councils, local education bureaus, and the state. for the convenience of calculation and analysis, the school’s total power was determined to be 100%, which was redistributed to each decision-making body based on the principal’s answer. take “determining course content” as an example. if a principal answered that only teachers had decision-making power, then teachers in this school had 100% decision-making power to determine the curriculum content and other subjects had 0%. zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 830 if the principal responded that the course’s content was determined by the principal, teachers, and the school councils, then each subject was assigned a power value of 33% accordingly. therefore, in each country/economy, as long as each subject’s average power value is calculated, the outline of the schools’ governance structure in that country/economy can be drawn. student scientific literacy test scores in this study, the scientific literacy test scores represent the level of student development. this is mainly because the main test area of pisa2015 was science. the scientific literacy test is well representative after rigorous design and reliability and validity analysis. the test scores were equalized and converted into an average score of 500 points in the pisa scientific literacy test of oecd countries in 2006 and a standard deviation of 100 points. individual variables affecting students’ scientific literacy test scores the pisa2015 student questionnaire collected sociodemographic variables and measured students’ non-cognitive performance in terms of intrinsic motivation, beliefs, and participation. based on the pisa questionnaire framework and related research findings, we selected the student’s gender, grade, and pisa index of economic, social, and cultural status (escs) from the sociodemographic variables. in the non-cognitive performance, we selected the instrumental motivation that reflects students’ external motivation and the variables of scientific pleasure and scientific self-efficacy that reflect the internal motivation of students. these non-cognitive variables were all measured by likert scale as continuous variables and expressed in standard scores. in the multilevel analysis, the variables selected above were used as control variables to enter the regression analysis model. data analysis first, spss20.0 was used to sort out and filter the data, get the sample data of china’s four provinces and cities and pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies, and perform descriptive statistics and difference testing. then hlm7.01 software was used to explore the impact of school governance structure on student performance through multilevel analysis. results power distribution in school governance practice the distribution of power in the school’s significant affairs’ decision-making reflects the relationship between various stakeholders inside and outside the school and reflects the school’s governance structure. the pisa2015 school questionnaire enumerated 12 significant issues such as teacher selection and dismissal, determination of teacher starting salary, teacher salary increase, proposed school budget, and decision on budget alzhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 831 location, and asked the principal who has the authority to make decisions on these matters in the school. based on the principal’s answer, we calculate the power distribution of bsjg and pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies schools in various decisions. the results are shown in table 1. the analysis of various subjects’ power distribution found that: (1) bsjg principals have relatively limited decision-making power, and the principal accountability system is not fully functional. in bsjg, principals’ average decision-making power in various affairs is 13.28%, while the average decision-making power of principals of pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies is 39.09%. after the difference test, the difference between the two reached a very significant level (t = 25.19, p < 0.001). in high-scored countries/economies, the principal had decision-making power in eight matters, including teacher selection, teacher dismissal, school budget, budget allocation, student discipline, student evaluation policy, student enrollment policy, and curriculum setting. over 33% had dominant powers, but bsjg principals had no dominant powers in all 12 matters. (2) the decision-making power of bsjg teachers is relatively small. in bsjg, teachers’ average decision-making power was 7.44%, which is significantly lower than in high-scored countries/economies (t = 19.13, p < 0.001). teachers of high-scored countries/economies had dominant powers in selecting teaching materials, determining course content, and formulating student evaluation policies, but bsjg teachers had no dominant power in these matters. (3) bsjg school governance emphasizes collective decision-making, and the decision-making power of the school councils is relatively large. the bsjg school councils had the supreme power in determining budget allocation, formulating student discipline, and student evaluation policies. the overall average decision-making power was 28.1%. this was not only higher than the decision-making power of the principals of the four provinces (cities) but also significantly higher than the decision-making power of the school council of high-scored countries/economies (t = -14.00, p < 0.001). (4) the local education bureau of bsjg has the dominant power in school affairs decisions. the supreme power of the bsjg local education bureau is mainly manifested in the selection of teachers, the dismissal of teachers, the determination of teachers’ starting salary, the determination of teachers’ salary increase, the formulation of student enrollment policies, the selection of teaching materials, the determination of course content and the determination of course openings, etc. the average decision-making power in various matters was 46.27%. in comparison, the decision-making power of the local education bureau in high-scored countries/economies was only 19.03%, which only has the supreme power in determining the starting salary of teachers and determining the amount of teacher salary increase. a comparative analysis of the dimensions of school autonomy by adding the powers of the principal, teachers, and school council, the value obtained can reflect the school’s degree of autonomy. the results are shown in table 2. we found that the autonomy of bsjg schools is relatively low. the average autonomy of bsjg schools in various affairs is 48.8%, while the average autonomy of high-scored countries/economies schools is 68.5%. there is a statistically significant difference be zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 832 table 1. power distribution of various entities in major affairs decisionmaking (%). four provinces (cities) in china pisa2015 high-scored countries / economy principal teacher school council local education bureau country principal teacher school council local education bureau country teacher selection 21.36 4.44 26. 52 47.28 0 .41 62.96 5.47 8.24 18.87 4. 46 teacher dismissal 13.19 1.36 21.01 61.90 2.54 47.29 0.84 11.85 32.45 7.57 determine the starting salary of teachers 3.72 0.46 10.61 75.36 9.85 11.78 0. 41 6.02 34. 35 47. 44 determine the salary increase for teachers 4.80 0.84 17.70 65.98 10.68 13.37 0 .58 6.42 33. 40 46.23 propose school budget 18.67 2.26 34.76 42.83 1. 49 40.90 3.91 17.96 29.65 7.58 determine budget allocation 25.49 4.71 56.65 12.46 0 .68 62.37 8.98 20.09 7.32 1. 25 establish student discipline 21.63 18.85 49.04 8.36 2.12 43.98 30.91 15.13 6.83 3.15 develop student evaluation policy 19.22 22.56 43.68 12.79 1.76 36.60 35.08 9.86 9. 11 9.35 formulate student admissions policies 13.05 3.11 24.49 58.94 0. 41 68.23 6.87 6.30 12.07 6.52 textbook selection 4.80 8.83 12.82 68.27 5.28 20.38 62.87 6 .95 3.47 6.34 determine course content 5 .77 14.11 16.34 51.88 11.90 15.83 47.29 4 .56 9.22 23.08 determine course opening 9.74 7.14 20.13 49.63 13.35 44.53 25.80 10.88 6.70 12. 08 mean 13.28 7.44 28.10 46.27 4.92 39.09 19.03 10.34 16.92 14. 61 tween the two. bsjg schools have more than 50% of the decision-making power in five matters, including teacher selection, school budget proposal, budget allocation, formulation of student discipline, and student evaluation policies. in high-scored countries/economies, in addition to determining the starting salary of teachers and determining the amount of salary increase for teachers, schools have more than 50% power in most affairs, and their autonomy was sufficient. the significance test of the difference in the ratio found that the autonomy of bsjg schools in seven significant issues, including teacher selection, teacher dismissal, evaluation policy, enrollment policy, selection of teaching materials, curriculum content, and curriculum establishment is very significantly lower than that of high-scored countries/economies. among them, bsjg and high-scored countries/economies have the most considerable difference in autonomy in selecting textbooks, courses, and enrollment policies, with 63.7%, 44.2%, and 40.7%. zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 833 table 2. analysis of school autonomy in major affairs decision-making (%). four provinces (cities ) of china high-scored countries/economies t p-value teacher selection 52.3 76.7 9.1 0.000 teacher dismissal 35.6 60.0 8. 5 0.000 teacher starting salary 14.8 18.2 1. 6 0.116 teacher salary increase 14.8 18.2 1. 6 0.116 school budget 55.7 62.8 2.6 0.010 budget distribution 86.9 91.4 2.5 0.0 12 student discipline 89.5 90.0 0.4 0.723 evaluation policy 88.5 81.5 2.2 0.031 enrollment policy 40.7 81.4 14 .9 0.000 textbook choose 26.5 90.2 26.5 0.000 course content 36.2 67.7 12.6 0.000 course open 37.0 81.2 19.3 0.000 average autonomy 48.8 68.5 16.4 0.000 note: p value is accurate to three decimal places, 0.000 means p value is less than 0.0005. the 12 significant issues listed in the pisa2015 questionnaire can be divided into three dimensions. the first is the resource allocation dimension, including teachers’ appointment and dismissal, determining the starting salary and salary increase of teachers, proposing school budgets, and allocating budgets. the second is the dimension of course management, including course offerings, teaching materials selection, and course content determination. the third is student management’s dimension, including the formulation of student evaluation policies, student enrollment policies, and discipline. further, statistics on schools’ autonomy in each country/economy were made according to the country-division dimension. the results are shown in table 3. it is demonstrated that: (i) high-scored countries/economies had relatively high school autonomy in the three dimensions. the exception was that the autonomy scores of canada, germany, and south korea in resource allocation were lower than bsjg; canada and norway had lower autonomy in student management than bsjg. (ii) bsjg schools had the lowest autonomy in curriculum management, with a power value of only 33.33%, which was lower than all high-scored countries/economies. the average scores between the two were very significant, with a power value difference of 46.35%. (iii) in high-scored countries/economies, running a school in the dimension of resource allocation was lower than that of curriculum management and student management, while in bsjg, the autonomy of running a school in the dimension of resource allocation was relatively higher than that of course management. (iv) in the netherlands, the three dimensions’ autonomy received the highest scores, all of which scored more than 90%. new zealand, estonia, denmark, hong kong (china), and macau (china) also scored higher than 70% in all three dimensions. they could be classified as typical zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 834 table 3. sub-dimension analysis of school autonomy of each country/economy (%). resource allocation course management student management principal teac her sch. coun cil sch. autonomy principal teac her sch. coun cil sch. autonomy principal teac her sch. coun cil sch. autonomy belgium 36.90 1.75 15.07 53.72 21.87 48.87 7.02 77.77 46.16 25.48 16.56 88.21 denmark 53.42 3.67 14.25 71.34 28.10 46.65 10.44 85.20 52.88 19.03 16.27 88.18 estonia 59.56 4.39 8.59 72.53 39.57 43.31 13.14 96.02 53.05 23.37 16.24 92.66 finland 44.68 2.00 2.33 49.01 26.20 53.52 1.25 80.97 48.80 29.06 2. 54 80.39 germany 16.31 3.44 7 .13 26.88 25.36 36.38 17.48 79.22 47.72 30.37 10.88 88.97 ireland 24.22 0.88 25.01 50.12 20.82 52.89 11.18 84.88 38.42 21.95 35.31 95.68 netherlands 63.44 4.75 24.47 92.67 35.17 57.72 4.52 97.41 71.54 21.61 6.14 99.29 norway 52.73 1.44 2. 53 56. 71 33.93 39.99 1 .16 75.09 39.12 19.44 6.72 65.29 poland 50.54 1.35 1. 04 52.93 30.12 50.49 5.34 85.95 44.50 41.72 9.73 95.95 slovenia 45.26 1 .79 13.26 60.31 13.23 43.79 7.62 64.63 35.98 33.87 5 .80 75. 65 canada 29.20 2.67 7.60 39.47 25.15 28. 17 2 .12 55.44 43.53 14.59 5 .53 63. 65 australia 46. 73 4.58 8.35 59. 65 24.00 57.23 1.99 83.23 56.07 26.96 5.03 88.07 new zealand 47.08 4.60 22.73 74.41 22.30 71.59 2.25 96.15 56.93 20.29 14.30 91.53 japan 28.19 1.52 16.61 46.32 62.72 27.62 2. 19 92.54 81.86 15.67 1.28 98.81 korea 18.34 6.30 7.69 32.33 26.16 54.96 14.27 95.39 55.48 28.58 6.90 90.97 singapore 24.34 2.25 19.38 45.97 16.90 23.48 41.13 81.51 39.71 9.49 36. 44 85.65 china hong kong 37. 68 14.73 24.12 76.53 23.81 66.53 5.64 95.99 43.83 47.84 5.42 97.09 macao, china 52.75 3.02 33.98 89. 75 31.63 45.89 14.84 92.36 44.14 33.09 18.70 95.93 high score country average 39.71 3.39 11.69 54.79 26.94 45.31 7.43 79.68 49.65 24.24 10.45 84.35 four provinces (cities ) of china 14.56 2.35 28.06 44.97 6.81 10.07 16.45 33.33 17.82 14.86 39.16 71.85 high-autonomy countries/economies. (v) in japan, the resource allocation dimension’s autonomy score was low, equivalent to the bsjg level, but the autonomy score on the curriculum management and student management dimensions was relatively high, both more significant than 90%. therefore, japan is a country with low autonomy in resource allocation and high autonomy in curriculum and student management. besides, finland, singapore, germany, and south korea also belong to this type. the relationship between school governance structure and student performance which one has the advantage of large or smaller school autonomy? to explore the impact of school governance structure on student performance, we conducted a multilevel analysis. the method is as follows: first, take the scientific literacy performance of 15zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 835 year-old students in bsjg and pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies as the dependent variable, and divide the variables that affect the performance of students’ scientific literacy into two layers. the first level was set as student-level variables, and the second level was school-level variables. after establishing the zero model without adding any predictor variables, we found that the bsjg inter-school variation was 5,770.10, the intra-school variation was 5,075.71, and the intra-class correlation coefficient 1 (icc (1)) was 0.53. the inter-school variation of pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies was 3,481.17, the intra-school variation is 6,049.54, and the icc (1) value was 0.37. the inter-school variation reached a significant level, indicating that the data has a nested structure and was suitable for multilevel analysis. next, variables such as gender, grade, secs, instrumental motivation, scientific pleasure, scientific selfefficacy, and other student-level variables were added to the model to establish a random coefficient model. finally, under the premise of considering and overcoming multicollinearity, three variables, including resource allocation autonomy, the autonomy of curriculum management, and the autonomy of student management, which reflect the school’s governance structure, were also added to the model to establish a complete model. the results are shown in table 4. in bsjg, the six variables of individual student level explained 9.91% of the intra-school variation and 41.03% of the inter-school variation; the three variables of the school-level governance structure explained 2.41% of the inter-school variation, reaching a very significant level. in pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies, the individual student level variable explained 13.01% of the intra-school variation and 21.77% of the inter-school variation, and the school level variable explained 1.54% of the inter-school variation, which also reached a very significant level. this indicated that after controlling several student-level variables, the school governance structure has a relatively small direct impact on student scientific literacy test scores, but it is still an essential factor that cannot be ignored. also, there is still more than 97.5% of the variance that has not been explained in this model at the school level, implying that there are many inter-school variance variables that affect student performance, which need to be further studied. on the impact of school governance structure variables, further analysis found that the impact of different dimensions of school autonomy on student performance presents different patterns in bsjg and high-scored countries/economies. specifically: (i) curriculum management autonomy had a significant positive predictive effect on students’ scientific literacy test scores. in bsjg, every time the autonomy of school curriculum management increases by one standard deviation, the student’s scientific literacy score would increase by 35.48 points, equivalent to a one-year educational experience. (ii) student management autonomy had a significant predictive effect on students’ scientific performance. nevertheless, it is worth noting that in high-scored countries/economies, the predictive effect of student management autonomy was positive, whereas in bsjg, it was negative; that is, for every standard deviation of student management autonomy, student performance would drop by 42.54 points. (iii) the autono zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 836 table 4. two-level linear regression analysis results of the impact of school governance structure on students’ scientific literacy test scores. four provinces (cities) in china high-scored countries/economies zero model stochastic model complete model zero model stochastic model complete model ev se ev se ev se ev se ev se ev se fixed effect intercept 513.40 *** 6.46 485.51 *** 6.15 494.35 *** 14.4 9 517.16 *** 1.86 511.12 *** 2.35 469.37 *** 8.23 individual level gender 13.81 *** 2.18 13.80 *** 2.18 5.58 *** 0.94 5.57 *** 1.02 grade 39.03 *** 3.27 38.68 *** 3.25 33.53 ** 1.24 33.64 ** 1.24 secs 5.21 *** 1.37 5.11 *** 1.37 14.89 *** 0.69 14.96 *** 069 instrumental motivation -3.05 1.36 -3.01 1.60 -3.06 *** 0.49 -3.05 *** 0.49 scientific fun 1 3.20 *** 1.35 13.19 *** 1.36 17.91 *** 0.52 17.94 *** 0.52 scientific selfefficacy 3.38** 1.07 3.38 ** 1.07 6.83 ** 0.43 6. 84 ** 0.43 school level resource allocation autonomy 33.40 19.4 9 8.42 6.34 course management autonomy 35.48* 16.6 0 19.33* 9.72 student management autonomy -42.54 * 20.1 2 23.49* 9.23 random effect school variance 5,770. 10 *** 75.9 6 3,402. 39 *** 58.3 3 3,263. 23 *** 57.1 2 3,481. 17 *** 59.0 0 2,723. 16 *** 52.1 8 2,669. 60 *** 51.6 7 intramural variance 5,075. 71 71.2 4 4,572. 57 67.6 2 4,586. 79 67.7 3 6,049. 54 77.7 8 5,262. 30 72.5 4 5,262. 17 72.5 4 ev: estimated value; se: standard error. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. my of resource allocation was not significant in the model, and its impact on student performance was not statistically significant. discussion and recommendations the multilevel analysis found that the governance structure has a significant impact on students’ scientific literacy test scores, but the influence of school autonomy of different zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 837 dimensions on student performance presents different patterns. this shows that the relationship between governance structure and school effectiveness is not a simple linear relationship. therefore, while we gradually clarify and expand schools’ autonomy, we must also be clear that school autonomy is not the bigger, the better. how should the political-school relationship be handled? which subjects’ decision-making power should be expanded or appropriately restricted? how to coordinate the relationship between multiple subjects? these are issues that must be thoroughly considered and resolved in the reform of the school governance structure. expand school autonomy and establish a new political-school relationship the relationship between government and school is the focus of the reform of the school’s governance structure, but it is also a difficult point. the “outline of the plan” pointed out that it is necessary to continuously promote the separation of management and operation, and implement and expand school autonomy. it is proposed that “building a modern school system that runs schools according to law, independent management, democratic supervision, and social participation, to build up a new relationship between the government, schools, and society” (ministry of education, 2015). this policy reflects the international trend of school governance structure reform. in the past few decades, many western countries have been promoting decentralization, giving schools more autonomy to meet their needs for education (oecd, 2016). simultaneously, it also conforms to china’s national conditions and is a real need to reform the governance structure in chinese schools. it can effectively stimulate the vitality of the school and promote the independent development of the school. based on the analysis of pisa2015 data, this study found that bsjg schools have more than 50% decisionmaking power in five matters: teacher selection, school budget proposal, budget allocation, student discipline formulation, and student evaluation policy formulation, indicating that it has a certain degree of autonomy right. however, the autonomy in the seven significant teacher selection issues, teacher dismissal, evaluation policy, enrollment policy, selection of teaching materials, course content, and course opening is significantly low. among them, there was the most significant difference in autonomy with high-scored countries/economies in selecting teaching materials, curriculum, and enrollment policies. this demonstrated that, to a certain extent, bsjg still has much room for improving school governance structure and expanding school autonomy. this finding is consistent with some previous related studies (ye, 2010; li & xia, 2014) (ye, 2010). in 2015, the “several opinions of the ministry of education on further promoting the separation of education management, management, and evaluation, and promoting the transformation of government functions” (education politics law [2015] no. 5) also clearly pointed out that at present, government management education still has the phenomenon of surpassing its position, absence, and dislocation. the independent development and self-discipline mechanism of the school is not yet sound (education ministry of china, 2016). in the future, to fully stimulate the vitality of schools, we must further promote the separation of management, operation, and zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 838 evaluation, clarify and guarantee school autonomy under the law, establish a new political-school relationship, and establish a modern school system. if the government wants to change its functions, it should, under the guidance of the new public management and new public service concepts, transform from a “paddler” to a “helmsman” and then to a “server” (zhao, 2013). reduce excessive administrative approval, inspection, and appraisal of schools, let alone arbitrarily intervene in the internal micro-affair management of schools, provide more generous space for school development, and create conditions to increase school autonomy, especially in the selection of teaching materials, curriculum, and enrollment policies and teacher recruitment. of course, we must also realize that the greater the autonomy is not necessarily, the better, and the expansion of school autonomy does not necessarily bring about changes in school effectiveness and student performance. as we have found that, in bsjg, the predictive effect of student management autonomy on student performance is negative; that is, the expansion of student management autonomy does not promote the growth of student performance. therefore, while gradually expanding school autonomy, it is also necessary to improve the school’s autonomous management capabilities through management mechanisms such as training, supervision, and accountability, to achieve a dynamic balance and optimization between the government and the school. give priority to curriculum management to ensure school curriculum management autonomy curriculum management is the most critical and dynamic part of the school governance system. from the perspective of the world’s curriculum reform trend, western countries pay more attention to schools’ autonomy in curriculum management practice, so that the curriculum can fully respond to the needs of multiple stakeholders and effectively promote the development of students (yang, 2003). however, due to the long-term tradition of centralized and unified curriculum management in china, schools have relatively little autonomy. since implementing the new curriculum, china has begun to implement a three-level curriculum management policy, giving schools a certain degree of curriculum autonomy. simultaneously, the textbook also implements an outline for multiple versions of textbooks, allowing schools to choose to use different versions of textbooks. however, the fact is that due to various factors such as the enrollment policy of the high school and college entrance examination, the management methods for the selection of textbooks, and the awareness and ability of school curriculum management, the school’s actual autonomy is still minimal. our findings confirm this. curriculum management autonomy has a significant positive predictive effect on student performance, but bsjg schools have very little autonomy in curriculum management, significantly different from high-scored countries/economies. there are respective 63.7%, 44.2%, and 31.5% differences in the decision-making of materials selection, course offerings, and course content. therefore, to expand school autonomy, priority must be given to curriculum management autonomy. to effectively protect the autonomy of school curriculum management, we need to pay attention to two aspects. on the one hand, china must revise and improve zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 839 relevant policies at the national level to strive for more generous space for school curriculum management autonomy. for example, the “experimental program of compulsory education curriculum setting” stipulates the types of courses and the number of hours schools should offer in grades 1-9. the sum of school-based courses, local courses, and comprehensive practical activity courses accounted for 16-20% of the 9-year total class hours. however, some provinces and cities have strengthened comprehensive practical activities, requiring that a certain number of hours be guaranteed for research studies or practical scientific activities. in some areas, local courses have been added, and individual courses that are of little value to student development are also included in the school curriculum, which, to certain degrees, takes up school-based curriculum time. therefore, the plan needs to stipulate the proportion of school-based curriculum hours to protect the school curriculum’s autonomy effectively. the “interim measures for the selection and management of elementary and middle school textbooks” and other related documents need to be revised and improved based on extensive comments. on the other hand, local education administrative departments should strengthen relevant training to improve school curriculum management awareness and curriculum leadership. only achieve: (i) the school attaches importance to top-level design and curriculum leadership; (ii) according to relevant national policies, combined with school development prospects, educational philosophy, school characteristics, and student development needs, independently plan school curriculum; (iii) implement creatively national curriculum and local curriculum, as well as the rational development and implementation of school-based curriculum, can we realize the autonomy of curriculum management. improve the principal accountability system and strengthen the principal’s power and responsibility in school management we found that in bsjg, the average decision-making power of principals in various matters was 13.28%, while the average decision-making power of principals of pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies was 39.09%, and the difference between the two reached a very significant level. besides, the decision-making power of the principals of bsjg in the three dimensions of resource allocation, curriculum management, and student management was significantly lower than that of all pisa2015 highscored countries/economies. however, bsjg’s school council’s average decisionmaking power was 28.1%, which was significantly higher than in high-scored countries/economies. one is low, and the other is high; that is, the principal has low decision-making power, and the school council has high decision-making power. this, to a certain extent, shows that the four provinces (cities) of china place more emphasis on collective decision-making by the school council. for a long time, china has been implementing a principal accountability system in elementary and middle schools. at the same time, schools are required to establish a school committee composed of principals, teachers, representatives of students zhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 840 and parents, community representatives, and other relevant subjects, improve the faculty representative assembly system and establish a parent committee to strengthen democratic management school. this school’s internal governance structure framework not only adheres to the principal accountability system but also emphasizes collective management, reflecting the principle of democratic centralism. however, it must be admitted that if the dialectical relationship between democracy and centralism cannot be handled properly, this kind of governance structure can easily lead to the dictatorship and monopoly of the principal in some schools. in contrast, it may also lead to the de facto no-one responsible situation, even called the collective responsibility. compared with pisa2015 high-scored countries/economies, bsjg principals have poor decisionmaking, but the school council has high power. in its 2015 annual report, the oecd emphasized that principals with more power in school governance have relatively high student performance at their schools, mostly when student performance is tracked and analyzed or released to the public (oecd, 2016). in the future, we suggest that local education administrative departments appropriately expand principals’ decision-making power, enhance principals’ sense of responsibility, and improve their management efficiency. researchers should also conduct an in-depth international comparative analysis and empirical research to provide reasonable and feasible policy recommendations for the practical improvement and promotion of the principal accountability system. strengthen democratic management and promote teachers’ participation in school affairs decision-making the participation of teachers not only reflects the democratic nature of the school’s governance structure, but also affects teachers’ job satisfaction, organization and work engagement, and personal performance to a large extent. teacher participation in school management and decision-making has become the primary trend of elementary and middle school management (chu, 2009). however, we found that the average decisionmaking power of bsjg teachers in major school affairs was only 7.44%, which was significantly lower than the average level of pisa2015 high-scored families/economies. especially in the “student management” dimension, the decision-making power of bsjg teachers was not only lower than the average level of high-scored countries/economies but also lower than all their respective high-scored countries/economies. in the “course management” dimension, the decision-making power of bsjg teachers was only higher than that of singapore but lower than that of the other 17 high-scored countries/economies. several studies have confirmed this research result. chen surveyed 731 elementary and middle school teachers in seven provinces (autonomous regions) in compulsory education from the teachers’ perspective. when it comes to “important decisions related to teachers’ work, teachers in our school have many opportunities to participate,” 281 teachers mentioned that the situation was “somewhat inconsistent” in their schools. another 64 teachers expressed “not at all,” accounting for 47.2% of the total number of teachers interviewed (chen, 2011). zhao and zhou analyzed the pisa2015 principal questionnaire and found that bsjg principals scored the lowest on the “teacher participation” dimension in the performance of various dimensions of leadzhao & wang. school governance structure and student performance. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 841 ership. the frequency of various related leadership behaviors was generally lower than that of other high-scoring countries, especially in “giving employees the opportunity to participate in school decision-making.” the proportion of bsjg principals showing such behavior “at least once a month” was only 23.8%, while the proportion of other high-scored countries was between 66.7%-93.7% (zhao & zhou, 2017). the low level of teacher participation has become an important issue that cannot be ignored in the governance structure of bsjg schools. article 30 of the education law of the people’s republic of china states that “following relevant law, institutions shall ensure the participation of faculty and staff in democratic management and supervision through organizational forms such as faculty and staff congresses as the main body.” this is a clear stipulation in chinese law for teachers to participate in school governance and provides a legal basis for teachers to participate. however, it must be acknowledged that these legal provisions are only provisions in principle, lacking operational rules for implementation, and failing to clarify the legal consequences and penalties after relevant entities violate this provision, making it challenging to implement teachers’ right to participate. in the future, in addition to strengthening and improving relevant legislation, schools need to clarify further the responsibilities, powers, obligations, ways, and means of teachers’ participation in school governance in the school’s “articles” and related systems under the guidance of the legal framework and modern school governance concepts. this enables teachers to rely on laws and rules for their participation. of course, more importantly, the school should learn from the corporate governance experience and establish a governance structure and organizational culture in which the rights and responsibilities of multiple stakeholders are clear and that both restrict and promote each other. only when all subjects are concerned about school development and participate in school governance in an 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(2019). 学校治理结构及其对学生成绩的影响: 中国四省(市) 与 pisa2015高分国 家/经济体的比较分析. 全球教育展望. 48(6):24-37. https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1002-2384.2017.10.003 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1002-2384.2017.10.003 https://doi.org/10.19744/j.cnki.11-1235/f.2000.03.017 https://doi.org/10.19744/j.cnki.11-1235/f.2000.03.017 article-dechengzhao-bece_title_16nov2020 article-dechengzhao-bece_maintext16nov2020 the status quo, sources and influencing factors of professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china: an empirical study based on multiple counties in hubei province xin gong, caixing niu, jing wang central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china abstract. the professional pressure of preschool teachers in rural china is closely related to the stability of the teaching staff and the development of children. a study of 734 teachers in 155 rural preschools from three national-level poverty-stricken counties and one non-poverty county in hubei province showed that current rural preschool teachers are facing greater professional pressure. approximately 44.47% thought that the pressure is high, but has not yet reached the level of high burnout; non-poverty county preschool teachers have relatively high pressure. according to the demand-control-support (dcs) model, the main pressure stems from the work requirements of children and parents, especially parents’ excessive emphasis on children’s safety, knowledge, and skills. the results of the ordered probit model showed that the influencing factors of preschool teachers’ professional pressure in rural preschools in china include work factors such as workload and the number of children in difficulty; control factors like perseverance and professional identity; support factors such as staffing status, salary satisfaction, family support, and work support; as well as demographic variables such as age and household registration type (hukou); and certain inter-county differences exist. therefore, we recommend that the government, society, and preschools establish effective incentive and restraint mechanisms to reduce the professional pressure of preschool teachers in terms of salary, social status, parental guidance, workload, and stress training, and improve their ability to cope with pressure. meanwhile, more focus need to be given on teachers who are for the first year preschool, older in age, lacking staffing status, no non-agricultural household registration, and overloading working. gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no.1, 2020 716 best evid chin edu 2020; 6(1):715-738. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar070. how to cite: gong, x., niu, c., & wang, j. (2020). the status quo, sources and influencing factors of professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china: an empirical study based on multiple counties in hubei province. best evidence in chinese education, 6(1):715-738. keywords: rural china; preschool teachers; professional pressure; influencing factors about the authors: caixing niu, school of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. email: 1508932191@qq.com jing wang, school of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. email: 936664837@qq.com correspondence to: xin gong, associate professor, school of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. email: gongxin@mail.ccnu.edu.cn funding: this study was supported by the humanities and social science research youth fund project of the ministry of education "research on the source and flow of preschool teachers in poor rural areas in hubei province" (16yjczh022). conflict of interests: none. © 2020 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 717 question or the survival and development of rural preschool teachers, it is not only necessary to pay attention to their performance and ability, but also to their mental life and professional pressure. the professional pressure of teachers is also the so-called work pressure of teachers. it is an unpleasant and complex negative emotional experience that occurs to teachers due to the continuous action of various threatening stimuli in the teacher’s professional environment, such as tension, frustration and depression (kyriacou, 1987), and the subsequent psychological and physical discomfort (yao, 2005). from a global perspective, teachers have always been regarded as one of the most stressful professions (boyle et al., 1995). the work pressure of university teachers mainly comes from the dual tasks of scientific research and teaching; the pressure of middle school teachers mostly comes from the pressure of students’ academic performance, especially the pressure of higher-level entrance examinations; but the safety and behavior are the main sources of pressure for elementary school teachers (li et al., 2011). studies have shown that the negative effects of teacher professional pressure are generally greater than the positive effects. excessive professional pressure can easily lead to emotional instability, affect their physical health and increase negative behaviors. for example, nearly half of university teachers believe that stress affects the quality of research and teaching (miller et al., 2011); the stress of elementary and middle school teachers not only damages their health and reduces the quality of life, but also leads to absenteeism, resignation, or early retirement (tsouloupas et al., 2010), in addition, the pressure of teachers is easily transmitted to students (oberle & schonertreichl, 2016), thus affecting student development (herman et al., 2018). due to the age characteristics of young children and their lack of independence, they are easily influenced by teachers. at this stage, teachers’ professional pressure has a greater negative effect, and it is of great practical significance to pay attention to preschool teachers’ professional pressure. preschool teachers are considered one of the most stressful professions (curbow et al., 2000; moriarty et al., 2001). excessive professional pressure affects preschool teachers’ professional identity, happiness and health, teacher-child relationship, quality of classroom care and education, and children’s development, especially children’s social and emotional development (lu & han, 2006; jeon, l., 2018; pakarinen et al., 2010; whitaker et al., 2015). professional pressure affects the stability of the teaching team, and high pressure is often the main reason leading to the resignation of preschool teachers. excessive work pressure often causes teachers to produce burnout, lose their enthusiasm for work, and even begin to hate and fear preschool education. this may further affect the quality of education and teaching. at the same time, the working atmosphere and status of preschool teachers will also affect teacher cognition (hur et al., 2016). generally speaking, there are abundant researches on professional pressure in the chinese literature, but there are only ten empirical reports on preschool teachers, and there are fewer articles on professional pressure for rural preschool teachers in poverty-stricken areas. the research in this field mainly covers four aspects: the first is to f gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 718 study the professional pressure itself and summarize the current situation and sources; the second is to explore the relationship between psychological capital, competence, organizational support, professional pressure and professional happiness from a psychological perspective; the third is to analyze the life state of preschool teachers from the perspective of spiritual life, and takes professional pressure as one of the indicators; the fourth is to study professional pressure from job burnout, taking professional pressure as an influencing factor of its occurrence. from these studies, the professional pressure of chinese preschool teachers is not low, and the overall level of pressure is higher than that of moderate pressure. for example, a questionnaire survey of 302 preschool teachers in sichuan, shanxi, guangdong, liaoning, and anhui indicated that 76.2% of teachers felt they were under work pressure, and 24.9% of the surveyed teachers felt severe or extremely stressed (lu & wang, 2008; wang et al., 2015). another study based on shenyang city showed that 20.3% of the respondents felt the pressure was unbearable (qin & yan, 2007). this is basically consistent with the research conclusions in wuhu of anhui and beijing (alatambagen & liu, 2014; lai, 2011; shu & yao, 2004). a recent study found that from 2002, 2011 to 2016, the professional pressure of basic education teachers (including some preschool teachers) has gradually increased (xu, 2017). the pressure of key teachers is not necessarily lower than that of other teachers (li et al., 2013). limited empirical research shows that teachers in rural preschools are under great pressure. for example, a survey of teachers in rural private kindergartens in ya’an, sichuan found that 49.6% of teachers thought they were under a lot of pressure, and 36.3% thought they were under pressure (guo et al., 2017). although there is currently no empirical research in china for direct comparison, it is generally believed that preschool teachers face younger children, while taking care of childcare and education work at the same time, and their professional pressure is greater than that of primary and secondary school teachers (tsai et al., 2006). from the point of view of stress sources, the stressors of preschool teachers are the children and their parents (53.5%) (jiang et al., 2016; wang et al., 2015). in terms of influencing factors, there are significant differences in the work pressure of preschool teachers of different teaching age, professional title and school level. with the improvement of job titles, professional pressure shows a v-shaped change that first decreases and then increases. the 1,5002,000 cny middle-income teacher group professional pressure score is significantly higher than other income teachers and the income and environmental pressure scores of unmarried teachers are significantly higher than those of married teachers (lai, 2011). the impact of the nature of preschool has not yet gotten agreement. other factors include social status, attribution methods and stress coping methods (lu & wang, 2008; zhang et al., 2012). the work pressure of rural preschool teachers also varies with the nature of the preschool, the teacher’s marital status, age, teaching age, education level and grade (wei & dong, 2010). internationally, the group of preschool teachers in the united states faces high job requirements and lacks psychological resources and control capabilities (li-grining et al., 2010). based on a survey of 150 preschool teachers in romania, 42.0% were “very stressed” and 86% had intermediate to advanced stress levels (clipa & boghean, gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 719 2015). more than half of the 429 preschool teachers surveyed by italian researchers had musculoskeletal diseases (converson et al., 2018). researchers mainly analyzed the sources of stress from the environment and individual factors, including: children’s problem behaviors, special children in integrated classrooms, large numbers of children in the class, excessive paperwork, handling non-teaching tasks, and persisting in implementing correct early childhood education concepts, poor communication with colleagues and parents, children’s separation anxiety, and time pressure (alison & berthelsen, 1995; friedmankrauss et al., 2014). on the whole, there are few surveys and researches on preschool teachers in rural areas, especially poor rural areas. for regions with different economic development levels, there is no direct comparative study, and the analysis of influencing factors is not thorough enough. important variables such as child characteristics, teacher family support and work support, perseverance, and salary satisfaction have not been examined. after the completion of the two-term preschool three-year action plan, what is the current situation of the professional pressure of rural preschool teachers? what are the sources and influencing factors of stress? what is the difference between the professional pressure of poor and non-poor rural preschool teachers? we conducted questionnaires and interviews with more than 700 teachers from 155 rural preschools in multiple counties in hubei province, china. this paper will use the professional pressure model to analyze the professional pressure of preschool teachers in rural china for the first time, assess the current situation and sources of pressure, use an ordered probit model to examine the influencing factors of pressure, and compare the differences between poverty and non-poverty areas. this supplements the research literature on rural preschool teacher pressure, enriches the unity of empirical methods in existing research, and provides policy inspiration and suggestions for promoting the development of chinese preschool teachers and rural preschool education. psychologically, stress is a cognitive and behavioral experience composed of psychological stressors and stress responses. professional pressure is the experience and feeling of discomfort when an individual deviates from a normal or desired lifestyle at work (shi, 2003). in the analytical framework of this article (figure 1), professional pressure is regarded as a mental state. generally, work pressure has a significant positive predictive effect on job burnout (zhang et al., 2014), i.e., high professional pressure will lead to higher job burnout (zhang et al., 2009). according to the classic demandcontrol-support (dcs) model, professional pressure stems from high work requirements, low control capabilities and insufficient support (karasek et al., 1988; johnson et al., 1989). needs include work tasks and individual development requirements; control refers to the individual’s control over work, including the level of individual abilities, ability and job matching status, and decision-making initiative at work; support mainly refers to school, family and social support. in empirical research, the related variables of the influencing factors of the teacher professional pressure source analysis model usually include demographic variables such as gender, age, marital status, education level, work experience, qualification certificates, etc.; and workplace environmental gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 720 figure 1. an analysis framework of preschool teachers’ occupational stress based on the dcs model. factors such as workload and teaching resources, income, relationship with colleagues, etc. these factors may affect teachers’ perception of job needs, self-control ability, and support received. this article classifies various factors into three dimensions: demand (d), control (c), and support (s). for example, workload, student behavior problems, parent expectations, etc. are demand factors. psychological capital such as perseverance, personality characteristics, and the way of coping with stress are controlling factors. economic benefits and colleague relations are supporting factors. gender, education level, number of children, etc. are demographic variables that may affect multiple dimensions at the same time. for example, compared with men, women may have lower perceptions of their own work needs and less control, but the family burden is heavier. since higher education level and professional title may increase teachers’ selfdevelopment requirements, and also represent stronger individual ability and work decision-making initiative, teachers’ education level and professional title are both demand factors and control factors. methods this research uses a combination of questionnaire surveys and interviews. the sample of rural preschool teachers comes from three national-level poverty-stricken counties and one non-poverty-stricken county in hubei province, which are located in the east (counties a and b) and west (counties c and d) of hubei. the enrollment rate of children of the right age in poverty-stricken county is about 80%, and that of non-povertystricken county (county c) is slightly higher, and the teachers are not professional enough. after stratified sampling of county-level units, the selection of rural samples adopts a strategy of combining cluster sampling and random sampling, based on the principle of covering representative townships and village-level preschools in the corresponding area, including 78 public, 71 private and 6 publicly-built private preschools. for two of the poverty-stricken counties, cluster sampling was used to let all teachers participate in the questionnaire survey; for the other two preschools and counties with a gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 721 large number of teachers, stratified random sampling was used. in each sample preschool, most teachers filled out the questionnaire, the return rate exceeded 90%, the number of valid samples was 734, and the number of samples without missing variable information was 626. at the same time, the research team randomly interviewed at least one teacher in each preschool. among the teachers surveyed, 53%, 40%, and 7% of the teachers were from public, private, and publicly-built private preschools, respectively; and more than 60% are from national-level poverty-stricken county. in terms of demographic characteristics, the proportion of male teachers was relatively low (1%), 13% were ethnic minorities, and the average age was 32 years old, with the majority being 20-30 years old (32.83%) and 30-40 years old (50.41%). seventeen percent of teachers had a non-agricultural household registration, 92% were married, and more than 90% had at least one child. the education level of most teachers was associate degree (28.9%), 6.07% had a bachelor degree, 28% of teachers were majoring in preschool education, and 15% had preschool education qualification certificates. it can be seen that the overall educational background and professional level of rural preschool teachers were relatively low. in addition, the average teacher-student ratio of the classes led by these teachers was 0.06, which is approximately 1:17. these teachers worked an average of 9.12 hours a day, which was more than one hour over the eight-hour work system. the proportion of teachers signing contracts was 60%, and the proportion of those with institutional staffing status was only 11%. the average monthly salary was 1,563 cny. about 16% of teachers had received preschool help when personally experiencing financial difficulties. the survey used self-compiled questionnaires, and drew on related research on teachers’ professional pressure and the quality of rural preschool teachers. among them, related variables of professional pressure referred to the dcs model and the study of jiang (jiang et al., 2016). there are 92 questions in total. the current pressure was mainly measured by two indicators. the first was the question of the degree of stress, from 1 to 4 represents the degree of increase gradually. the second was a five-point scale adapted by researchers based on the mbi-es for educational practitioners’ burnout scale, which included 15 items like “feeling exhausted at the end of work”, “work all day is really stressful for me”, and “i have difficulty to concentrate”, etc. the standardized job burnout index is synthesized through factor analysis, which approximately obeys a standard normal distribution with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. the scale has been widely used in the research of individual job burnout. through the test, the cronbach’s α of the scale is 0.801, and the internal consistency is highly reliable. at the same time, the questionnaire also asked about the largest source of the stress of the teachers surveyed. according to the dcs model, part of the professional pressure of teachers came from work needs. in the professional situation of preschool teachers, work pressure mainly came from children, parents, preschool principals, colleagues and the society; the other part came from self-development needs and self-control. therefore, the professional pressure of preschool teachers may also come from themselves. therefore, the most stressor question was set as a multiple-choice question, with a total of 4 options: children and parents, preschool internal, self and society. gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 722 regarding the quantitative analysis of the influencing factors of professional pressure, the questionnaire also designed related questions. according to the dcs model, many factors affect professional pressure. generally, professional pressure stems from high job requirements, low control capabilities, and insufficient support. if the individual feels, the higher the work requirements, the lower the self-control ability, and the less support he receives, the greater the pressure he feels. therefore, the questionnaire asked about the content of the job requirements of the surveyed teachers. for example, workload and the number of children with difficulties in class; ability and psychology that reflect control dimensions, such as education level, perseverance, and professional identity, some of which also demand dimensions; problems that reflect support dimensions, such as contract signing, salary, satisfaction with salary, relationship with colleagues. besides, the questionnaire also contains demographic variables that affect the three dimensions together. among them, perseverance character is a kind of psychological capital, a perceptual evaluation, and control factor, and indicators such as depression and lack of confidence in the management of behavioral relationships. the measurement method comes from the chinese version of the grit scale developed by psychologist angela duckworth. it is a five-point scale, including eight items such as “new ideas and projects sometimes distract me” and “setbacks cannot make me discouraged.” its cronbach coefficient is 0.607. the professional identity index’s measurement tool comes from the research of tang et al. is a four-point scale, including 18 items such as “i very much agree with the profession of preschool teachers,” and the cronbach coefficient is 0.803. both indices have undergone factor analysis and standardization. the family support index is a composite of the support level of family members, including five items. the job support variable is measured by the degree to which “preschool has helped solve personal financial difficulties.” the questionnaire was distributed at noon and was filled out by the teacher or an assistant. the questionnaire data is analyzed by descriptive statistics and systematic quantitative model analysis through stata 14.0 software. since the main dependent variable stress degree is an ordered discrete variable with a value of 1-4, and does not obey a normal distribution, the researcher chose an ordered probit model and used the oprobit command to estimate. the model is as follows: among them, y is the ordered categorical variable “pressure degree”. if y*<=c1, y=1, it means “no pressure” if c1<y*<=c2, y=2, it means “less pressure” if c2<y*<=c3, y=3, it means “high pressure” if y*>c3, y=4, it means “huge pressure” gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 723 cj (j=1, 2, 3) is the critical value of the professional pressure index in ascending order from one degree to the next. the coefficient of c and the independent variable can be estimated by the maximum likelihood estimation method. as mentioned earlier, the influencing factors in the model mainly include: (1) demographic variables such as gender, age, ethnicity, education, and household registration; (2) education level, professional match degree, qualification certificate holding status, perseverance character, control factors such as professional identity, some of which are also demand factors; (3) demand factors such as the number of working hours per day, the type of class, the teacher-student ratio, the number of children with difficulties in the class, etc.; (4) supporting factors include contract signing , staffing status, salary, satisfaction with salary, colleague relations, school support, etc. in addition, there are school types and countylevel virtual variables to control the differences between campuses and counties. in the interview method, a semi-structured interview outline was used, which focused on content such as the degree of preference for the current job, the degree of stress, the reasons for the stress, the way of dealing with stress, the size of the class, and whether the children were difficult to teach. the choice of interview time was flexible, usually during interclass, lunch break or after get off work. in addition to on-site notes, interviews were recorded through audio recording after consent was obtained. the qualitative data collected was analyzed by classification method. before issuing the questionnaire and starting the interview, the team members who received uniform training introduced the identity of the researcher and the research theme, obtained the consent and trust of the interviewees, and tried to ensure that the data and information were true and effective. results and analysis the status quo of professional pressure of preschool teachers in rural china in table 1, the surveyed rural preschool teachers faced greater professional pressure, 36.83% of the teachers believed that they were under pressure at work, and 44.47% believed that the pressure was high. among them, 40% of teachers worked for 10 hours or more per day, 2 hours more than normal working hours. during the survey, many teachers said, “i don’t have enough time to rest at noon every day.” on the other hand, the job burnout level of the sample teachers was not very high. the maximum personal index is only 3.87 (the theoretical maximum level is 5). only 4.91% of the teachers chose the high levels of 4 and 5, no collapse appeared. this was lower than the level (22.17% of burnout type) found by li et al. in the survey of preschool teachers in beijing and tianjin (li et al., 2019). at the same time, there were still 43.24% of the teachers surveyed chose to “feel exhausted when off work”, which was worthy of the attention of policy makers. a teacher pointed out in an interview, “i feel very tired and stressed, there are too many children in the class and they are noisy, and my voice is uncomfortable.” compare guo et al.’s (2017) (49.6% has high pressure, 36.3% has gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 724 table 1. distribution of stress status and job burnout of preschool teachers in the surveyed rural areas. county frequency distribution percentage of pressure (%) mean of pressure (1-4) mean of job burnout (1-5) sample # 1: no 2: low 3: high 4: huge total 3.96 14.73 36.83 44.47 3.22 2.43 733 psc a 6.67 20.00 39.05 34.29 3.01 1.96 105 b 9.09 15.91 25.00 50.00 3.16 2.13 44 d 3.44 18.21 43.3 35.05 3.10 2.44 291 non psc c 2.73 9.22 31.4 56.66 3.42 2.62 293 note: because one of the 734 total samples is missing pressure information, the number of samples here is 733. the total number of samples 733 is also used in the statistics of pressure information below. psc: poverty-stricken county; non-psc: non-poverty-stricken county. 4:huge = very high. figure 2. comparison of frequency distribution of stress levels between poverty-stricken counties and non-poverty-stricken counties. gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 725 huge or very high pressure), zhang’s pressure on preschool teachers in wuhan city (48% expressed huge or very high (zhang, 2016) and jiang et al.’s pressure on rural preschool teachers in 2016 (35.0% showed the pressure was very high, 32.7% was under high pressure), as well as wang & gan’s survey of the professional pressure situation of rural elementary school teachers in shaoguan city, guangdong province close to the same period (53.4% were under high pressure, 7.77% under very high pressure) (wang & gan, 2018), this study found rural preschool teachers have a higher level of professional pressure. there were certain regional differences in the level of professional pressure of teachers. as shown in figure 2, preschool teachers in non-poverty-stricken counties faced greater pressure compared to poverty-stricken counties. the level of job burnout of teachers in both povertyand non-poverty-stricken county was roughly the same, and the level of job burnout of teachers in eastern counties was significantly higher than that of western counties. from the perspective of demographic variables, the professional pressure levels of male and female teachers were not different. there were certain differences in the professional pressure of teachers of different ages. among them, teachers in the 40-50 years old had the highest professional pressure (mean: 3.37). the professional pressure of teachers with rural household registration is higher (3.25 vs. 3.10). the average professional pressure of married teachers was higher (3.24 vs. 2.97), and the professional pressure of minority teachers was slightly lower (3.05 vs. 3.25), but these differences did not pass the significance test in the influencing factor model. the sources of professional pressure for preschool teachers in rural china in the preschools surveyed, the professional pressure of teachers mainly came from children and parents. as shown in table 2, among the sample teachers, 63.74% thought that the pressure comes from children and parents, 10.54% from preschool, 15.81% from themselves, and 9.90% from the society. combining the dcs model and various survey data, it is found that external job requirements are the main source of pressure for preschool teachers in rural china. many teachers interviewed also believe that children’s safety in the kindergarten and communication with parents are the biggest source of stress. on the one hand, safety issues have always been their biggest concern, because once a child has any problems in preschool, even if it is very small, it is easy to be complained or embarrassed by parents. moreover, the mentality of rural preschool parents eager to see the effects of preschool education can easily increase the pressure on teachers. teachers are faced with the everincreasing requirements of the new generation of parents, and the pressure of the parents’ expectation of literacy and mathematics education. this is in great conflict with china authority’s idea of preventing “elementary schooling in pre-school education” and has increased the difficulty of teachers’ work. as a teacher in county c said, “some parents do not understand their work (children pee in their pants, scratch their face, and fail to learn knowledge), and they gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 726 table 2. distribution of sources of professional stress for rural preschool teachers. source total sample sub-sample f % male female < 50 yr ≥ 50 yr ahr non-ahr children & parents 399 63.74 42.86 63.72 64.39 20.00 65.76 53.85 preschool 66.0 10.54 0 10.34 10.01 26.67 10.00 11.89 self 99.0 15.81 0 16.28 16.27 6.67 16.44 14.69 society 62.0 9.90 57.14 9.66 9.32 46.67 7.80 19.58 total 626 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 note: f: frequency; ahr: agricultural household registration; non-ahr: nonagricultural household registration. table 3. types of classes brought by preschool teachers and professional stress. class percentage (%) professional pressure mean sd min max 2-3 yr 2.15 3.33 0.62 2 4 3-4 yr 28.26 3.29 0.83 1 4 4-5 yr 27.12 3.23 0.84 1 4 5-6 yr 28.26 3.09 0.88 1 4 6-7 yr 14.20 3.23 0.81 1 4 have not considered how many children a teacher has to bring and do not give themselves the opportunity to explain.” a teacher in county b mentioned, “the work pressure is high, and every day i must be nervous and pay attention to the behavior of each child, worrying about safety issues and not explaining to my parents.” a teacher in county d has similar feelings, “sometimes parents feel that their children have not learned anything at school, so they feel stressed.” in addition, many teachers pointed out, “the pressure of work comes from more children, and the children have different personalities, some are naughty, and some are obedient”; “work is also very tiring, there are many children in the class, it is very noisy, and many children like to report but don’t like to listen to the teacher’s words. i have to emphasize a sentence many times.” specifically, the pressure from children and parents and the work requirements of preschool have increased the workload of teachers. for example, “there are monthly activities in the park, such as outdoor open classes, reading competitions (inter-class appraisal), and children’s activities on children’s day, all of which require teachers’ gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 727 design plans, which are relatively difficult.” the descriptive statistics show that professional pressure and working hours are a significant factor. it is directly proportional (spearman rank correlation coefficient is 0.11), and is significantly correlated at the level of p = 0.01. at the same time, the professional pressure of a teacher is related to the class type. table 3 shows that the average professional pressure scores of 2-3yr childcare teachers and 3-4 preschool teachers are higher than those of 3-4yr, 4-5yr and 5-6yr classes. more accurate results need to be verified by the ordered probability selection model. the heavy workload is even more serious for small-scale private preschools with only one teacher per class. as one interviewed teacher said, “some parents will pick up their children home for lunch breaks, but some children will stay in the class to play. we need to feed, receive parents, give homework, and take care of some of the children who are not sleeping. so every day it is very common to work over 12 hours.” relatively speaking, the self-control ability they felt has a certain effect. for example, in the way of coping with stress, most of the teachers with greater stress did not know how to deal with such stress. many teachers mentioned, “what else can i do, i can only rest more on my own”, “every day i work under a lot of pressure, and i am already stunned when i get home, and i can only transmit my pressure to my children.” in addition, the professional pressure of teachers is closely related to security factors such as staffing status and salary, indicating the effect of control and support factors on pressure perception. for teachers with institutional staffing status, only 33.72% felt “high pressure”, but for teachers without the staffing status, the proportion increased to 45.9%. teacher professional pressure was negatively correlated with the salary satisfaction (spearman’s rank correlation coefficient is -0.2416), and it is significant at the level of p=0.01. this means that the higher the teacher’s satisfaction with the salary, the lower the professional pressure. as shown in figure 3, for the teachers with the highest salary satisfaction, only 14.29% of the teachers expressed a high pressure; for those teachers with the lowest salary satisfaction, 66.28% expressed a high pressure. in addition, none of the interviewed teachers mentioned that they received insufficient family support; a few teachers pointed out that “the burden is heavier at home”, but “in many cases, it is better to go back home despite the pressure.” at the same time, some teachers mentioned the disadvantages of school support, such as “the principal is too strict, does not respect the teacher, has a low status in the school, and parents have prejudice against them, and there is no promotion opportunity and qualifications”, so “there is no hope for work.” in terms of sub-samples, 16.72% of preschool teachers in non-poverty areas believed that the biggest source of pressure was preschool. in contrast, the proportion of preschool teachers in poverty-stricken areas was only 6.12%, and the proportion of choosing children and parents as the biggest stressor was also significantly higher (67.12% vs. 58.02%). from the perspective of demographic variables, different groups of teachers had different sources of professional pressure. as shown in table 3, for male teachers, a large part of the stressor came from the society (57.14%), surpassing “children and parents”, which is only 9.66% for female teachers. for preschool teachers who are older than 50 years old, the biggest stressor was not only children and parents gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 728 figure 3. the relationship between professional stress and salary satisfaction. (20.00%), but society (46.67%). for rural preschool teachers with non-agricultural household registration, the pressure from the society was also higher (19.58% vs. 7.80%). analysis of the ordered probit model of influencing factors of professional pressure the results of the ordered probit model of the factors affecting the degree of professional pressure are shown in table 4. in terms of demographic variables, age had a positive effect on the professional pressure of teachers. the older you are, the more likely you are to feel “high pressure.” in addition, if rural preschool teachers have a rural household registration, the more likely they were to feel “high pressure.” the number of years in school had a positive effect on teacher pressure. other demographic variables related to ability, such as education level and qualification certificate holding status, did not show a significant impact. consistent with the source analysis, most of the variables that reflect job requirements had significant effects. among them, the number of working hours per day was positively correlated with the degree of work stress. rural preschool teachers often spent a lot of time on daily management tasks, including taking care of children, preparing lessons, communicating with parents, organizing texts, and participating in training. the professional pressure level of teachers who care the 3-4 yr old children was significantly higher than that of other classes, which was consistent with the results of descrip gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 729 table 4. model results of factors affecting professional pressure. variable model 1: no missing value processed model 2: mean replacement of missing values and missing labeling method demographic characteristics gender: male -0.261 (0.640) 0.268 (0.490) nationality: minority 0.277 (0.215) 0.128 (0.190) age 0.024** (0.009) 0.015* (0.009) ahr 0.301** (0.138) 0.326*** (0.124) married 0.364 (0.311) 0.304 (0.270) no child 0.157 (0.290) 0.019 (0.256) capability characteristics: demand and control ccp member 0.078 (0.192) 0.148 (0.174) education level -0.008 (0.047) -0.007 (0.043) major in preschool 0.041 (0.111) 0.070 (0.104) preschool qualification 0.165 (0.144) 0.197 (0.132) teaching years 0.029 (0.020) 0.032* (0.018) work characteristic 1: demand daily work hours 0.092** (0.045) 0.091** (0.042) 3-4 yr old children 0.223** (0.108) 0.212** (0.103) 2-3 yr old children 0.273 (0.333) 0.237 (0.309) teacher/child ratio 2.384 (1.870) 2.880* (1.726) no. of difficult children 0.012*** (0.005) 0.011** (0.005) work characteristic 2: demand and control transfer teacher -0.116 (0.206) -0.090 (0.185) professional title 0.155 (0.113) 0.126 (0.105) work characteristic 3: support contracted -0.033 (0.107) -0.041 (0.101) institutional staff -0.538** (0.211) -0.529*** (0.194) salary 0.0001 (0.0001) 0.0001 (0.0001) psychological characteristics: control salary satisfaction -0.162*** (0.057) -0.174*** (0.052) perseverance -0.099* (0.057) -0.076* (0.050) professional identity -0.142*** (0.055) -0.079 (0.049) social support: control family support -0.178** (0.079) -0.174** (0.074) school helped personal financial difficulties ever -0.366*** (0.125) -0.326*** (0.119) preschool type: demand public preschool 0.128 (0.116) 0.113 (0.107) public-built private 0.206 (0.220) 0.342 (0.209) county virtual variable (county a as the reference) b 0.239 (0.290) 0.378 (0.237) c 0.487** (0.229) 0.559*** (0.211) d 0.363 (0.229) 0.345 (0.210) n 626 733 note: *, **, *** represent the significance level of 10%, 5% and 1% respectively. arh: agricultural household registration; ccp: chinese communist party. gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 730 tive statistical analysis. the sample number of teachers for 2-3 yr children was limited, and there was no significant difference, but the coefficient was also positive. in addition, the greater the number of difficult children in the class (including left-behind children, children with family financial difficulties and children in need of special education), the greater the work pressure of teachers. there was a negative correlation between the perseverance character that reflects the controlling factors and professional pressure, indicating that the teacher’s own psychological capital will affect their perception and response to pressure. positive individual adjustment factors in classic research include tolerance to change, self-esteem, non-individualism, persistence, strong personality, and non-a-type personality (shi, 2003). in addition, teachers with high professional identity were less stressed. the pressure-relieving effect of institutional staffing status is extremely significant, reflecting the importance of the support factors of welfare and job security to rural preschool teachers in china. the stress of teachers without staffing status was significantly greater than that of teachers with staffing status. approximately 45.90% of teachers without staffing status expressed high pressure. among teachers with staffing status, the proportion was only 33.72%, a difference of 12.28 percentage points. salary had no significant effect, but satisfaction with salary can significantly reduce the degree of stress, which is consistent with the dcs model and the pay-back model (luo et al., 2011). in addition, the other two indicators of the support dimension in the dcs model showed significant effects: first, the degree of family support was significantly negatively correlated with the professional pressure of rural preschool teachers; second, if preschool had helped teachers solve personal financial difficulties, and the probability of the teacher “feeling high pressure” is significantly lower. discussion the professional pressure status of rural preschool teachers is related to the stability of teacher resources, the quality of preschool education and the development of children. existing studies rarely involve the professional pressure of preschool teachers in poor rural areas, and lack systematic and strict quantitative model analysis. based on the survey data in the rural areas of hubei and the demand-control-support model in the professional pressure theory, this article empirically analyzes the current situation, sources and influencing factors of the professional pressure of teachers in rural preschools. the main conclusions and discussions are as follows: first, the current preschool teachers in rural china are facing greater professional pressure. among the teachers surveyed, 44.47% thought the pressure was extremely high, and 36.83% thought the pressure was high. this level is relatively high compared with previous studies on the pressure of rural preschool teachers. meanwhile, the teacher’s job burnout is within a tolerable range and there is no large-scale collapse, so it should be viewed in a comprehensive and objective manner; 43.24% of the teachers surveyed still felt exhausted when they were off work. in view of the negative effect of excessive work pressure, the professional pressure of rural preschool teachers deserves attention and further exploration. gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 731 second, in general, the professional pressure of preschool teachers in rural china mainly comes from children and parents. from the perspective of the dcs model, the main reason for the high professional pressure of rural preschool teachers was the high job demand, and this demand mainly came from the job requirements of others. approximately 63.74% believed that the greatest pressure came from children and parents, 10.54% thought it was mainly from preschool, 15.81% thought the pressure was mainly from themselves, and 9.90% of teachers thought it was mainly from society. the interviewed teachers were worried about the safety of their children, and at the same time, they often found it difficult to deal with elementary problems such as parents’ over-concern with their children’s pronunciation and arithmetic. this level is consistent with jiang et al.’s findings on 7 national-level poverty alleviation counties in 6 provinces and cities in central, western, southern, and northern china, and wang et al.’s research on changchun preschool teachers, and the proportion is higher (63.74% vs. 42.4% vs. 53.5%); but from the source of the pressure of teachers themselves, it is lower than the study by jiang et al. (15.81% vs. 27.0%). descriptive statistical analysis also found that professional pressure is related to work requirements and control factors such as working hours, class type, staffing status, and salary satisfaction. third, based on the results of the ordered probit model, the influencing factors of the professional pressure of rural preschool teachers include age, household registration, number of years in school, workload, class characteristics, number of children in difficulty, perseverance, professional identity, staffing status, salary satisfaction degree, family support, work support and inter-county differences. according to the dcs model, the positive effect of age may be due to the fact that older teachers are already at the mature stage of their careers, playing a more important role in preschool, and having a stronger need for self-development. moreover, due to the relatively low level of education of older preschool teachers, poor health, lower acceptance of new knowledge, and weak control over work content, work pressure is naturally greater. household registration status largely reflects the socio-economic status and social resources of teachers and their families. if teachers working in rural areas have urban household registration, the resources from their families may be better, and then the preschool environment may be better. the ability to withstand pressure is stronger with stronger control over the work, and the perception of stress is weaker. the longer of years the teachers taught in school, the richer the work experience they would get, and then the stronger the ability and the higher the degree of stress resistance would be. of particular importance is the fact that workload has a positive effect on professional pressure and burnout, which again verifies the discovery that the largest source of stress comes from work requirements. the work pressure of teachers is positively correlated with the number of children with difficulties in class, which is in line with the reality of preschools in rural china. in the interview, a teacher pointed out, “there are more left-behind children in my class. two children are brought by their parents and the others are brought by grandparents. it is more difficult to communicate, especially when the children are injured because of collisions. during the activities, teaching children to dance and sing is difficult, and he will ignore you.” although the teacher-student ratio in rural preschools gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 732 is also problematic, basically it has not achieved “two teachers and one childcare worker” (in many cases there is only one teacher in a class), but due to the lack of internal differences, almost all teachers face this problem, the model found no significant results. under the premise of controlling other factors, factors such as perseverance, professional identity and family support can also reduce professional pressure. existing literature shows that self-esteem, self-motivated and perseverance are good predictors of professional pressure (yang & wu, 2013; li et al., 2013). the effect of professional identity in reducing stress is consistent with a study from the united states (buettne et al., 2016). as a teacher in county d mentioned in an interview, “work pressure is okay, because i like this job, so i feel a little more relaxed.” salary satisfaction can significantly reduce the degree of stress, while the relationship between salary itself and work pressure is not significant. it shows that teachers’ psychological feelings about wages are more important, that is, under greater work intensity, the low wages perceived by preschool teachers are likely to cause psychological imbalance, low professional accomplishment, and higher professional pressure. it can be seen from the survey and model results that teachers’ recognition of their salary is a key factor. some teachers have lower absolute salaries, but they are relatively acceptable in poor rural areas. they also believe that their academic background is consistent with the salary they receive, and their satisfaction with salary is not necessarily low, and vice versa. family and school support are substantially negatively correlated with the professional pressure of rural preschool teachers, indicating that effective social support is an important guarantee for individuals to cope with stress. fourth, the professional pressure of preschool teachers in non-poor rural areas is higher than that in poor rural areas, and their sense of job burnout is roughly the same. this seems to go against the general expectation, but according to our research, we found that there are more preschools in rural areas in non-poverty-stricken counties. the competition among preschools is fierce. more workloads and work requirements can easily lead to greater professional pressure. other reasons may lie in: rural preschool teachers in non-poverty areas have relatively high levels of education (47.44% and 27.67% of associate degree and above), and higher requirements for their own development; preschools in developed rural areas have a higher level of teacher management and the requirements may be higher. from the perspective of pressure sources, 16.72% of preschool teachers in non-poverty areas believe that their biggest source of stress is preschool, which is nearly 11 percentage points higher than that in povertystricken areas, and the proportion of choosing children and parents as the biggest source of stress is also lower. in addition, the levels of professional pressure and burnout of rural teachers in the eastern region were higher than those in the western region. according to the analysis of the survey, this may be because there are more preschools in the low-mountain plains in the eastern region, and the competition is more intense than in the high-mountainous regions of the western hubei. recommendations gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 733 the results of this empirical study provide important policy inspiration for adjusting the professional pressure of preschool teachers in rural china and better guaranteeing the core quality of rural preschool education. for preschool teachers, moderate professional pressure helps to enhance their work motivation, but long-term excessive pressure can cause teachers’ bad mood, negative slack, high resignation rate and absenteeism, which is not conducive to the development of preschool education (xu, 2003). considering that the overall pressure of teachers in rural preschools is relatively high, the government and schools should establish effective incentive and restraint mechanisms to effectively help teachers reduce work pressure in terms of wages and benefits, social status, parental guidance, and workload; teachers should also actively respond to professional pressure, improve emotional management and control ability, reasonably regulate pressure, and turn it into development motivation. specifically, we recommend the following points. first, the government and schools should introduce corresponding policies and measures to reduce the workload of teachers in rural preschools, so as to appropriately ease the pressure on teachers. for example, increase the allocation of rural preschool teachers, rationally and effectively arrange and allocate workload, and reduce their nonteaching workload. at the same time, the government and society should take measures to improve and protect the social and economic status of rural preschool teachers. preschool leaders should try their best to create an optimal educational environment and working atmosphere for teachers to reduce the stressors. second, given that the source of pressure mainly comes from children and parents, the government and schools need to provide more parent education and propaganda to improve parents’ awareness, so that they can learn more about the nature and complexity of preschool teachers’ work. at the same time, actively guide preschool teachers to conduct home-school cooperation and communication to reduce the pressure from parents. due to the low-age characteristics of children and the fact that rural parents have not yet formed a scientific preschool education concept that conforms to the law of children’s growth and national guidelines, it is particularly important for teachers to gain the understanding and cooperation of parents in preschool education for their professional happiness. third, since professional pressure has not caused excessive job burnout, it is necessary to increase the stress resistance of rural preschool teachers, rather than simply alleviate the pressure. psychologically, not all stress is bad. yerkes and dodson first studied the different effects of stress and proposed the famous “yerkes-dodson law”, that is, before reaching a certain point, as the level of stress and arousal increases, work performance also improves; after this point is exceeded, work performance begins to decline. moderate pressure can not only stimulate the engine and improve work efficiency; it also has the functions of arousing, adjusting, and strengthening, which are the basic conditions for individuals to cope with life events (yerks & dodson, 1908). a variety of ways can improve teachers’ self-stress management and control ability, so that they can devote themselves to the work of preschool education. preschool teachers should recognize the importance of their work for themselves, students, parents and gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 734 society, and constantly remind and improve themselves. in addition, society and schools should increase social, economic and psychological support for rural preschool teachers. active support is a protective factor, which can protect teachers’ enthusiasm for work, enhance professional identity, and improve their ability to resist stress, so as to play a positive role in professional pressure. whereas empirical studies have found that relative wages have a greater support and protection effect, and wage satisfaction is highly correlated with their relative wage levels among those around them. therefore, the government should provide satisfactory salaries for teachers in public preschools, and private preschools should also consider market demand and the long-term development of schools to provide teachers with reasonable salaries. fourth, the study found that under the same county, age, workload, staffing status, etc., rural preschool teachers with perseverance and a high sense of professional identity have less pressure to report, indicating that these teachers can better deal with professional pressure. therefore, psychological capital training courses can be added to the aforementioned training to improve teachers’ social and emotional skills and perseverance character, thereby reducing the transmission of teacher pressure to children. teachers who are under pressure should be provided with timely mentor guidance and psychological counseling opportunities, and consideration should be given to appropriately adding anti-stress content in business training, and innovating teacher education and training methods according to needs. for example, increase meditation training. considering that the number of years of teaching has a significant impact on alleviating stress, the government and preschools should increase training opportunities, use senior teachers to supervise and instruct junior teachers, improve new teachers’ work ability and professional identity, and strengthen their ability to resist stress. in conclusion, coping with the professional pressure of preschool teachers requires the concerted efforts of the government, society, schools, and teachers to form a joint force. our research results also demonstrated that while focusing on preschool teachers as a whole, we should also focus on rural preschool teachers for the child group of 3-4 year olds, and teachers who are older, lack staffing status, have no nonagricultural household registration, and overloading working. in view of the fact that the pressure on teachers in national-level poverty-stricken county preschools is not necessarily higher than that in non-poverty-stricken counties, relevant policies and measures to reduce pressure should cover the wider rural areas. gong et al. the professional pressure faced by preschool teachers in rural china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 735 references alatambagen, & liu, x.m. 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(2012). the influence of kindergarten teachers’ attribution style on their job burnout. preschool education research, 2012(8):5054. [chinese] received: 11 may 2020 revised: 12 june 2020 accepted: 22 june 2020 the chinese version of this article has been published in xueqian jiaoyu yanjiu, 2020; 2020(2):18-31. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 龚欣, 牛彩星, 王鶄. (2020). 农村幼儿园教师职业压力现状, 来源及影响因素. 学前教育研究, 2020(2):18-31. article-xingong-bece_title_22sep2020 article-xingong-bece_maintext22sep2020 peer effect of middle school students: a natural experiment based on puberty developmental maturity yuhong du, yanbin guo beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. peer is an important factor affecting the academic performance of middle school students. domestic research has discussed this issue, but there are still some shortcomings in solving endogeneity aspects. therefore, this study used the random effect of natural changes in pubertal development and maturity of middle school students in two years adjacent to the same class to identify peer effects due to changes in pubertal development and maturity; at the same time, first-order difference and quantile regression are used to solve the endogeneity problems in general regression analysis. we found that girls’ developmental maturity is significantly negatively related to their performance, and boys’ developmental maturity is significantly positively related to their performance, which indicates that there is a gender difference in the impact of adolescent developmental maturity on academic performance of middle school students. in addition, the peer effect is also heterogeneous, that is, in overall, the lower the development maturity of girls in a class, the more conducive to the improvement of student performance; the higher the maturity of students in class, the more conducive to the improvement of student performance. the findings of this study have certain policy implications for adjusting the school age of school-age children. best evid chin edu 2019; 4(1):425-442. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar019. keywords: peer effect; natural experiment; developmental maturity; heterogeneity correspondence to: yuhong du, professor, director, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. e-mail: dyh@bnu.edu.cn. du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 426 introduction n the framework of the educational production function, family, school, student personal characteristics and peers are all important factors affecting student academic performance. in the past few decades, a large number of studies have conducted a lot of fruitful discussions on the factors of families, schools, and students, and can accurately estimate the role of each factor; however, there is no clear conclusion about the role of peers, especially in the mainland of china, and is particularly very rare on the peer effects in middle school students. therefore, this study attempts to analyze the peer effect of middle school students in mainland of china. literature review peer effect is also called peer effect. research on the role of peers in education can be traced back to the coleman report (1966). the study found that peers, families, teachers, schools and other factors affect students’ academic performance. most of the early studies were limited to the discussion of the relationship between peers and academic performance (caldas & bankston, 1997; link & mulligan, 1991), and did not overcome the endogeneity problem in estimation. in 2000, hoxby (2000b) for the first time analyzed the peer effect in schools by using the random factors of the birth of the population, and relatively accurately estimated the peer effect in education. hoxby’s idea of using natural experiments to overcome endogeneity to estimate peer effects has gradually gained importance in subsequent related research. concepts, pathways, and heterogeneity the definition of peer is the first step in the study of peer effects, and it is also a major challenge in the study of peer effects. early studies often chose classmates (sacerdote, 2001; zimmerman, 2003), class level (ding & lehrer, 2007), and grade level (hoxby, 2000b; hanushek, et al., 2003) as individual student peers. in recent years, there have been an increasing number of researches using students’ self-reported friends (ilmarinen, et al., 2017; lavy & sand, 2018) as peers for analysis. this social networkbased peer effect is obviously more real, but data acquisition is difficult and generally difficult to achieve. about the author: yanbin guo, graduate candidate, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. e-mail: ybguo@mail.bnu.edu.cn funding: this study was supported by the 2015 major research project of the ministry of education’s philosophy and social science research project “relationship and contribution of education and economic development” (project #: 15jzd040). conflict of interests: none. i du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 427 in addition to defining peers, clarifying the concept of peer effects is also the basis for conducting related research. there has been no consensus on the concept of peer effects. at present, there are several representative views: sacerdote (2011) believed that the peer effect includes almost all external factors that are not marketor price-driven, such as peer background, current behavior, or educational attainment. lu & zhang (2007) believed that the peer effect is the interaction between people, which directly affects the performance of relevant actors. du & yuan (2016) defined the peer effect in education as the influence of the background, behavior, and performance of peers in dormitories, classes, grades, or schools on student performance or behavior. there are various ways to influence this effect. based on the above analysis, the author considers the effects of natural characteristics, background, behavior, performance, and non-cognitive characteristics of peers in schools on student performance, behavior, and non-cognitive skills as peer effects. there are many ways in which the peer effect can play a role, and peer performance is not the only way to generate peer effects. hoxby (2000b) believed that the ways of peer effect include: mutual help between students; students’ inherent ability to affect peers through the spillover effect of knowledge and the impact on class positioning; behaviors affected by the environment also affect peers; disability, race, gender, and family income also play a role; peer effects can also take a part through the attitudes of teachers and administrators to students. earlier studies on peer effects were mostly limited to the description of correlations. strategies such as ordinary least squares were often used, but these methods did not solve the problem of endogeneity well. one of the challenges in estimating peer effects is endogeneity. according to the theories of manski (1993), manski (1995), and moffitt (2000), the endogeneity of the peer effect estimation mainly comes from selection bias and reflection problem. parents often choose a school, class, or even a teacher for their children based on their family economic and social background, making it difficult to simply attribute changes in students’ academic performance to peers, which is the so-called self-selection bias. individual students and their peers live in the same environment and receive the same education, and there will inevitably be mutual influences between each other. that is, students are not only affected by peers, but also students themselves. moreover, these two effects often occur at the same time, and it is often difficult to separate them, which causes the problem of simultaneous bias in the estimation of peer effects. peer effects are also heterogeneous, meaning that students of different types or abilities may be affected to different degrees and directions by peers. hoxby (2000b) found that the peer effect is asymmetric. subsequent research has gradually verified this conclusion, but the existing researches on the direction of heterogeneity were not completely consistent. the conclusions mainly include two major categories: the smaller the differences in student abilities or types, the better the student’s development (ding & lehrer, 2007; hoxby & weingarth, 2005), and the larger the differences in student abilities or types, the better the student’s development (carman & zhang, 2012; vigdor & nechyba, 2006). in addition, the identification of heterogeneity often uses two stratedu & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 428 gies: interaction (hoxby & weingarth, 2005) or quantile regression (ding & lehrer, 2007; hanushek, et al., 2003). recognition strategy in recent years, with the continuous improvement of causal inference technology, the identification of peer effects has become more accurate. natural experiments (angrist & lang, 2004; hoxby, 2000b) and quasi-experimental studies have gradually attracted attention. the key to natural experiments is to find the appropriate random factors. since hoxby (2000b), the research of natural experiments has been favored by the social sciences. when it comes to natural experiments, you first need to clarify the relationship among random control experiment, natural experiment, and conventional observational studies. standard random experiments generally need to meet three conditions (freedman et al, 2007). first, compare. compare the differences between the experimental group and the control group after the experiment. second, random assignment. the subjects were randomly assigned to the control group and the experimental group. third, manipulation or intervention by researcher. the researchers gave different experimental treatments to the experimental group and the control group. the ideal random experiment needs to fully meet the three conditions mentioned above. traditional observational research can often only meet the first condition, that is, “comparing” the differences between different research objects, and the conditions of “random allocation” and “human intervention / control” are often difficult to meet. natural experiment is a research method between random experiment and traditional observational research. natural experiments are different from traditional observational studies. because the former can meet the first condition of random experiments, that is, “comparison”, it can at least guarantee that the sample is random (random) or approximately random (as random), which is also a natural experiment closer to random experiments than traditional observational research. the reason is that it should be said that randomness is the key to natural experiments (dunning, 2012). therefore, finding enough exogenous and uncontrolled factors is a prerequisite for conducting natural experiments. “nature” in natural experiments often comes from some phenomena in social life: for example: (1) exogenous shocks: disasters, climate, economic fluctuations; (2) individual biological factors: birth, aging, disease, death, etc. (3) geographical location: topography, borders; (4) man-made purely random events: draw lots, test scores, government policies, etc. in addition, natural experiments are also observational studies, because natural experiments also cannot satisfy the condition of “control” in random experiments, and the experimental process cannot be controlled by researchers. natural experiment, as a causal inference strategy closest to random experiment, provides us with a reliable identification strategy, which overcomes the disadvantages of traditional observational research to a certain extent. however, we must also admit that it is often difficult to provide the conditions for causal analysis of everything we want to evaluate in social life. the analysis of specific groups based on natural experiments can often only be regarded as a local average du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 429 treatment effect (late) (dunning, 2012). the evaluation of natural experiments is generally carried out from three aspects, plausibility, credibility, and relevance (dunning, 2012). plausibility refers to the use of quantitative and qualitative methods to demonstrate that the allocation process of natural experiments is random; credibility emphasizes that the causal relationship of the model is convincing, that is, the disposal variable is independent of other factors that affect the outcome variable; relevance refers to the problem and intervention to be studied whether it is substantially related to the external validity of the experimental results. the excellent properties of natural experiments in solving endogeneity make it an important choice for identifying peer effects. hoxby (2000b) used the random factors of birth changes to identify the effect peer brought by gender and race. the key of this research is to cleverly find the natural changes in student gender and changes in student performance caused by natural changes in race. it overcomes the corresponding endogenous problem, thus setting a precedent for identifying the peer effect by natural experiments. effective natural factors as a multi-disciplinary issue, the study of peer effects has been involved to varying degrees in economics, psychology (ilmarinen, et al., 2017), and sociology (cheng, 2017). in recent years, influenced by multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary trends, different disciplines have learned from each other in terms of research content and research methods. affected by psychology and sociology, a lot of researches have been done on the relationship between adolescent developmental maturity and students’ academic performance. the maturity of puberty is a natural phenomenon of life, and it is a normal physiological phenomenon that does not transfer by human will. puberty refers to the physical development of people who were originally able to have children (mckechnie, 1979). physiological research often uses the two indicators of pubertal status and pubertal timing to describe the physical development of adolescence. the former refers to changes in the body of an individual, including secondary sexual characteristics, and the latter refers to the sooner or later of these changes compared to their peers. to characterize the differences in pubertal development in different individuals, the term “pubertal mature pubertal development” was introduced, and it is often measured as soon as puberty enters. adolescent developmental maturity has a certain effect on individual cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills, and this effect is direct, that is, developmental maturity often depends on the sooner or later of puberty. a study by beltz and berenbaum (2013) found that the effects of adolescents entering puberty on their cognitive development and brain development differ by gender. they used the characteristics of male first spermatorrhea and female menarche as the proxy variables for puberty. the study found that boys who entered early adolescence performed better on cognitive tests than boys who entered later adolescence; for women, this effect was not significant. cavanagh and riegle-crumb (2007) also used girls’ self-reported menarche as a proxy variable for early and late puberty. they found that girls who matured earlier had lower gpa in high school, were more likely to encounter failure in high school courses, and graduated du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 430 from high school is less likely. research by daniel et al. (1982) found that maturity at puberty affects both cognitive and non-cognitive performance of students. compared with boys with normal developmental maturity, boys who have late maturity (secondary sexual development score below 80% of participants) have worse cognitive scores and lower expectations from their parents; they have earlier maturity of boys performed better on cognitive scores than boys of moderate maturity and later maturity. kristian and tuomas (2017) used the development of adolescent secondary sexual characteristics as a proxy variable for early and late puberty. the study found that students who matured later (including boys and girls) have lower cognitive scores, worse academic performance, and future income will be lower. this study believes that there is a difference between men and women entering puberty, but this is not the reason for the differences between men and women in cognitive ability and academic performance (koerselman & pekkarinen, 2017). in summary, adolescent developmental maturity is a natural factor that has a direct impact on students’ academic performance, parental expectations, etc., and most studies support the conclusion that boys mature earlier and girls mature later are more favorable for student development. in this sense, the influence of peer development maturity on student achievement can be regarded as a peer effect. based on this, this study attempts to supplement and develop the existing research from the following three aspects: first, we have overcome the problems of self-selection bias and synchrony bias commonly encountered in the estimation of peer effects. this study uses natural experiments on changes in adolescent developmental maturity to more accurately estimate the peer effect brought by adolescent developmental maturity. second, it enriches the related theories of peer effects. this research combines the research results of psychology and physiology, and focuses on the influence of the physiological characteristics of peers on students’ academic performance, which enriches the research content of peer effects to a certain extent. of course, puberty developmental maturity is just one type of peer effect, and the overall analysis of all types of peer effect has yet to be explored. third, the external validity of the study is higher. in the past, researches on peer effects mostly focused on a certain school, region, or project. the research on peer effects at the national level is still relatively limited. this study uses the tracking data of middle school students in mainland china to analyze this problem to a certain extent. this improves the applicability of the conclusion. the following structural arrangement of this article is as follows: the third part introduces the model and data sources; the fourth part gives descriptive statistical results, the results of econometric analysis, and the robustness test; the fifth part gives research enlightenment and shortcomings. research design empirical strategy natural experiment du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 431 the recognition of peer effects is inseparable from the clever application of causal inference technology. therefore, finding suitable random factors is very important for the construction of the entire model. this factor must not only affect the academic performance of peers, but also ensure that it is not affected by human factors. we use the maturity of middle school students as a random factor to identify peer effects. in the process of choosing a school and class, parents rarely consider the maturity of their classmates, and developmental maturity often has a significant impact on their academic performance. in addition, from the perspective of the educational production function, the factors affecting the average grade of the class include factors such as family characteristics, school characteristics, and personal characteristics, but many factors will not change significantly in the short term. for example: the overall ability of class students, the family economic background of the class students as a whole, the school environment, the characteristics of teachers, etc., and other unobservable factors in the shortterm changes are random. therefore, this article uses the number of students who entered puberty (that is, the first male nocturnal emission or female menarche) in the same class as the proxy variable for student development and maturity, and then eliminates other factors that affect the average grade of the class through a first order difference. the effect of changes in the developmental maturity of middle school students on the change in the average grade of a class during the year can be regarded as a peer effect. this design for identifying peer effects can be regarded as a natural experiment. the basic model established in this article is as follows: (1) (2) represents the average score of the academic performance (cognitive ability test) of grade c in class g of school j, represents the maturity of the students in the class, and the corresponding coefficient α1 is the size of the companion effect concerned in this article; represents the share of students in the same class school characteristics; represents the average true ability of students in the same class; is an unobservable error term. we can obtain the following equation by first difference. (3) where the unobservable factor is random, then in equation (3) has a normal distribution with a mean value of 0. equation (3) gives the relationship model between the development maturity of the students in the class and the average performance of all students in the class. includes the results of students who have entered adolescence. therefore, in order to further overcome the problem of possible simultaneous errors, we replace the student’s grade in formulas (1) and (2) with the du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 432 average grade of students who have not yet entered adolescence in the same class, that is, means that those in class c of class g of school j have not entered adolescence. the average score of the students’ academic performance, so through the difference, we can get a model similar to (3): (4) and the corresponding coefficient δ1 is the size of the peer effect concerned in this article. heterogeneity model studies (ding & lehrer, 2007; hoxby & weingarth, 2005) show that the peer effect is heterogeneous, that is, the direction and magnitude of peer influence on students at different levels may be different. we use the strategy of conditional quantile regression (koenker & bassett, 1978) proposed by koenker and bassett to identify the heterogeneity of peer effects. combined with the research object of this article, we set the quantile regression model as follows: (5) represents the value of θ quantile given . quantile regression can estimate any percent and minimize the mse function to obtain the estimator, which is equation (6). cjg′ 0+ 1 cjgmat (6) data sources the data used in this article are micro-data from china education panel survey (ceps). ceps uses pps sampling to design a sampling frame based on the “six population” in four stages, covering 28 county-level units (counties, districts, and cities) randomly selected across the country with the average education level and population ratio as stratified variables. the sample is a good representation of mainland china. during the sampling process, 1-2 classes were sampled in each grade of each school, and all students in the selected classes were sampled. the survey took the 2013-2014 school year as a baseline and surveyed 10,279 seventh-grade students. in the 2014-2015 school year follow-up survey, a total of 9,449 seventh-grade students were successfully followed up with a follow-up rate of 91.9%, and this is the representative of the situation in the du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 433 country. the survey also surveyed the backgrounds of student parents, classroom teachers, class teachers, and school leaders. the relevant data can well meet the research needs of this article. each round of the ceps survey will test the students’ cognitive ability. the content of this test question does not involve the specific memorizing knowledge taught in the school curriculum, but measures the students’ logical thinking and problem solving ability. finally, the three-parameter project reflection theory (irt) is used to convert the standard points into international standards and characteristics of national standardization. this study focuses on peer-level peer effects in schools and requires peer composition to remain stable for a certain period of time. as a result, we only kept data on 7,826 students from 184 classes in 96 schools that did not reclassify or merge during the two surveys. at the same time, 213 students who did not meet the study design 1 were deleted, and the remaining valid sample was 7,613 2 students in 184 classes of 96 schools. results describe statistical results in combination with the literature review, this article summarizes the main factors that may affect the average grade of the class. table 1 gives descriptive statistics of the main variables. from table 1, we can find that from the core variables, the scores of the 8th grade students’ academic performance have decreased compared with the 7th grade; in the same class, the students’ average maturity, girls’ and boys’ maturity during the year increased by approximately 50.12%, 39.69%, and 75.54%, 3 respectively. it can be seen that a higher proportion of boys have entered adolescence within two years. from the perspective of family characteristics, compared with the seventh grade, the average maximum years of schooling of parents and the proportion of only children have declined, with 0.3 years and 1% respectively. the decline in parents ‘years of education may be caused by measurement errors, that is, the parents’ education level was answered by the children in the first round of surveys, while the parents or their children’s guardians answered in the second round of surveys. the decline in the proportion of only children may be related to the “the only child of one parent can have a second child” policy that was implemented nationwide in november 2013 and can be regarded as a random change. the proportion of students with higher family socioeconomic status in the class increased by 1.5%, this is majorly related to the type of community in which the student lives to identify the family socioeconomic status of the participated student. it is possible for the student residence community to change within two years, but this change is random, and it is difficult to have a substantial impact on student development and maturity in the short term. in terms of school characteristics, the nature of the school has not changed in two years; the school ranking has declined slightly. affected by factors such as measurement error, the above changes are all within acceptable ranges. descriptive statistical results generally support the hypothesis of this study. du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 434 table 1. summary statistics of main characteristics. description of variables type mean sd min max n core variables class average score from students not entering the puberty in seventh grade [1] continuous -0.171 0.581 -1.707 1.466 2,589 class average score from students not entering the puberty in eighth grade continuous -0.237 0.610 -2.021 1.267 2,589 puberty maturity from all students in seventh grade [2] continuous 17.447 7.347 3 45 2,589 puberty maturity from all students in eighth grade continuous 26.191 8.234 6 55 2,589 puberty maturity from female students in seventh grade continuous 13.092 5.512 2 27 2,589 puberty maturity from female students in eighth grade continuous 18.288 5.873 3 33 2,589 puberty maturity from male students in seventh grade continuous 4.502 3.631 0 24 2,589 puberty maturity from male students in eighth grade continuous 7.903 4.677 0 28 2,589 family characteristics the ratio of classroom high ses in seventh grade continuous 0.385 0.292 0 1 2,589 the ratio of classroom high ses in eighth grade continuous 0.400 0.288 0 1 2,589 class average education highest years of parents in seventh grade [3] continuous 16.47 1.104 12.90 19 2,589 class average education highest years of parents in eighth continuous 16.17 1.196 12.37 18.71 2,589 the ratio of classroom singlechild in seventh grade continuous 0.410 0.256 0 0.969 2,589 the ratio of classroom singlechild in eighth grade continuous 0.400 0.265 0 0.969 2,589 school characteristics the property of school in seventh grade [4] discrete 1.095 0.408 1 4 2,589 the property of school in eighth grade discrete 1.095 0.408 1 4 2,589 the rank of school in seventh grade discrete 4.123 0.680 2 5 2,560 the rank of school in eighth grade discrete 4.174 0.755 1 5 2,589 [5] note: [1]. the cognitive tests score range of two wave survey is -2.029~2.710,-3.137~ 2.063 respectively, and ceps using z-scores. [2]. using the number of students entering the puberty (namely appearing the first spermatorrhea and menarche) as proxies of puberty maturity. [3]. illiteracy, primary schools, junior secondary schools, secondary vocational schools, vocational high schools, regular senior secondary schools, higher vocational colleges, undergraduate schools and graduate schools and above denoted 0 year, 6 years, 9 years, 12 years,12 years, 12 years,12 years, 16 years, 19 years, respectively [4]. the property of school includes public school, private school subsidized by the government, ordinary private school and private school for children of migrant workers, which is denoted by 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively. [5]. there is a school that didn’t complete the rank of school in eighth grade, so the sample size of the rank of school in seventh is 2589. du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 435 table 2. puberty maturity on score for all students. puberty r 2 n scores 0.0386** (0.0193) 0.2932 7,114 note: 1. the table controls for class average education highest years of parents, the ratio of only-child from the same classroom and the ratio of classroom single-child and includes school fixed effects. the number of sample size is the number of students. 2. clustered standard errors are reported in parentheses and standard errors are clustered by class. 3. **: p<0.05. table 3. peer effects from puberty maturity. puberty maturity from all students class average score from students not entering the puberty puberty maturity from all students 0.0057*** (0.0011) 0.0009 (0.0020) n 184 56 r 2 0.0044 0.0001 note: 1. robust standard errors is reported in parentheses 2. each column represents a separate regression and the number of sample size is the number of class. 3. ***: p<0.01. table 4. peer effects from puberty maturity by sex. puberty maturity from all students class average score from students not entering the puberty puberty maturity from female students -0.0106*** (0.0014) -0.0142*** (0.0026) puberty maturity from male students 0.0376*** (0.0018) 0.0338*** (0.0037) n 184 184 56 56 r 2 0.0086 0.0595 0.0127 0.0334 note: 1. robust standard errors is reported in parentheses 2. each column represents a separate regression and the number of sample size is the number of class. 3. ***: p<0.01. du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 436 econometric analysis results the peer effect of adolescent developmental maturity: from table 2 in the natural experiment, it is not difficult to find that in controlling the family characteristics and adopting the fixed school effect method, from the perspective of the individual student, the student’s developmental maturity and academic performance are related, that is, table 2 estimates the results, but this result is undoubtedly endogenous. in order to further explore the causal relationship between student development maturity and student performance, we give the estimated results of formulas (3) and (4), which are the first and second columns of table 3. we can find that the development maturity of the students in the class is positively related to the students’ performance, but the r2 in both models is smaller. at the same time, through further analysis of the data, we found that in the samples used in column 1 and column 2 of table 3, the number of boys accounted for 51.65% and 83.35%, respectively, and the number of boys had certain advantages. in addition, from table 1, we can find that the ratio of girls entering adolescence increased by 39.69% within two years, and the proportion of boys entering adolescence increased by 75.54%. in summary, we believe that the results given in table 3 more reflect the impact of male students’ developmental maturity on student performance, and do not fully characterize the impact of developmental maturity of all students, especially female students, on student performance. existing physiology and psychological studies show that there is a gender difference in the impact of adolescent developmental maturity on males and females, that is, early maturity of boys and late maturity of girls are more favorable for individual development. therefore, in this study, in equation (1) was replaced by female development maturity and male development maturity , respectively. equations (2) and (4) were treated the same, and new equations (3) and equation (4). the estimation results are shown in table 4. after considering the gender differences in student development maturity, we found that the impact of development maturity on student performance became robust and the corresponding r2 became relatively reasonable. from the first column of table 4, the maturity of the girls in the class is negatively correlated with the class average and is very significant. when we focus on the peer effect to students who have not yet reached puberty in the class, that is, as shown in column 3 of table 4, students are still negatively affected by the maturity of the development of girls from the class, which is very significant. the research conclusions are basically the same. the study by dubas et al (1991) found that the later the girls mature, the higher their academic performance ranks. from the second column of table 4, the development maturity of the boys in the class has a very significant positive correlation with the average grade of the class. when we only focus on the impact of boys ‘developmental maturity on students who have not yet reached puberty in the class, the conclusion is still valid, as shown in column 4 of table 4, that is, boys’ developmental maturity has a positive predictive effect on student performance. the results of dubas et al (1991) and daniel et al (1982) are consistent. both studies show that the sooner a boy matures, the higher his academic performance. the above results also confirm our results in table 3, that is, the results in du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 437 table 3 mainly reflect the impact of male students’ developmental maturity on student performance. robustness test the maturity of puberty is a natural life phenomenon, but if there are factors related to both puberty development maturity 4 and academic performance, such as: family economic and social status, learning pressure, then equation (3) the estimation results of equation (4) may be inconsistent. therefore, this study analyzes the above factors one by one by sample. we divide the students’ socioeconomic status and the learning pressure of the three major subjects into high and low according to the median, and perform regression based on formula (4). the results are shown in tables 5 and 6. from the second line of table 5, the negative impact of the student’s performance on the maturity of the girls in the class still exists in the subgroups with high socioeconomic status, low socioeconomic status, high math pressure, and low math pressure. this is basically consistent with the conclusions in columns 1 and 3 of table 4, which shows that the conclusions of this article are relatively robust. from the fourth row of table 5, the development maturity of the boys in the class is positively correlated with the academic performance in different groups. this is basically consistent with the conclusions in columns 2 and 4 of table 4, which shows that the influence of family socioeconomic status and mathematical pressure on adolescent development and maturity is not serious, and it can basically guarantee that adolescent development and maturity exists independently as exogenous factors. from the second row of table 6, it is not difficult to find that the development maturity of class girls has always had a negative impact on student performance, which is consistent with the conclusions in columns 1 and 3 of table 4. the development maturity of female students has a negative effect on student performance prediction. looking at the fourth row of table 6, the impact of the developmental maturity of the boys in the class on the student’s performance is positive, indicating that the developmental maturity of adolescence is not seriously affected by the learning pressure of chinese and english, and the regression results and benchmark regression results (table 4 columns 2 and 4) are closer. it can be seen that the basic conclusion of this study is relatively stable, that is, the learning pressure does not significantly affect the maturity of adolescence, so the latter can exist as an independent natural factor. peer effect of developmental maturity under different conditional quantiles: heterogeneity model figure 1 shows the impact of girls’ maturity on the performance of non-pubertal students in different quantiles. the horizontal axis represents the conditional quantiles of class girls’ developmental maturity, and the vertical axis represents the effects of girls’ developmental maturity on performance under different conditional quantiles. in overall, the peer effect of girls’ developmental maturity is heterogeneous. student performance decreases with the increase of conditional quantiles, and has been shown to have a sig du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 438 table 5. peer effects from puberty maturity by sex: robustness. high ses low ses high pressure from math high pressure from chinese puberty maturity from female students -0.0069 (0.0047) -0.0385*** (0.0084) -0.0112* (0.0060) -0.0203*** (0.0064) puberty maturity from male students 0.0467*** (0.0067) 0.0075 (0.0087) 0.0565*** (0.0101) 0.0210*** (0.0061) note: 1. robust standard errors is reported in parentheses 2. all results are estimated by equation (4) and each cell represents a separate regression. 3.*: p<0.1, ***: p<0.01. table 6. peer effects from puberty maturity by sex: robustness. high pressure from chinese † low pressure from chinese high pressure from english high pressure from english puberty maturity from female students -0.0185 (0.0115) -0.0148*** (0.0044) -0.0300*** (0.0047) -0.0069 (0.0057) puberty maturity from male students 0.0080 (0.0100) 0.0491*** (0.0058) 0.0450*** (0.0063) 0.0187* (0.0096) note: 1. robust standard errors is reported in parentheses 2. all results are estimated by equation (4) and each cell represents a separate regression. 3.*: p<0.1, ***: p<0.01. †: in this subgroup, puberty maturity on score is not significant which result from that the number of size is small. nificant negative impact on most of the quantiles. before the 70th quantile, the impact of class maturity on student achievement was similar to the regression results of ols; after the 70th quantile, the negative impact of class maturity on student achievement was affected by the quantile. the increase of the point increases rapidly, and it is obviously larger than the regression result of ols. the influence reaches the maximum value at the 90th quantile. figure 2 shows the influence of boys’ developmental maturity on the average performance of non-pubertal students in different quantiles. the horizontal axis represents the conditional quantiles of class boys ‘developmental maturity, and the vertical axis represents the impact of boys’ developmental maturity on performance in different conditional quantiles. overall, the peer effect of boys’ developmental maturity is heterogeneous. student performance improves with the increase of conditional quantiles, and the effect on almost all quantiles is always significantly positive. for the 10th to 30th quantiles, student performance decreases as the conditional quantile increases, and for du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 439 figure1. peer effects in different quantiles in male. figure 2. peer effects in different quantiles in female. du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 440 the 30th to 80th quantiles, student performance increases as the conditional quantile increases. after the 80th quantile, the student’s performance decreases again with the increase of the conditional quantile, and the effect reaches the maximum at the 90th quantile. conclusion and discussion peer effect, as a classic problem in economics, pedagogy, psychology, and sociology, is of great significance to school placement, school enrollment, and parents’ choice of school. however, there are not many domestic studies on the peer effect in mainland china; especially the related studies that have effectively solved the endogenous nature are still scarce. we used the national survey data of ceps to design natural experiments using changes in the development and maturity of middle school students, and empirically test the peer effect of middle school students in mainland china. this is one of the earlier studies in mainland china to analyze the peer effects of middle school students. this study found that peer maturity has an impact on the academic performance of middle school students, and that this effect has a gender difference. the developmental maturity of boys has a very significant positive correlation with the average class performance, while the developmental maturity of girls has a very significant negative correlation with the average class performance. this study has certain policy implications for adjusting the school age of school-age children. we found that the peer effect of middle school students ‘developmental maturity has gender differences, which confirms and expands the common sense that boys’ mental maturity is later than that of girls. therefore, from the perspective of adolescent development and maturity, the age at which boys and girls enter school should be different. the enrollment age of boys should be slightly behind that of girls of the same age, in order to give full play to the positive impact of higher development maturity and lower maturity of girls on classmates. this article basically solves the endogenous problem of peer effect estimation, and has played a positive role in enriching related research. however, the following limitations exist: (1) this study analyzes the peer effect of middle school students from the perspective of adolescent development and maturity, but this is only one type of peer effect, and the overall analysis of all types of peer effects has not been achieved. the peer effect has various types and strong endogenous characteristics. it is very difficult to measure all kinds of peer effects completely. therefore, in order to accurately measure peer effects, existing research can often only identify some types of peer effects. of course, these studies are undoubtedly helpful for the subsequent overall analysis of all types of peer effects, which is the direction of future efforts. (2) in theory, the most ideal peer effect should be based on the analysis of friends, for example: analysis based on social networks, but this type of research often requires higher quality data, data acquisition is relatively difficult, and everyone’s friends change often. it should be said that this type of peer effect is very effective, but it is also not easy to achieve, which is undoubtedly a point for future research. du & guo. peer effect of middle school students vol.4, no. 1, 2020 441 notes 1. refers to samples of boys who have entered their age at menarche and girls who have entered their age for the first time, and boys who have not responded to the age of their first sperm and girls who have not responded to the age of their menarche, as well as samples of menarche and the time when their first sperm is younger than 9 years old. 2. when considering only the results of adolescent students (e.g., columns 3 and 4 of table 4), the valid sample is 2,589 students from 56 classes in 30 schools. 3. female: (18.288-13.092) /13.092 = 0.3969; male: (7.903-4.502) / 4. 502 = 0.7554; all students: (26.191-17.447) /17.447 = 0.5012. 4. studies have shown that girls 'menarche sooner or later, and boys' first sperm emission sooner or later are affected by factors such as genetics, nutritional status, economic income level, and pressure, and the impact of these factors on the maturity of men and girls can be attributed to differences in family economic and social status the resulting nutritional differences. references angrist, j. d., & lang, k. 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(2003). peer effects in academic outcomes: evidence from a natural experiment. rev econ stat, 85(1):9-23. received: 13 november 2019 revised: 04 december 2019 accepted: 17 december 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in education and economy, 2019; 03:40-48. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 杜育红, 郭艳斌. 初中生的同伴效应: 基于发育成熟度的自然实验. 教育与经济, 2019; 03:40-48. article-yuhongdu-bece_title_30jan2020 article-yuhongdu-bece_maintext30jan2020 family capitals and education acquisitions: analysis on the mediating effect of shadow education haiping xue capital normal university, beijing 100048, china abstract. the purpose of this study is to explore whether family capitals and shadow education affect students’ education acquisitions. the study constructs the social reproduction theory mode of family capitals influence on children’s education acquisitions. using 2014 chinese education tracking data, this study examined shadow education’s mediation effects on the process of family capitals affecting on education acquisitions for middle school students. family capitals and shadow education jointly affect the education acquisitions of students, in which, shadow education plays an intermediary role between family capitals and education acquisitions for students. in sum, shadow education is increasingly becoming a supplement to school education and may become a new intermediary for family capitals influence on students' education acquisitions. the study adds to the limited literature in this particular field concerning the mediating effects of shadow education on family capitals and education acquisitions. best evid chin edu 2019; 1(2):87-107. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1019 keywords: family capitals; education acquisitions; shadow education; social reproduction; mediation effect correspondence to: haiping xue, professor and director of the institute of educational economics and management, college of education, capital normal university, china, email: xuehaiping_416@163.com. xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 88 research background and problem amily socioeconomic background influence on education acquisitions is a major field of study, in china. when it comes to social equity research, many scholars in the country have examined the effects of family social, cultural, economic and political capital has on academic education opportunity acquisitions of children. it turns out that most students with higher family capitals have more chances to attain better academic education opportunities. nowadays, there are plenty of chinese compulsory education students participating in extracurricular tutoring, called “shadow education”. shadow education and school education complement each other and jointly influence students’ education acquisitions. to date, the vast majority of empirical research on supplementary tutoring has only investigated the effects of family capitals/shadow education on academic education opportunity acquisitions. also, empirical research combining school and shadow education outcomes concerning family capital and its related effects on student academic performance and higher-level education acquisitions is rare. even fewer studies have explored the mediating effects of shadow education on students’ education acquisitions under the affects of family capitals. this paper will establish a theoretical model using joint social reproduction to investigate how family capitals influence the mechanisms of students’ education acquisitions through shadow education. at the same time, an examination of the mediating effects of shadow education on students’ education acquisitions performed using family capitals will be conducted. from the perspective of shadow education, this paper plans to expand the research about family capitals and its effects on student education acquisitions. the results from this study will provide governments and education policy-makers another scientific theoretical reference for developing educational social equity initiatives. this paper is divided into five parts: first, a review of relevant empirical studies; second, an introduction to data sources and variables to be used in the study; third, an explanation of the constructs and theoretical model for family capitals on education acquisitions; fourth, an introduction to the structural equation modeling (sem) method to be used; and, fifth, a summary of results, discussion, and implications of this study. review of existing research connotations and classification of family capitals the concept of family capital was derived from the larger theories on social capital. funding: national natural science foundation of china “family capital, shadow education and social reproduction” project (approval number: 71774112); national natural science foundation of china -“facing the shadow education system: research on supplementary tutoring in compulsory education in china” project (approval number: 71373165). conflict of interests: none. f xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 89 social capital in the modern era was first proposed in the late 1970s originating from the fields of social relations and social networks. french sociologist, pierre bourdieu, was one of the first researchers that devoted to systematically study the concept of social capital. in his view, “family” is the “cell” and basic unit of society. a family capital was seen as a means to providing various useful resources for educational activities for individual students. coleman (1988), an american scholar, divided family capitals into material, human and social capitals. material capital refers to the material resources that can promote the development of production. human capital applies to the knowledge level and ability that people possess to change the society. lastly, social capital is a social resource structure that exists in the interpersonal network and can be used as an asset to help individuals achieve their goals. social capital is believed to be found inside and outside of the family construct. more specifically, it is present in parentchild relationships, parents’ concerns, expectations, supports, investments and participation in education of their children. outside the family, concerns the interpersonal relationships within the community where the family is located. according to li chunling (2003), family background mainly deals with the family’s economic capital (family’s income level), cultural (father’s education level), social (father’s position level) and political capitals (family’s composition). jiang guohe and yan guangfen (2006) believed that family capitals mainly include family economic, cultural and social capitals. liu zhimin and gao yao (2011) understood family capitals as family socio-economic background, which included family economic, social, cultural and political capitals. influence of family capitals on school education acquisition coleman’s (1988) work indicated that family social capital assists students to achieve higher education achievement. teacherman (1987)’s study showed that social capital of american families measured by parents’ occupation had an important influence on children’s education prospects and academic performance in high school. wong (1998) found that family social capital had a significant positive impact on children’s academic achievement in his research from the czech republic. james (2000), using australian survey data from 1991 to 1997, indicated that children from families with low social capital usually attended lower level colleges and universities. in the 60 years from the 1940s to the 1990s, family social capital measured using the occupational status of fathers was viewed as an important impact on the student’s education acquisition (li, 2003). this theory began to change, in the 1980s, when research began revealing that the higher the occupational levels of fathers resulted in the higher their children’s academic performance. li yu (2006) found that from 1966 to 2003, family social capital measuring fathers’ occupational status had different degrees of influence on the probability of their children going to high schools and colleges. during china’s great cultural revolution (1966-1976), family social capital had little influence on the probability of children attending school. in xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 90 the earlier years of educational reform (1977-1991), the family’s social capital on the probability of children attending school began playing as a factor. in later years (1992-2003), the influence of family social capital rose steadily, to the point, which it performed as a significant indicator for university entrance. for instance, liu and gao (2011) study, using survey data of 14 university students from jiangsu province, learned that the relationship between family capitals and higher education acquisition was a significant factor. family cultural capital on school education acquisition bourdieu (1989) indicated that children with higher cultural capital, in french families, received more and higher quality education. as well, teacherman (1987) found that american parents with education degrees had a significant influence on their children’s education and academic achievements in high school. based on timss data from hong, south korea, japan, singapore, and thailand, woessmann (2003) saw results indicating similar significant positive impact on students’ performance. however, two studies, concluded otherwise, robinson and garnier (1985) and katsillis and rubinson (1990) found cultural capital to have little or no impact on student academic achievement. family economic capital on school education acquisition american parents’ incomes play an important factor on their children’s education opportunities and academic performance in high school (carneiro & heckman, 2002; teacherman, 1987). wong (1998), in a study done in the czech republic, found similar results indicating that family economic capital had a significant positive impact on students education achievement. li (2003) discovered that from the 1940-1970, family economic capital had a weak impact on individual education acquisition; but, had a significant impact on some special groups (such as rural and female populations). in the years, 1970-1990, the relationship between the two concepts would have a greater impact on all populations. an urban family survey indicated if the family’s economic capital was at the top-tier in social class, the education level of their children was generally higher guo & min, 2006). finally, liu & gao (2011) found that family economic income was a significant predictor of acquisition; but, had no significant impact on the quality of education acquisition. family political capital on school education acquisition bian, wu and li (2008), believed that political capital refers to the identity, power and resources provided by political parties and regimes, as well, as the deterrent and influence derived there from. li (2003) uncovered that during the 1940s up until the 1990s, the influence of family political capital on personal education acquisition was divided with the first 30 years showing a positive relationship between concepts; xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 91 whereas, in the following 20 years, the influence of family political capital on children’s education acquisition was just the opposite. beginning in the 1990s, family political capital had no significant influence on individual education acquisition. family political capital mainly played a role in the opportunity distribution of middle and higher education. liu & gao (2011), observed that, if the father’s political status was a member of the communist party of china, had a significant negative impact on the quantity of higher education acquisition of his children. meanwhile, the father’s national administrative level had also an insignificant impact on the quantity of higher education acquisition of his children. moreover, the father’s political status and national administrative level had a significant positive impact on the quality of his children’s acceptance to higher education institutions. family capitals on shadow education acquisition research by smyth (2009) on irish families saw that with more social capital a family could afford more shadow education acquisition resulting in higher quality education for their children. hong & zhao (2014) found that parental occupation hierarchy had a significant positive impact on whether urban compulsory education students participated in shadow education or not. similar results were discovered in zhou & zou (2016) review using pisa 2012 data that analyzed the influence of family social capital in china and the united states and how children’s shadow education opportunity acquisition was impacted. using a multi-layer linear model, results indicated that chinese parents ranked at the highest occupational status index had significant positive opportunities for their children to getting supplementary tutoring in mathematics, reading and science; meanwhile, american parents in the highest occupational status index, would have no significant impact on their children receiving similar supplementary tutoring. family cultural capital on shadow education acquisition tansel and bircan-bodur (2008) indicated that parents’ education levels have a significant positive impact on supplementary tutoring expenditure for turkish primary and secondary school students. a chinese survey pointed out that the degree of education affects the head of a household significantly and on whether urban students participated in supplementary tutoring (xue & ding, 2009). parents’ education degrees and expectations had significant positive impacts on whether chinese primary and secondary school students participated in supplementary tutoring and compulsory education (chu, 2009; hong & zhao, 2014; mark bray et al., 2014; xue, 2015). however, other studies found differing results, education degrees and education expectations on the part of parents had no significant influence on whether students participated in shadow education (buchmann et al., 2010; zeng et al., 2010). family economic capital on shadow education acquisition xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 92 stevenson and baker (1992) conducted a pioneering research on shadow education and discovered that family economic capital had a significant impact on whether japanese high school students participated in supplementary tutoring, which eventually led to a more likely chance of attending university for these particular students. other studies discovered parallel findings, such as, family income significantly impacting supplementary tutoring (bircan, 2008; buchmann et al., 2010; tansel and bircan, 2008; xue & ding, 2009). on the other hand, a survey completed in gansu, hunan, and jiangsu provinces, zeng et al. (2010) found that the monthly income of fathers has no significant impact on whether junior high school students chose supplementary tutoring. xue’s (2015) study, also done in china, found similar results showing that net household income per capita of a family had no significant influence on whether students participated in supplementary tutoring. influence of shadow education on school education acquisition family capitals directly influence the students’ school and shadow education acquisitions and, at the same time, students’ shadow education acquisitions influence their school education acquisitions. since students’ shadow education will be helpful for them to improve their academic performance, also will position them favorably for higher education success. studies on the influence of shadow education acquisition on school education acquisition have basically centered on the influence of shadow education acquisition on students’ academic performance at school. due to the influence of individual, family, school, and other factors on students’ academic performance, in order to control the endogenous problems, some scholars, in china, and abroad have adopted advanced statistical methods to estimate the influence of supplementary tutoring on students’ academic performance. these studies, so far, have presented mixed results. sunderman (2006) attempted to estimate the influence of supplementary tutoring on indonesian fourth-graders by using the instrumental variable method and found that the influence was not significant. as well, dang (2007), made use of the instrumental variable method and using such data as the hourly after-class tuition fees paid by parents predicted the positive impact on student learning. zhao (2015), making use of the instrumental variable method, also, found that after-school tutoring expenditures, though small, showed an impact on the math performance. yet, studies from guill and bonsen (2010), using a multilayer linear model to observe the influence of supplementary tutoring on grade 5 and 6 students, in hamburg, germany, saw no significance in student learning. zhang (2013) and hu et al. (2015) studies had similar findings. summary of existing research scholars have paid extensive attention to the influence of family capitals on education opportunity acquisition in schools and most of the relevant research concludes xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 93 that family capitals is an important influence on student learning. with the rise of shadow education, the influence of family capitals on shadow education acquisition has only begun to attract the attention of scholars, in recent years. related studies tended to focus on the influence of family cultural capital and economic capital on the opportunity acquisition of shadow education, and rarely discussed the influence of family social capital and political capital. at present, in the compulsory educational system now present in china, shadow and school education complement each other. the vast majority of existing studies focused mainly on the family capitals impact on school education acquisition or shadow education acquisition. few studies combined school education and shadow education to investigate the influence of family capitals on the students’ academic performance and higher-level education acquisition. as well, few studies investigated the mediating effects of shadow education on the influence of family capitals, students’ performance, and the acquisitions of higher-level education. data source and variable description the data used in this study came from the 2014 china education panel survey (ceps) conducted by the china survey and data center of renmin university of china. the variables used in the statistical analysis are described in table 1. the variables of extracurricular tutoring in the dataset refer to the education activities of academic course supplements. the sample number of junior high school students in this data set was 19,487. according to the literature research results from above, this study, divides family capitals into four capital categories: social, cultural, economic and political. family social capital measurements come from li chunling’s research on occupational stratification, which divides the occupation of students’ parents into upper, middle and lower levels. the parent with the higher occupational stratification was used to measure the index of student’s social capital outside the family. the higher the occupational stratification of the parent, the more social capital outside the family the student attained. 1 cultural capital is measured by the number of books in the family, outside of the parent’s highest education and textbooks and magazines. economic capital is measured by family financial status, which can be divided into three levels: difficult, medium and rich. political capital is measured by parents’ political status, which can be divided into three categories 2 : party members, democratic parties and the masses. from previous literature, education acquisitions of students mainly referred to the level and quality of education acquired by students. generally, the difference of education acquisitions of students can be measured from two dimensions. one is the level of education received by students or the number of years receiving education, which represents the difference of education acquired by students. second, to measure the education obtained by students is the difference in education quality under the xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 94 same education level or years, usually measured by students’ grades or school quality. although the quantity and quality of education are both important measures of education acquisition, in studies of family capitals and student’s education acquisitions, affected by data availability, the researchers always paid much more attention to the number than to the quality of education acquisition. most studies were not involved in aspects of the difference of quality education, which may be because the quality of education information data is difficult to collect. different from existing studies, this paper will mainly focus on the influence of family capitals on quality of students’ education acquisitions, which is measured by students’ academic performance at school. the variables involved in the article are described in table 1 below. theoretical construction model of the influence of family capitals on education acquisition according to existing literature studies, family capitals has an important impact on acquisitions of school education and shadow education; but few studies combine them to investigate the impact of family capitals on education acquisitions of children. it will underestimate the influence of family capitals on children’s education acquisitions if they are investigated separately, and the mechanisms by which family capitals affect children’s education acquisitions will also not be fully revealed. in order to fully and accurately evaluate the influence of family capitals on children’s education acquisitions, this study, combined school education and shadow education to construct a theoretical model of the influence of family capitals on children’s education acquisitions. based on li’s (2006) study on the mechanisms of education inequality and liu & gao’s (2011) study on the mechanisms of family capitals influences on acquisition of higher education quantity and quality, this study, constructs the theoretical model of family capitals impact on acquisition of education (see figure 1). firstly, family capitals can directly influence children’s academic achievement at school. secondly, family capitals can also influence their children’s academic performance at school by influencing the child’s access to education opportunities (for example, go to a better school) (see corresponding solid arrows in figure 1). thirdly, family capitals can also influence their children’s academic performance at school by influencing their shadow education opportunity advantage (see corresponding dotted arrows in figure 1). finally, advantage opportunity in children’s school education acquisitions will also affect their advantage opportunity acquisitions in shadow education (see corresponding part of the dotted line arrow in the figure 1). the mechanism faction that family capitals affects is their children’s education acquisitions that are essentially a mechanism of resource exclusion, meaning that the advantage class families use their family capital advantage to reduce competition for entrance, or to exclude some competitors from the competition so to increase opportunities of accessing high-quality school education and shadow education. this kind of exclusion is embodied in four types: economic resource, privileged resource, implicit resource, and cultural resource. economic resource exclusion, which is the xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 95 most common form in modern society, mainly refers to the rich class’s exchange of family economic capital for high-quality education resources. privileged resource exclusion refers to the fact that in the design of education system, special positions are always reserved for some privileged classes. the setting of high-quality education resources often favors some privileged classes. implicit exclusion of resources means that when making decisions on admission to higher education and shadow education, vulnerable class families have to withdraw from competition for shadow and better school education opportunities due to their poor abilities to bear the risk of low evaluation on the expected return of education. lastly, the exclusion of cultural resources indicates that families with parents, who have low educational backgrounds and poor cultural resources, do not attach great importance to their children’s education, so therefore they may withdraw from the competition for shadow and better school education opportunities. based on the theoretical model of family capitals influencing education, in order to test the mediating effect of shadow education on family capitals and education acquisition, the following research hypotheses are as follows: hypothesis 1: family capitals have a significant positive impact on education acquisitions of junior high school students. hypothesis 2: whether participation in shadow education has a significant positive impact on education acquisitions of junior high school students. hypothesis 3: shadow education plays an intermediary role in the process of family capitals influence on students’ education acquisitions, that is, family capitals influences students’ education acquisitions by influencing their shadow education participation opportunities. analysis of the mediating effect of shadow education based on the theoretical model and research hypothesis established, this study will use structural equation models to analyze influences of family capitals to students’ education acquisitions and test mediating effects of family capitals to students’ education acquisitions through shadow education. intermediary model of family cultural capital on students’ education acquisitions using the theoretical model and wen et al.’s research to verify the methods and procedures for mediating effects, this study constructs an intermediary model for family cultural capitals impact on students’ education acquisitions (the normalized regression path coefficient results of the model are shown in figure 2). results indicated that the path coefficients passed the significance level test except for the path coefficient of shadow education participation affects to students’ performance. according to the joint significance test, the mediating effect of family cultural capital to students’ achievements is not significance; shadow education does not play an intermediary role between family cultural capitals and students’ performance. xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 96 table 1. description of variables in statistical analysis. variable type variable name variable description shadow education whether to participate in extracurricular tutoring 0=no,1=yes education acquisition student achievement the total score of standardized scores of students in the mid-term examination of foreign languages and numerals in 2013 family capitals social capital parents have the highest career stratification 1= lower, 2= middle, 3= upper cultural capital highest degree of parents 1= illiteracy, 2= primary school, 3= junior high school, 4= high school, 5= junior college, 6= university undergraduate, 7= graduate student and above books, magazines outside the family library 1=little, 2= less, 3= average, 4= more, 5= a lot parents' expectations of their children's education level 1= don’t read now, 2= junior high school graduation, 3= high school, 4= junior college, 5= big ben, 6= graduate student, 7= doctor economic capital family financial status 1= difficult, 2= medium, 3= rich political capital political status of parents 1= communist party member 2= democratic party 3= masses individual factors gender 0 = female, 1 = male grade 0= seventh grade, 1= ninth grade table 2. fitting results of the intermediary model of family cultural capital influencing students’ education acquisitions. fitting index cmin df cmin/df rmsea nfi rfi ifi tli cfi numerical 358.10 12 29.84 0.038 0.967 0.922 0.968 0.925 0.968 judgment standard <5.0 <0.10 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 table 3. results of the intermediary model – family social capital influencing students’ education acquisitions. fitting index cmin df cmin/df rmsea nfi rfi ifi tli cfi numerical 140.01 5 28.00 0.034 0.957 0.919 0.959 0.875 0.959 judgment standard <5.0 <0.10 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 97 table 4. results of the intermediary model – family economic capital influencing students’ education acquisitions. fitting index cmin df cmin/df rmsea nfi rfi ifi tli cfi numerical 59.38 5 11.87 0.02 0.970 0.910 0.972 0.917 0.972 judgment standard <5.0 <0.10 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 table 5. results of the intermediary model – family political capital influencing students’ education acquisitions. fitting index cmin df cmin/df rmsea nfi rfi ifi tli cfi numerical 59.47 5 11.89 0.02 0.964 0.892 0.967 0.900 0.967 judgment standard <5.0 <0.10 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 table 6. results of the intermediary model – family capitals influencing students’ education acquisitions. fitting index cmin df cmin/df rmsea nfi rfi ifi tli cfi numerical 1136.66 2 35.52 0.042 0.950 0.914 0.951 0.916 0.951 judgment standard <5.0 <0.10 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 >0.80 >0.90 the results show that the model is recursive, with a sample size of 19487 (the results of model fitting are shown in table 2). it can be seen from the table that all other fitting indexes reach a good level except for cmin/df=29.84>5, this indicates that the model can fit well with the actual observation data and the established model for family cultural capital influencing education acquisition. in all, the theoretical hypothesis model is stable. the likeliest reason why cmin/df>5 rejects theoretical model 1 is the large number of valid samples (n=19,487). when the sample size is very large, all the models that fit well with the data will be rejected, so whether to use the model cannot be decided through a chi-square test. fitting index cannot be the main basis for comparing models, instead, the rationality of the relationships between variables described in models and the appropriateness of parameters’ estimation should be considered (for example, the correlation coefficient cannot be greater than 1, and the error variance cannot be a negative number). the relationship between variables described in this model is reasonable and the parameters’ estimation is appropriate. therefore, this study decided to use this model to test the mediating effect of family cultural capitals on students’ education through shadow education. xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 98 intermediary model of family social capital influence on students’ education acquisitions for family capitals influence on education acquisition, this study, constructed the intermediary model that family social capital influences education acquisitions of students. all the path coefficients in the model past the significance level test (the results of standardized regression path coefficient of the model are shown in figure 3). according to the joint significance test, family social capital has a significant mediating effect on students’ performance and shadow education plays a partial mediating role between family social capital and students’ performance. the results display a model that is recursive at a sample size of 19,487 (table 3). except for cmin/df = 28.00 > 5, all other fitting indexes reached a good fit level indicating that the model can be well fitted with the actual observation data. the relationships between variables described in this model were reasonable and the parameters’ estimation as appropriate. so, this study decided to use the model to test the mediating effect of families’ social capital on students’ education through shadow education. intermediary model of family economic capital influence on students’ education acquisitions this study measured family capitals influence on education acquisition. the intermediary model shows family economic capital influences education acquisitions of students (the results of standardized regression path coefficient of the model are shown in figure 4). all path coefficients in the model past the significance level test except family economic capital influence students’ performance. the joint significance test revealed that family economic capital had a significant mediating effect on students’ performance and shadow education played a complete mediating role between family economic capital and students’ performance. the results of the model analysis suggest that the model is recursive with a sample size of 19,487 (the results of model fitting are shown in table 4). all, except cmin/df = 11.87 > 5, reached a good fit level indicating that the model can be well fitted with the actual observation data. the relationships between variables described in this model were reasonable and the parameters’ estimation as appropriate. the model was used to test the mediating effect of families’ economic capital on students’ education through shadow education. intermediary model of family political capitals influence on students’ education acquisitions this study constructed the intermediary model to test family political capital influence on education acquisitions of students. the results of standardized regression of path coefficients show that all the path coefficients in the model have past the significance level test (are shown in figure 5). family political capital had a significant xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 99 figure 1. theoretical model of family capitals influencing education. figure 2. multiple intermediary model of family cultural capital influencing students’ education acquisitions. ***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05 xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 100 figure 3. model of family social capital influencing students’ education acquisitions. ***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05 figure 4. model of family economic capital influencing students’ education acquisitions. ***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05 xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 101 figure 5. model of family political capital influencing students’ education acquisitions. ***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05 figure 6. model of family capitals influencing students' education acquisitions. ***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05 xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 102 mediating effect on students’ performance and shadow education played a partial mediating role between family political capital and students’ performance. the results from the model analysis signified that the model is recursive with a sample size of 19,487. except for cmin/df = 11.89 > 5, all other fitting indexes have reached a good fit level indicating that the model can be well fitted with the actual observation data (he results of model fitting are shown in table 5). the established model of family political capital influencing education was a good theoretical hypothesis model because cmin/df>5 rejects theoretical model 1 and was the largest number of valid samples in the model statistically analyzes (n=19,487). the relationships between variables described in this model are reasonable and the parameters’ estimation was appropriate. so it was decided to use this particular model to test the mediating effect of family political capitals on students’ education through shadow education. intermediary model of family capitals influence on students’ education acquisitions the results from the standardized regression path coefficients suggest that the model past the significance level test (figure 6). family capitals had a significant mediating effect on students’ performance and shadow education played a partial mediating role between family capitals and students’ performance. the results of model analysis showed that the model was recursive with a sample size of 19,487 (see table 6). except for cmin/df = 35.52 > 5, all other fitting indexes reached a good fit level. conclusion and policy recommendations conclusion this paper combines school education and shadow education to investigate the influence of family capitals on junior high school students’ education acquisitions. the following are the main research conclusions. a family capital has a significant positive impact on education acquisitions on junior high school students, which, therefore, supports hypothesis 1. in terms of all types of family capitals, family cultural, family social, and family political all have a direct and significant positive effect on junior high school students’ education acquisitions. however, family economic capital has no significant direct impact on junior high school students’ academic education acquisitions. participating in shadow education has a significant positive impact on education acquisitions of junior high school students, as well, thus, supporting hypothesis 2. in the mediating effects of family capitals and total family capitals affecting students’ education acquisitions, participating in shadow education had a significant positive impact on junior high school students’ education acquisitions in all categories. xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 103 shadow education plays a partial mediation intermediary role in the process of family capitals influencing students’ education acquisitions. more specifically, family capitals influences students’ education acquisitions by influencing their shadow education participation opportunities, and therefore, supporting hypothesis 3 of this study. shadow education has different mediating effects among different types of family capitals and education acquisitions of students. it does not perform an intermediary role between family cultural capital and students’ education acquisitions. the reason may be that families with high cultural capital can provide more direct guidance and motivation for their children’s learning and such, families are less dependent on shadow education to improve children’s academic performance. shadow education also showed an intermediary role between family economic capital and students’ education acquisitions. families with high economic capital cannot provide direct support and motivation for their children to study on their own, but have the ability to buy more shadow education for their children and this largely relies on the shadow education to raise their children’s academic performance. results indicated that shadow education functions as an intermediary between family social capital and students’ education acquisitions and political capital and students’ education acquisitions. families with high social capital and political capital not only provide direct support and motivation for their children’s learning, but also rely on shadow education to improve their children’s academic performance. a family capital gets its status through the influence of both school education and shadow education on children’s education acquisitions. family capitals influence on junior high school students’ education acquisitions through school education and shadow education systems displays the differences in opportunities. families with higher education levels, ultimately, have their children attain higher social stratifications. children growing-up in families with more capitals are more likely to enter the primary labor market, whereas, children coming from families with poor capital are more likely to enter the secondary labor market. therefore, family capitals are transmitted from the fathers to the children. intergenerational inheritance of family capitals is realized, and hence, this process of intergenerational inheritance of family capitals is seen in school education and shadow education. this educational social structure leads to solidifying of class right-up to the job market. classic social reproduction theorists, such as, coleman and bourdieu, focus on the influence of family capitals on education acquisitions in schools. they elaborate on the mechanisms of education social reproduction in schools, but ignore the mechanisms of shadow education social reproduction. currently, shadow education has become an important supplement to education in schools, globally. shadow education acquisition is not only an important form of student education acquisition, but also, has an important impact on student school education acquisitions. therefore, to only investigate the influence of family capitals on education acquisition on school education will eventually underestimate the influence of family capitals on education acquisitions of children and fully reveal the current mechanisms of education social reproduction. this study finds that the shadow education plays an intermediary role between family capitals xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 104 and education acquisitions. it also, ravels the joint mechanism of social reproduction between school education and shadow education, to a certain extent. in all, this study aims to assist in the development and improvement of the classic education social reproduction theory, for the current implementation of education fairness and the social mobility policy, in china, has certain significance. the influence of shadow education on students’ education acquisitions can be divided into short-term and long-term impacts. the short-term impact of shadow education on students’ learning is mainly reflected in the promoting of students’ academic performance in school. while, the long-term impact of shadow education on students’ learning is attained in helping students to enter better schools. limited by data, this study only discusses the short-term impact of shadow education on the acquisition of family capitals and education. therefore, we will analyze whether shadow education can help students to attend better schools. and, in subsequent studies, explore the long-term impact of shadow education between family capitals and education acquisition. policy suggestions limiting the influence of family capitals on education acquisition and giving more emphasis to the role of education in promoting social mobility should become important responsibilities of governments around the world to achieve social equity. based on the conclusions and discussions of this paper, the policy implications of this study are as follows. governments should take notice of the importance of shadow education and its influence on family capitals and students’ education acquisitions. governments can make policies, in particular for shadow education to reduce its impact and create more equal schooling. in recent years, chinese governments at all levels have paid more attention to creating a fairer educational system that can control such dilemmas as shadow education. as well, new policies have been adopted to weaken the influence of family capitals. the hope is to lessen the role that the dominant class currently holds over the educational system and, thus, open new opportunities to disadvantaged groups. in order to maintain their competitive advantage of entering the best schools, the dominant class has increasingly attached importance to use of the shadow education system and this has resulted in the exclusion of groups with less power. in other words, disadvantaged groups stuck in the inescapable intergenerational inheritance of family capitals are left with a school education and shadow education that is combined with social reproduction mechanisms. the result is severely weakened government policies on education and a damaged foundation for social equality. at present, governments at all levels are fighting the logic that shadow education is an outcome of market behavior. therefore, most lawmakers have a laissezfaire attitude towards shadow education and so generating a “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to the current situation. however, governments should focus more on the intermediary role of shadow education and family capitals on students’ education xue. family capitals and education acquisitions. vol.1, no. 2, 2019 105 acquisitions, forming initiatives to establish an educational system that will weaken the impact of shadow education through compulsory education fair policies. the intermediary role of shadow education between family capitals and students’ education acquisitions initiates the joint social reproduction mechanism of school and shadow education. education’s social reproduction function has also been further enhanced, making it easier for social strata to replicate and solidify. in order to break the class solidification and promote social equality, chinese governments can also provide shadow education subsidies to families of junior high school students with poor academic performance and family capitals to weaken the negative impact of shadow education. developed countries like australia, england, france, singapore and the united states have dealt with shadow education through measures, such as, remedial vouchers and allowances and tax breaks. chinese governments can learn from these practices and bring forth explicit policies relevant to china to combat shadow education in the hopes to providing an equal opportunity education for all chinese students. notes 1 the upper professional class includes: heads of government agencies, enterprises and public institutions, middle management personnel, middle and senior professional and technical personnel, cadres and civil servants of general government agencies, economic business personnel, private business owners and employees or above. the middle class includes: grass-roots management personnel, other professional and technical personnel/general technicians, employees of enterprises and institutions, technical workers, military police fire fighters, selfemployed/small business owners (8 employees or less). the lower occupational class includes: commercial and service personnel, non-skilled workers, agricultural, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery personnel, freelancers, unemployed and laid-off household workers. 2 since this survey did not specifically ask parents about their political status, it asked respondents about their political status. however, since respondents may be people other than their parents, parents rather than parents’ 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(in chinese). received: 27 february 2019 revised: 15 march 2019 accepted: 21 march 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in education & economics 2018; 34(4):69-78. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 薛海平. 家庭资本与教育获得: 基于影子教育中介效应分析. 教育与经济 2018; 34(4):69-78. article-haipingxue-bece_30march2019 article-haipingxue-maintext-bece_30march2019 bece. newsletter vol.7, no.1, 2021 934 nutrition improvement program for compulsory education students in rural area: effects of meal plan on pupils’ physical health and mental health by yu, j.f., & zhao, q.r. correspondence to: zhao, q.r., associate professor, college of economics and management, china agricultural university, china. email: zhaoqiran@cau.edu.cn his article is based on the research data of 49 schools from three northwest provinces in china that have implemented the “nutrition improvement program for compulsory education students in rural area “(2015), using ordinary least squares (ols) regression and propensity score matching (psm) methods to study the influence of enterprise and school meal plan on children’s physical and mental condition through the development state like height and weight, including the status like anemia, since the implementation of the plan in 2011. the research indicators and results are as follows:  indicator description: the body mass index z score (bmi zscores) and height for age z score (haz-scores) are used to evaluate the physical development of children; the anemia rate and hb(hemoglobin) value are used to reflect the anemia status of children; and the mental health test(mht) is used to measure the mental health of children.  analysis of regression results: this paper adopts the ols regression estimation method，and the results show that after adding a series of personal and family variables, whether school supply meals or not have no significant impact on bmi index and haz index, but it has a significant impact on the hb value and anemia rate, and it also has a significant correlation with the psychological score. what’s more, using the psm method to control the endogeneity, which further proves whether the school supply meal or not has a significant effect on the mental health of students, and also including the specific learning anxiety, self-blame tendency, and physical symptoms.  research conclusions: in terms of physical development, there is no significant difference between school meals and corporate t vol.7, no.1, 2021 935 meals; in terms of anemia and mental health, students who receive school meals is worse than those receiving corporate meals.  policy recommendations: in order to further improve the implementation of the plan, it is necessary to consider the reasonable design of the proportions of different types of meals and the nutritional combination of foods in different meal plan; in terms of nutrition, school meals need to pay attention to providing sufficient meat and other iron-rich elements food, corporate meals should increase the supply of vegetables or fruits. source: education & economy, 2020; 36(4):30-39. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic nathan storey, robert e. slavin johns hopkins university, baltimore, md 21286, usa abstract. this paper examines the united states federal and state educational responses to the spread of the covid-19 pandemic, as well as states’ plans for reopening schools. the virus entered the united states in january 2020. as the virus spread, most school districts began to close in march. at the end of june, the united states has experienced the highest number of cases and deaths due to covid-19 in the world, and infection rates appear to be rising once again. given the great physical and socioeconomic diversity of the united states, the federal and state response to covid-19 and plans to reopen schools in the autumn have emphasized flexibility and adaptation. however, the implementation of remote (online) learning has highlighted and exacerbated long-standing racial and economic inequalities in us society related to technology access, school engagement, and school-parent relationships. these inequalities may be exacerbated as schools attempt to reopen and students continue to face inconsistent access to learning, learning loss during the spring semester and summer, and covid-19 spread among the most atrisk population groups. further research and practical interventions, such as tutoring, should be implemented to address educational equality issues and improve access, whether to in-person or remote instruction. best evid chin edu 2020; 5(2):617-633. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.or027. how to cite: storey, n., slavin, r.e. (2020) the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. best evid chin edu, 5(2):617-633. keywords: covid-19; remote learning; school closure; educational responses; online schooling; distance learning; school reopening. about the author: nathan storey, school of education, johns hopkins university, 300 east joppa road 5th fl., baltimore, md 21286, usa. email: nstorey1@jhu.edu correspondence to: robert e. slavin, professor, school of education, johns hopkins university, 300 east joppa road 5th fl., baltimore, md 21286, usa. email: rslavin@successforall.org. conflict of interests: none. storey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 618 n the 2020 pandemic, the united states has had the largest number of covid-19 cases and deaths of any country. its responses to the health crisis have been fragmented and uncertain. the same fragmentation and uncertainty have prevailed in the us education system, and as of this writing (june 2020), the policies and outcomes of us schools combating covid-19 are not yet known. the educational response in the united states has emphasized a reliance on flexibility, adaptation, and local decision-making, for both better and worse. this paper will examine the us response to the coronavirus outbreak, focusing on the different approaches taken by different states and school districts, the challenges encountered in closing schools and shifting to remote (online) or distance learning, and prospects for reopening school systems in the fall 2020. as will be seen, the transition to remote learning was often inconsistent and revealed or exacerbated existing inequalities in us society, especially those related to socioeconomic status and race. these inequalities are likely to be further intensified should the remote learning system continue in place under the conditions that existed in the spring or without large-scale, effective action taken to address covid-19-related learning loss. onset of us pandemic the first identified coronavirus cases in the united states were reported in mid-january 2020, though some speculate the virus entered the united states as early as december 2019, and began circulating in northern california and washington state, before spreading to other states (baker, 2020). at the end of january, the us department of health and human services (hhs) declared a public health emergency, introducing quarantines for us citizens traveling from china and denying entry to non-us citizens who had been to china. washington state reported the first us death due to coronavirus on february 29, and the virus had been reported in over half of all us states by the middle of march. by the end of march, us states reported over 3,000 deaths and 164,500 confirmed cases. the us federal government passed the coronavirus aid, relief and economic security (cares) act on march 27, 2020, including support for k-12 and higher education institutions in the form of formula grants to be distributed to states based on their shares of title i-a funds, to be used for response activities and long-term closure planning and coordination and educational technology purchases, as well as a portion of the governor’s education relief fund, a discretionary sum to be used for emergency support grants for childcare, k-12, and higher education (reid, 2020). the intention of the bill was to enable flexibility in addressing the specific educational needs each state faced. in addition, the act included $18.5 billion for the supplemental nutrition assistance program (snap), supporting child nutrition (jordan, 2020). one month later, the us had reported 60,966 total deaths and over 1 million confirmed cases, which nearly doubled again by the end of may, when the us reported 103,781 deaths and 1.77 million cases (ritchie, et al., 2020). as of july 1, 2020, there have been 2.5 million cases and 125,000 deaths, and both numbers continue to accelerate. while the federal government passed some measures and recommended social distancing actions, the more substantive responses to the pandemic have occurred at the state level. i storey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 619 state and local response to covid-19 since no cure or vaccine existed, the main public health response to the pandemic was social distancing, which entailed the closures of most venues in which people gather. this included schools. by the time the cares act was signed into law in late march, us states and territories had been forced to take action on their own to determine when and how to close schools and to support teachers and students transition to remote learning. school superintendents petitioned the federal government and the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) for guidance on how to respond to the pandemic in february (binkley, 2020), but the first states did not begin mandating the closures of in-person schooling until mid-march, initially on a two-three week basis, though individual school districts and schools did close earlier than that as students and faculty began testing positive for the disease (forgie, 2020). by the end of march, all 50 states had announced mandatory or recommended closures of public schools, and most required remote learning in place of in-person classes. some states, such as kansas, virginia, and oklahoma, decided that schools would not reopen for the remainder of the school year, but other states, including new york, maryland, and new jersey, put off that decision until april or early may. though most states ordered schools to be closed, seven states (california, idaho, tennessee, florida, south dakota, maine, and kentucky) merely recommended schools be closed, allowing district variations in response to the virus, and by may, some counties in colorado, wyoming, and montana (meltzer, 2020) had begun to reopen in a limited capacity and in smaller, less-populated areas (map, 2020; kirsch, 2020). as it became clear that schools would have to remain closed beyond the initial two-week closure, districts began petitioning the federal government for waivers on the required number of school days and hours in a year (jones & pflaum, 2020) and on completion of standardized testing. at least one state, georgia, petitioned the department of education for approval to suspend standardized testing for the 20202021 school year as well (strauss, 2020). while the school schedule and standardized assessments are determined by states and school districts, receipt of federal funds is tied to completion of these requirements under the basic us education law, the every student succeeds act (essa). with the closing of school campuses for all levels, schools began the process of creating remote learning curricula, materials, and policies and procedures on short notice. online learning provision and school services the short period between the decision to close schools and the initiation of remote learning caused a scramble across the country to prepare for online instruction, requiring flexibility and adaptation at the state, district, and school levels. in short succession, teachers received tutorials on using zoom or other videoconferencing platforms, revised their curricula and standards for assessment, and developed printed packets to be distributed to students’ homes, among other approaches to support the transition. washington state developed resource lists for parents including courses, online resources and learning games, exercise activities, and downloadable content for learning (ospi, 2020). storey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 620 teachers soon found themselves taking on unprecedented responsibilities. many states required or recommended regular teacher-student communication, such as through synchronous lessons, sometimes on a daily basis (as in iowa, minnesota, and vermont), or on a weekly basis (as in arkansas, delaware, and michigan) (sparks, 2020). schools switched to communications by email, phone calls and text messages, print, and even social media (herold, 2020). a teacher in greenville, south carolina, remembered, “‘it ‘was just like a free-for-all. we [teachers] all went to school. we created lesson plans in, like, 12 hours. so 10 days of lesson plans in a day, essentially. and we had to be prepared to launch those lesson plans by wednesday and to start doing full-on e-learning, which our kids had never really done before without us’” (turner, et al., 2020). florida schools relied on teachers to build new curriculum plans from a variety of sources, including public broadcasting system (pbs) programs, existing materials, and new materials developed on short notice (kamenetz, 2020). this conversion was a monumental feat asked of teachers and administrators, which they rose to face in their combined commitment to students’ wellbeing and education. with the transition to remote learning, the focus on education provision shifted out of necessity, not just in terms of curricular material, but also in regard to other school roles and responsibilities. many states, including kansas, wisconsin, and virginia, prioritized preparations for graduating students to be able to complete their studies by waiving or allowing districts to request waivers for graduation requirements (sawchuk, 2020; sparks, 2020) that would no longer be feasible while conducting remote learning. few states opted to specify the number of hours or methods used for remote learning (sparks, 2020). in order to allow flexibility, montana decided that remote learning did not have to be online, requiring no single mechanism for districts to continue education. cleveland’s long distance approach, recognizing that the district included a large high poverty population and many students had inconsistent or no internet and computer access, chose to prioritize review of material students had already been introduced to, instead of new curriculum material not yet covered during the year (gewertz, 2020). districts have also chosen to prioritize student social emotional welfare during the traumatic period. schools play an important role not just in students’ education, but also their wellbeing, and many districts have endeavored to continue providing these services, such as free meals, during the pandemic. the salt lake city (ut) school district, for example, provided breakfast and lunch monday through friday and dinners for students three days a week starting in april (stauffer, 2020). these efforts highlight the flexibility required of schools and districts to address the specific needs of the students they serve and the importance of schools beyond the classroom. the necessity for distance education and worries about equity led some larger urban districts to partner with local public television to develop programs for broadcast and online distribution. los angeles unified school district partnered with public broadcasting system (pbs) stations across southern california to produce educational programming for television, websites, and apps targeting prek-second grade students, grades 3-8, and 9-12 (kamenetz, 2020; goldsmith, 2020; li & lalani, 2020). teachers were able also to turn to preexisting online curricula meeting multiple states’ standards, storey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 621 including engageny, learnzillion, and open up resources (rand, 2020). these partnerships have the potential to reach more students who may lack access to a laptop for joining online class sessions or regular internet access. few of these programs have been studied systematically, so it is unclear how effective the programs selected are for meeting students’ learning needs, however. some states and school districts have opted to reach their students through increased technology purchases, using existing budgetary funds or funding from the cares act grants. chicago public schools reportedly gave out more than 100,000 devices to students (turner et al., 2020), and miami-dade county public schools disseminated over 80,000 mobile devices and 11,000 smart phones to create wi-fi hotspots (goldstein et al., 2020). the greater nashville (tennessee) school district (glover, 2020), put into place programs to purchase laptops or wi-fi hotspots for students who struggled with access to internet, though recent predictions cast doubt on whether the computers will be procured and distributed in time for the start of the new school year (mangrum, 2020). with cleveland’s large high-poverty population, the district has attempted to distribute technology to enable access, but there are reportedly still many without regular access (gewertz, 2020). technology provision was not limited to major urban areas. rural minford, ohio also attempted to deliver laptops and printed work to the roughly 25% of students without technology (goldstein et al., 2020), and south portland maine schools district began a one-to-one technology program in 2003, using both ipads for younger students and chromebooks for older ones, and began pairing remote learning with online courses for teachers and administrators in the design and implementation of online learning (hogan, 2020). some districts relied on previously obtained technology and information to reach those struggling with access. south carolina (munyan-penney, 2020) and the coachella valley (ca) unified district (lee et al., 2020) both used previously purchased school buses with wi-fi hotspots, positioned primarily in lower-income neighborhoods, to enable greater internet access. idaho provided residents with a list of nocost or low-cost internet options, while south carolina developed maps showing wi-fi hotspots throughout the state, including those the state had placed on school buses. (munyan-penney, 2020). lindsay (ca) unified school district, with a large population of migrant agricultural workers, had started a community wi-fi project in 2016, allowing minimal interruptions to internet access and learning as schools transitioned to remote learning (kamenetz, 2020). salem city, virginia (va) implemented a one-to-one program prior to 2020, providing chromebooks to grade 3-12 students, paired with 200 hotspots and a partnership with a local cable company to provide free internet access for students qualifying for free and reduced lunch (sawchuk, 2020). these approaches, both using newly purchased technology and previously appropriated technology distributed in new ways, became among the most popular means to address differential access to remote education offerings. in the immediate aftermath of the closure of schools, districts wondered if and how they would continue to provide aid and services for students with disabilities, required under the individuals with disabilities education act (idea). some even constorey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 622 sidered not providing services out of a fear of compliance violations (green, 2020). while the federal government granted waivers on grading and hours of class time, secretary of education betsy devos rejected waivers on idea (jordan, 2020; green, 2020), and federal authorities have been flexible in the remote services (such as telehealth) that can be reimbursed through medicaid, a major funding source for schoolbased health care (jordan, 2020), enabling teachers and parents to find educational solutions. special education teachers employed a variety of approaches to reach their students. some connected with students virtually or via videotapes provided to parents demonstrating practices they can do with their children at home (jordan, 2020). many students with disabilities struggled to use online videoconferencing and learning tools or printed materials, requiring the assistance of human or technological aides such as screen-reading software, which are not included in programs such as zoom (hill, 2020). there is great variation in the population of students with disabilities, with many different needs and abilities, so for some the transition has been beneficial. the asd nest program in new york city focuses on incorporating students with autism into mainstream classrooms. tracey murray, a kindergarten teacher with asd nest, moved her classes, as well as a “social club” for students with autism (asd), to practice conversations online, discovering that students found it easier to communicate and look each other in the eye when using zoom instead of speaking in person (hill, 2020). while states, districts, and teachers took drastic action to continue providing education to many students, the transition was not without problems, some of them more significant than others. challenges and inequities in online learning while many states and districts went to great lengths to continue educational services for students, the remote learning process was not without its challenges. the transition was not always smooth. some districts and schools, particularly in urban areas, such as sidwell friends, a private school in washington, d.c., which went paperless before 2020 (turner, et al., 2020), more easily transitioned online because of existing infrastructure. but many school districts faced various issues, including lack of technology access for all students; teacher struggles to provide online lessons, student engagement, and the socioemotional impact of covid-19 on students. often, these issues corresponded more highly with preexisting conditions including family socioeconomic (ses) background, school funding and infrastructure, and student learning needs. access to technology, and therefore, access to educational content during remote learning, proved to be a disproportionately greater challenge for students and families from lower socioeconomic statuses. us census data from 2015 suggested that 15% of us households lack high speed internet, which impacts students’ ability to complete and turn in assignments; this is disproportionately more of an issue for black teens than their peers (25% compared to 4% of white teens and 6% of latinx teens) (anderson & perrin, 2020). upon the initiation of social distancing and remote learning, adults working service industry jobs often lost their jobs, leading to a loss of stability for their families. one outcome of this could be the loss of internet access for their homes. over 30 milstorey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 623 lion jobs may have been lost during the months of march-may (morath, 2020), hitting working class families the hardest, as these jobs are often ones which cannot be conducted remotely. unable to pay bills, internet access could easily fall by the wayside, depriving their children of remote learning opportunities. while many districts and states took or are in the process of taking steps to bridge the technology access gap as described in the previous section, a significant gap remains, which has a greater harm for those who need the most support. rigorous remote learning, using online platforms and at least some synchronous learning, attendance tracking, and grading of students’ work, was challenging to accomplish in the timeframe required, but implementation was skewed towards school districts with larger proportions of high-ses families. the policies and practices school districts reported following revealed that as few as 20% of schools may have offered rigorous remote learning nationwide (lieberman, 2020), but this number is almost certainly worse in areas and schools that cater primarily to students from high poverty and minority backgrounds. teacher interactions and student access to remote learning both appeared to be significantly worse for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. by one estimate, up to 40% of the poorest students accessed remote learning just once a week (kamenetz, 2020), while only 32% of teachers in high poverty districts reported interacting with students on a daily basis (compared to over 50% in higher ses districts) (education week, may 7, 2020). in districts with few low-ses families, only 20% of school leaders were concerned with missing technology issues, while 68% of school leaders in districts with a high proportion of low-ses families were concerned with this issue (herold, 2020). as described above, some states moved quickly to provide devices and hotspots to students lacking access, but for other states that made efforts to do this later in the semester or over the summer, technological options were more limited due to high demand (herold, 2020; munyan-penney, 2020). the students in these states and districts are liable to then become even more behind should schools not reopen in the fall, as they will continue to miss out on class content and educational support. some students were left out of state guidance and teacher efforts. while all states issued guidance on the provision of special education remotely, just two-thirds of states provided guidance or resources specifically for english learners (els) (sparks, 2020). due to the differential access to education, jonathan plucker of johns hopkins university center for talented youth suggests that students may enter the fall 2020 semester with a range of up to eight grade levels in knowledge (bowman, 2020). this is a huge difference in experience during this challenging time, which, unless addressed, will have a disproportionately large impact on students from disadvantaged backgrounds. because of educational access and technological issues, teachers have struggled to make remote learning work effectively for all students while taking on a large workload themselves. teachers reported struggling with learning to use the technology effectively. there have been reports of “zoombombing,” when outsiders join classroom zoom sessions, shouting obscenities or otherwise disrupting the lesson (munyanpenney, 2020). some teachers struggled with learning how to host and manage live storey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 624 learning sessions and instead relied on recording sessions and sending out videos for students to watch on their own or on students completing assignments included in paper packets (herold, 2020). teachers, parents, and students agreed that teachers teaching online were far more likely to engage students than were videos or assignments to be done without teacher input, but many teachers found online teaching more difficult. in addition, teachers have also been asked to take part in additional professional development sessions to be able to maximize the effectiveness of remote learning, use of platforms such as zoom, and how to support students during this time. while the professional development was necessary, requiring additional professional development created another strain on teachers’ time and energy, when they too were dealing with trauma and stress in their own lives. some teachers were challenged to reach students over large distances. the mountain empire district (california) must provide services for students spanning more than 660 square miles, three native american reservations, and six different communities (sawchuk, 2020). consequently, teachers are working longer hours than before. rebecca sorenson of rural michigan reported holding individual zoom sessions with students for 4-5 hours a day, followed by hours of driving to students’ homes to drop off educational materials (gewertz, 2020). methods and requirements related to grading students’ work quickly became an equity-focused conversation. many districts thought that continuing to grade students punished low-income students without access to technology. this partly reflected school leaders’ own ability to provide access to these students. high-poverty and rural district leaders reported that they were less able to provide remote learning options for all students than wealthy districts. only 34% of high poverty districts reported able to provide access for all, compared with 62-73% for suburban and wealthier districts (herold, 2020). their concerns also were informed by student engagement in existing classroom activities. almost one third (32%) of students in districts of highest poverty families were not regularly logging into online classwork, completing assignments, or communicating with their teachers, while only 12% of highincome district students were “truant” (herold, 2020). districts subsequently considered moving to pass/fail grading systems (sawchuk, 2020), focusing on moving students towards standards instead of to establish a grade, or passing all students already on track to progress to the next grade before the suspension of in-person learning (schwartz, 2020). these approaches were intended to ameliorate the “double hit” of losing class learning time and school community (fay, 2020) that are particularly beneficial to low income students. in disadvantaged areas, the load of responsibility fell more significantly on parents to support their children’s education. this challenge was greatest for younger students in elementary and pre-kindergarten (pre-k) grades, as well as students with disabilities, who require more supervision and support when using technology or completing classwork. older students in secondary school, more self-sufficient and competent in technology use, did not generally require this level of supervision. schools sought to coordinate more closely with the parents of students who appeared at risk of struggling or falling out of the system. peter kannam, principal at henderson-hopkins elemenstorey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 625 tary/middle school in baltimore, maryland, reported that their school hired four instructors to provide support for teachers to conduct online classes, send out daily text updates to parents on student engagement, as well as emails and robocalls two to three times per week, and held parent town halls every other week (kannam, 2020). these efforts, coupled with laptop distribution to 80% of the students in need of them, appear to have paid off, as the school reported that almost 99% of their students were engaged in classes, with 84% attending classes over the first seven weeks of the pandemic school closure. but in some cases, these efforts could not replace the role of schools in engaging students and supporting their learning. “no amount of love and care at home can turn the average parent into a special-education teacher overnight. nor can it enable them to practice occupational, speech, or physical therapy” (hill, 2020). differences in student engagement can also be tied to the various roles schools play beyond the classroom. students from low-ses families or experiencing homelessness rely on schools for food, healthcare, and social supports. nearly 1.5 million students nationwide experience homelessness, while 13 million children experience hunger (nuamah, et al., 2020). for these students, the supports schools provide are vital to their very survival. even though schools have made efforts to provide meals, the food insecurity (van lancker & parolin, 2020) and socioemotional trauma that students are experiencing without school support systems are very real. these issues have been shown repeatedly by strongly designed research studies to have an impact on educational achievement. another factor that may have exacerbated differential implementation of remote learning is state education funding levels. much has been written about the differently sized budgets maintained by public, private, and charter schools. following the passage of the cares act, secretary devos pushed for funds distributed by the federal government to states to be distributed increasingly to private schools (stratford, 2020). this breaks from previous title i funding standards, which restricted private schools to access these funds only for “equitable programs” (jordan, 2020). planning the reopening of schools as the rate of infection and death has decreased in some parts of the united states, thanks to social distancing and other preventative methods, attention has turned to planning the reopening of schools in the fall. all states and districts, however, are planning for a fall reopening. but with disease rates continuing at high levels, and even continuing to rise in many states as of late early july 2020, it is unclear when it will be safe to fully open. many states began reopening public spaces and loosening public social distancing restrictions in may and june 2020, and subsequently are seeing an uptick in cases, in some contexts experiencing record highs in state covid-19 cases. should these renewed rising levels of covid-19 prevalence continue into the fall, it is unknown if schools will be able to reopen as planned. while the american association of pediatrics (aap) has recommended reopening in-person schooling on account of schools’ role in child development (kamenetz, 2020-e), the decision to do so belongs with state government and local school districts. districts and states must determine if storey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 626 restarting in-person classes is worth the potential risk of infection, what steps and requirements to put in place, or if it is best to continue remote learning until infection rates diminish. all us states are planning to reopen in the fall to some degree, working with school boards and state and local leaders to develop plans and guidance. the cdc has put forth a series of recommendations for school districts to consider enacting in the process of reopening, including social distancing inside the school building, enhanced cleaning of surfaces, and providing options for teachers who feel uneasy or are at greater risk of infection to work remotely (cdc, 2020). given the potential for resurgence, others are preparing for a hybrid reopening approach or a return to remote learning even if schools reopen, purchasing more devices and considering one-to-one policies. philadelphia school district is considering a hybrid plan based on limiting the number of students and staff in the school on a given day while allowing other students and staff to participate remotely based on health concerns (hanna, 2020). annette anderson of the johns hopkins university center for safe and healthy schools sees this as the number one priority, “we need a one-to-one technology policy in every district…one student, one device with internet access included’” (myers, 2020). other dramatic restructuring ideas have been widely discussed, including two-session days, alternating school and home days to limit the number of students in a classroom (sharfstein & morphew, 2020), “microschools” with intensive home-school cooperation, moving classrooms outdoors (kamenetz, 2020), or extending the school year (ehren & turkeli, 2020). alternate-day plans have been widely adopted in other countries, and at least one large district, fairfax, virginia (arnold, 2020), has announced such a plan. however, districts in tucson (arizona), nashville (tennessee), and cincinnati (ohio), have announced plans to fully open schools in the fall whenever it is safe, and allow each school to figure out how to implement social distancing (conover, 2020; mangrum, 2020; ryle et al., 2020). these districts have also announced that parents will be allowed to keep their children at home and that any students remaining at home will be provided with remote learning for this purpose. the most common approach to reopening being discussed as of this writing seems to be social distancing within the school building. the best methods to implement this practice include spacing students out within classrooms by separating individual desks, keeping students in small groups that do not mix with each other during the school day, keeping students out of common areas, and ending extracurricular sports and clubs (sharfstein & morphew, 2020). within-classroom spacing requires alternateday or two daily session strategies to reduce the number of students in each class. some schools have considered repurposing cafeterias and shared space into additional classroom space (editors, 2020), using barriers between desks, spacing out arrival and departure from schools (sharfstein & morphew, 2020). since many us students ride buses to and from school, social distancing on buses has been a widespread concern. school buses could, for instance, be run with fewer students, spaced out in each bus, with more buses, and with buses using certain routes to avoid mixing (will, 2020). fairfax (va) county public schools (fcps) developed diagrams for classroom desk arrangement, as storey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 627 well as seating in school buses. based on a 77-seat bus, fcps recommends 23 students per bus, as well as the bus driver’s child and the driver (fcps, 2020). these approaches are all intended to minimize transmission of the virus among students and staff. but social distancing could be difficult to maintain, particularly for younger children and when students are not in organized environments such as classrooms. distances are easy enough to maintain when students are stationary at their desks in a classroom, but time spent in the hallways moving between classes, in recess on the playground, and getting to and from school, are the bigger challenge areas, where social distancing protocols could easily break down without careful monitoring, a herculean task. this makes it clear that social distancing is not a silver bullet to enable schools to be reopened. there is some question about who should wear masks, at what ages students should start being required to wear them, and what procedures should be put in place for people to enter school buildings. the cdc recommends that students be encouraged, not required, to wear masks, and that all faculty and staff wear masks (will, 2020) as so far, adults are the more at-risk population. while some countries have used temperature checks at the entrance of schools, some have seen this as an insufficient method given the possibility of transmission by individuals not displaying symptoms. overreliance on temperature checks could give a “false sense of security” (will, 2020), leading to the loosening of adherence to social distancing and mask wearing, to say nothing of potential complications when students must be checked following outdoor activities or fire drills. other added steps could include testing, increased places to wash hands, and enhanced surface cleaning protocols. dr. anthony fauci, director of the national institute of allergy and infectious diseases, recommended use of pooled testing (combining several students’ tests together into one sample for testing) to save school resources and time (watts, 2020). despite the existence of a number of different potential steps to address covid-19 spread in schools, many teachers remain concerned about whether returning to schools is the right decision. questions abound for what the classroom and school format will look like and how these policies will impact teachers’ routines and procedures. school districts must consider how self-quarantine policies impact teacher sick leave, whether teachers can and should take on additional responsibilities regarding child safety and classroom sanitation, how to manage high-risk teachers (or teachers with family who are high-risk) (will, 2020), to name a few issues. parents too are concerned about what returning to school mean for their children. a survey of los angeles parents revealed that around 20% of parents are not yet ready for their children to go back to school in person (blume, 2020). there is not much time left for states and districts to make these decisions, satisfy worried teachers (and parents), and implement policy changes or make physical changes to school grounds. the changes necessary could also be cost prohibitive for some districts. at a time when state education budgets are facing cuts, school districts are estimated to need as much as $1.8 million each (will, 2020) for construction, repairs, changes to transportation protocols, new staff and health personnel, equipment, and maintenance. one common recommendation, an increase in school nursing personnel, is also potentially storey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 628 challenging for urban schools where nurses are spread across multiple locations, or rural areas, where qualified nurses may be hard to come by or attract. even in california’s affluent and mostly suburban orange county, the ratio of nurse to students can range from 1:1,100 to 1:10,000 (editors, 2020). a more practical and inexpensive alternative would be the hiring of “health aides,” certified individuals who could assist schools with practical matters such as temperature checks, administration of prescription medicine, and distribution of masks, among other tasks. school health aides could also gather information, support the spread of information to a school’s community, form relationships, and refer students to established health providers. these services would free up the time and responsibilities of school nurses (if present) to take on regular student health needs and more serious health concerns. additional funding could come from the federal government. the house of representatives passed a bill, the health and economic recovery omnibus emergency solutions (heroes) act in april 2020, which would have included additional education funds, but it has not been introduced to the senate. the funds could be prioritized for public school districts facing the greatest levels of covid-19-related learning and staffing loss (sharfstein & morphew, 2020). while these steps may support schools in putting into place health protocols to minimize spread of covid-19, they do little to address the learning gaps that have developed between students with and without regular access to remote learning. how should schools go about bridging the potentially eight levels of difference between students that have developed over one semester? one potentially effective approach to address this gap could be tutoring. one on one or small group tutoring support has been proven to have a strong effect on learning reading and mathematics. some existing tutoring programs consistently produce effect sizes of 0.40 or more, around 5 additional months of learning (slavin, 2020), and tutoring by paraprofessionals has been shown to be as effective as tutoring administered by teachers (inns et al., 2018). in large enough numbers, tutors, perhaps recruited and organized through americorps, could move the needle for students to make up the covid-19 learning loss slide. the government of the netherlands recently set aside $278 million to provide support to all students in elementary, secondary, and vocational schools who need it (baars, 2020), while the uk set aside roughly $1.24 billion for tutoring and other services (adams, 2020). were the us to implement a similar program, considering the different population size, similar approaches could cost $5-7.5 billion (slavin, 2020). regardless of the methods used, significant steps must be taken to address the widening gap in learning brought on by the pandemic. implications in contrast to the transition to remote learning that occurred in more centralized educational systems, such as south korea, the united states has a long way to go to address the challenges of equity in the implementation of remote learning. while some steps and school-network-platform partnerships made efforts to close the gaps, a large portion of students experienced lower access to and participation in education after the initiation of remote learning. reopening schools to in-person instruction would enable greatstorey & slavin. the us educational response to the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 629 er access to education, but comes with its own questions, including whether families would be comfortable sending their children back to schools, whether teachers would risk exposure, what steps should be taken to limit transmission of the virus and how best to ensure compliance with these protocols, and how school districts would pay for any changes at a time when school budgets are being cut. regardless of whether schools reopen, remote learning is continued, or some sort of hybrid of in-person and online learning is implemented in the fall, the largest question of all remains: how can schools close the gap that has formed due to the covid-19 slide and unequal access to education during the spring semester? the federal government and us states must consider the steps taken by other countries as they reopen to learn what is most effective, how challenges can best be addressed as they arise, and what programs, such as widescale tutoring provision, can make up for the time lost. references adams, r. 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(2020, june 30) as schools plan for reopening, worried teachers say they have more questions than answers. education week teaching now. retrieved july 1, 2020, from http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching _now/2020/06/schools_plan_how_to_reo pen_teachers_unanswered_questions.html ?cmp=soc-shr-fb. received: 02 july 2020 revised: 05 july 2020 accepted: 05 july 2020 originalarticle-slavin-bece_title_15july2020 originalarticle-slavin-bece_maintext15july2020 bece. newsletter vol.6, no.1, 2020 800 the role of teachers’ social-emotional beliefs and teacher-student relationship in the effects of principals’ authentic leadership on students’ socialemotional competence by zhang, s., mao, y.q. correspondence to: mao, y.q. email: maoyaqing@bnu.edu.cn he authentic leadership of the principal refers to the positive psychological ability and moral values of the principal in the work interaction with teachers. in a district of beijing, zhang and mao chose stratified sampling to select 9 public primary schools and distributed a total of 900 teacher questionnaires. combined with the principal questionnaire and the student questionnaire, they investigated the teacher’s social-emotional belief, the principal’s honest leadership, the students’ social-emotional ability, and the close relationship between teachers and students. all the questionnaires adopted a 5-level likert scale. among them, students’ social-emotional ability includes six dimensions: self-cognition, self-management, others’ cognition, others’ management, collective cognition, and collective management. teachers’ social-emotional beliefs include three dimensions: learning adaptability, commitment and support culture. the results show that:  the authentic leadership of principals has a significant positive effect on students’ social affective ability.  teachers’ social emotions and beliefs close relationship between teachers and students and the leadership of the headmaster integrity students play a role of independent mediation between socialemotional ability, which shows the principal authentic leadership, in addition to playing a direct role of social emotions, can influence teachers’ social emotions and close relationship between teachers and students.  teachers’ social affective belief and intimate teacher-student relationship play a chain of mediating roles between principals’ authentic leadership and students’ social affective ability. in other words, principals’ authentic leadership affects teachers’ social affective beliefs, further affects an intimate teacher-student relationship, and finally affects students’ social affective ability. source: global education, 2020; 49(6):113-128. t an empirical study on the impact of individual local political elites and decision-making collective on educational fiscal expenditure in china ru cai, xinping zhang nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china abstract. under the current decentralization system in china, individual characteristics of the local political elites and collective characteristics of the standing committees of the local party have an impact on local education fiscal policy. yet published research on the similarities and differences between the collective influence of the standing committee and the individual influence of the political elite are lacking. to address this gap in the literature, our study discussed the impact of local political elites represented by the mayor and the secretary and the collective of standing committees of the local party on education fiscal expenditure. we construct multiple regression models and analyze the r2 change of variables is based on the cross-sectional data from 2015 of 283 prefecture-level administrative units in china. we find that both political elites and the standing committees have significant impacts on fiscal expenditure in education, and that the influence of the latter is greater than that of the former. the effect of individual characteristics and collective characteristics on education fiscal expenditure is not completely consistent across prefectures. china's prefectural governments implement china's unique principle of democratic centralism when they make decisions on local spending for education and the collective decision-making under the leadership of the committee plays an important role in education fiscal expenditure. based on this, we put forward policy suggestions to further develop the principle of democratic centralism and to optimize optimizing the local government education supply and evaluation mechanism. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 7(2):961-985. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.or023. cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no.2, 2021 962 how to cite: cai, r., & zhang, x. (2021). an empirical study on the impact of individual local political elites and decision-making collective on educational fiscal expenditure in china. best evidence in chinese education, 7(2):961-985. keywords: official personal characteristics; collective characteristics of standing committee of local party; democratic centralism; education fiscal expenditure about the authors: ru cai, doctorate candidate, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, no. 122, ninghai rd., nanjing 210024, china. email: 924654819@qq.com. correspondence to: xinping zhang, ph.d., professor, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, no. 122, ninghai rd., nanjing 210024, china. email: 403265357@qq.com. funding: this paper is funded by the key project of philosophy and social science research of ministry of education in 2020 “research on evaluation index system of high quality development of education” (20jzd053). it is also a project funded by the priority academic program development of jiangsu higher education institutions (papd). conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 963 introduction ith decentralization reform in china, chinese local governments face unique incentives and constraints given their institutional design. as a result, mainstream western fiscal decentralization theory provides little insight into china’s problems, leading yingyi qian (1996) and others to argue that chinese decentralization system design differs from that of the western. “chinese-style fiscal federalism” is the result of the unity of economic decentralization and political centralization (blanchard & shleifer, 2001). while implementing economic decentralization, the party and higher-level government organizations maintain control of the incentives and constraints on the party and government organizations at lower levels through organizational personnel arrangements based on local development performance (often expressed as local economic growth performance) (li & zhou, 2005). such institutional design has allowed localities to allocate more energy and resources to areas conducive to economic growth in the process of “competing for growth” which has mobilized local governments to develop the economy through initiatives that promote high-speed growth of the local economy, but has also brought problems for local education, health care, environmental protection, and investment resources, etc. (fu & zhang, 2017; wang & zhou, 2013; xu, 2011; yu, 2017; zhou, 2006; qiao, et al., 2005) . on the other hand, compared with the western countries, china’s local government officials have greater discretionary power in the process of intergovernmental competition and local governance, especially in the use of funds and budgetary arrangements. with this greater flexibility, china’s local governments exhibit a clear “soft budget” in terms of local fiscal expenditures. this means that local officials can take more flexible measures to deal with local affairs based on their own experience and preferences (yang & zheng, 2013; zhang, 2008). given this local flexibility, many scholars have paid attention to the relationship between the personality traits of officials and local governance. xianbin wang (2009), li’an zhou (2005), tingjin lin (2009), xianxiang xu (2008), ran song (2016), yini jiang (2017) and others use the analysis of government behavior from provincial, city and county levels as a starting point to discuss demographic characteristics of local officials, such as gender, age, education, and the relationship between work experience and the supply of public goods such as education, which provides new perspectives and ideas for interpreting china’s local governance model. however, such empirical researches, while paying attention to the influence of individual traits of officials, fail to connect this with collective decision-making of local governance in china. as democratic centralism is the fundamental organizational and leadership system of the local government, current researches are clearly insufficient to fully describe china’s local governance characteristics. given the organization of democratic centralism and decision-making principles, decisions on education finance must be made through a few democratic processes that are subject to the majority (zhu & hu, 2014). therefore, accurately describing the decision-making behavior and characteristics of chinese local government officials requires a focus on the relationship between the collective characw cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 964 teristics of decision-making body and their relationship with the individual characteristics of political elites. a proper description of the collective characteristics of local leadership is fundamental to such kind of researches. some early researches have been explored this theoretical logic regarding the collective as a rational decision maker, such as the logic of collective action (olson, 2014). from this perspective, the government can be regarded as a “personified” individual. in recent years, some foreign studies have begun trying to describe the characteristics of decision-making collectives quantitatively. the basic idea is similar to the above theoretical logic; that is, by considering the collective as an “individual” with certain characteristics, and then using the corresponding indicators (i.e., the composition of the collective average individual characteristics) the collective can be described (alesina et al., 2015). most such researches in china are still at the stage of theoretical discussion. some scholars analyzing public finance behavior have reported on officials stating that personal motives partially affected government group motivation (cao et al., 2014). others start from the concept of “collective leadership” and describe the dimensions and characteristics of collective decision-making (yang et al., 2014). to date, however, there have been few studies on the influence of collective leadership in china, and high-quality empirical research is especially lacking (cai & yao, 2018; zhang, 2014). this paper considers the local government decision-making body in terms of individuals of political elite and collective of the party committee. government officials discuss the impact of individual and collective decision-making on education spending and its financial interactions. finally, an analysis of the local government’s supply behavior of public goods, such as education, is considered. in the public fiscal expenditures, only the education fiscal expenditure item has the target stipulated explicitly by the government, moreover, the education publicity and the education finance expenditure with lag behind effect can reflect the local official’s fiscal expenditure preference more. for these reasons, this article focuses on the following questions: what are the similarities and differences between the political elite and the party committee’s standing committee, and how do they interact? what is the impact of the demographic characteristics and job experience characteristics of officials on the education fiscal expenditure? what specific characteristics have a critical impact on the education fiscal expenditure? answering these questions can provide a deeper understanding of the influence of local officials on education finance, and will allow a better interpretation of the behavioral motives of local officials under the “chinese-style decentralization” system. ultimately, this can help local political elites and party committee to make scientifically-based decisions. methods research design the 2015 prefecture-level administrative units are used as the research subject, and data are collected on the personal characteristics of the mayor, the municipal party commitcai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 965 tee secretary and the members of the standing committee of the party committee for use in a regression models for analysis. we chose prefecture-level administrative units as our research objects because of the availability of data and the need for research methods. first, provincial data cannot meet sample size requirements and county-level data is difficult to obtain; thus, only prefecture-city level data met research needs. second, although china has a “provincial county” financial management system, with only three provincial cities and counties in the administrative relationship, the local government level bears an important responsibility for the development of local education. third, the logic of local government behavior between leading individuals and collectives in the supply of education are present at provincial prefecture and county levels, the prefecture level can also explain this logic. therefore, the administrative units at the prefecture level are reasonable as the research subjects of this study. this paper therefore uses the data of prefecture-level administrative units in china to compare and analyze the behaviors of prefecture-level political leaders in financial expenditures on education, including the party committee secretary, the mayor (including the heads of autonomous league, governors of the autonomous prefectures) 1 and the decision-making collectives of the party committee. the basic characteristics of the collective committee of the party committee at the prefecture level are described using the “personification” method and averaging of individual committee member traits, and combined with the demographic and experience characteristics of the party committee secretary and the mayor as independent variables to establish six regression models. these models explore the relationship between individual and collective characteristics of political leaders at the prefecture level and fiscal expenditures for education. the variables of this study are designed as follows. dependent variables china’s assessment of the financial responsibility of local government education is mainly based on two indicators: the proportion of education fiscal expenditure relative to gdp should be greater than 4% and the proportion relative to the fiscal expenditure should be greater than 15% (government central committee, 1993; national education commission, 1993). these two indicators can not only describe the total level and effort of local government on education and financial expenditure, but also express the spending preference of local governments. thus, we use “educational fiscal expenditure as a share of gdp” and “educational fiscal expenditure accounts for the proportion of fiscal expenditure” as two dependent variables in each group model. independent variables the collective level party committee as a decision-making body is based on personal characteristics of the political elite personnel to generate a quantitative description of the collective identity of officials (alesina et al., 2015). it includes not only demographic variables such as gender, nationality, age, years of education, and professional backcai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 966 ground, but also the characteristics of the tenure of office, promotion rate, and working in the household registration area or not. control variables this study sets the level of local economic development, regional categories, population size, education needs, fiscal expenditure decentralization, and fiscal control variables, such as autonomy. the level of economic development is expressed in terms of local per capita gdp. china is divided into three major regions of east, central and west, which are modeled by virtual variables (using the western region as the reference group). population size is represented by the permanent population at the end of the year. the number of students enrolled in the city is used to indicate education needs. the financial expenditure decentralization index and the financial autonomy index are used as proxies for the local government’s financial operation characteristics. data processing resumé and socio-economic data in 2015, obtained from the national-level administrative units for the party committee officials, were used for analysis. an information table was generated for officials using the party committee leadership directory in the yearbook, from searching resumés for standing committee members from people’s daily, xinhua, and the government portals directory list, and using the socio-economic data and education finance data from the china city statistical yearbook (2016) and local statistical yearbooks. in 2015, 334-prefecture-level administrative units were present in china; analysis excluded areas where the data were scarce 2 . the term of office of the standing committee of each party committee is typically five years. a small number of members of the standing committee may change during a non-change year, and the leadership role of the new standing committee then takes some time to take effect; thus, members of the standing committee of the prefecture-level local party who were changed in 2015 and have served for less than half a year were excluded. after personal information was extracted for members, standing party committee-level characteristics for the group were calculated as the average individual characteristic or as a proportion. in this way, the personal data from 3,482 prefecture-level party committee members were combined into 314 values of the collective characteristics of the standing committee members of the prefecture-level party committee. the specific calculation method for each variable is shown in table 1. to match the political elite and the standing committee, samples with missing values are deleted 3 . finally, the pauta criterion for excluding outliers was applied 4 . using the obtained 283 sets of complete matching samples, we ran the following descriptive statistical analysis. results basic descriptive statistical analysis cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 967 table 1. variable setting and descriptive statistical analysis. variable abbr. metric method mean sd minimum maximum dependent variable education expenditure as a percentage of gdp (%) ex_gdp education expenditure as a percentage of gdp = education expenditure / gdp * 100 3.812 1.892 0.857 10.718 education expenditure as a share of fiscal expenditure (%) ex_fe education expenditure as a percentage of local fiscal expenditure = education expenditure / fiscal expenditure * 100 17.722 3.774 4.836 27.501 independent variable – political elite individual characteristic gender g 1=female; 0=male secretary 0.060 0.238 0.000 1.000 mayor 0.081 0.274 0.000 1.000 nationality n 1=minority; 0=han secretary 0.081 0.274 0.000 1.000 mayor 0.127 0.334 0.000 1.000 age a age = december 2015 date of birth secretary 53.812 3.233 43.090 61.020 mayor 51.567 3.449 40.040 60.000 education (years) ey education year = fulltime education year + in-service education year (excluding short-term training) secretary 19.583 3.037 12.000 31.000 mayor 19.996 3.058 13.000 31.000 education major em 1=social science; 0=natural science secretary 0.604 0.490 0.000 1.000 mayor 0.580 0.495 0.000 1.000 serve in the household registration area shra 1=yes; 0=no secretary 0.544 0.499 0.000 1.000 mayor 0.661 0.474 0.000 1.000 current position tenure cpt current tenure of office = december 2015 date of the current position secretary 2.254 1.547 0.060 8.090 mayor 2.081 1.508 0.050 9.100 promotion rate pr promotion rate = 1 / pre-service years of service secretary 0.034 0.007 0.024 0.067 mayor 0.037 0.008 0.024 0.084 independent variables – collective characteristic of the standing committee the party female share (%) fs female share = number of women / total number * 100 9.194 6.959 0.000 30.000 minority share (%) ms minority share = number of ethnic minorities / total number of people * 100 7.844 13.662 0.000 57.143 average age (years) a_a average age = sum of age / total number of people 51.996 1.714 48.275 57.146 average education (years) a_ey average education year = sum of years of education / total number of people 18.508 1.143 15.000 22.667 the proportion of social science (%) pss the proportion of social science majors = number of social science profes54.602 18.876 0.000 92.857 cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 968 sionals / total number * 100 the average proportion of officials serving in household registration area (%) ap_shra the average proportion of officials serving in household registration area = number of domiciled tenure / total number of people 25.851 16.525 0.000 83.333 average current position tenure a_cpt average current tenure of office = total number of current tenure / total number of people 2.612 0.764 0.489 4.777 average promotion rate a_pr average promotion rate = sum of promotion rates / total number of people; among them, promotion rate = 1 / preworking years 0.040 0.004 0.028 0.067 control variable per capita gdp of each city (10,000 cny/person) per_gdp per capita gdp of each city = gdp per year / permanent population at the end of the year 4.965 2.931 1.217 20.716 east area e 1=eastern; 0=others 0.364 0.482 0.000 1.000 central area c 1=central; 0=others 0.382 0.487 0.000 1.000 permanent population at the end of the year (10,000 people) pp the city’s permanent population at the end of the year 414.829 256.210 24.390 1465.750 urbanization rate (%) ur urbanization rate = urban household registration population at the end of the year / total household registration at the end of the year *100 53.451 14.333 11.212 100.000 the proportion of students enrolled in the city (%) pse the proportion of students enrolled in the city = the number of students at all levels of the city at the end of the year / the number of registered households at the end of the year * 100 14.726 4.683 1.472 39.125 the city’s fiscal expenditure decentralization index (%) fed the city’s fiscal expenditure decentralization index = the city’s fiscal expenditure / the province’s fiscal expenditure * 100 6.841 4.886 0.889 30.560 financial autonomy (%) fa financial autonomy = the city’s fiscal revenue / the city’s fiscal expenditure * 100 45.651 22.025 9.242 103.843 due to the fact that some data of the standing committee of some party committees cannot be collected, the missing official information is not included in the calculation. among the leaders at the prefecture-level in china, there are fewer female and minority members, and male still are the majority of local leaders. the average age of the secretary is 53.81 year-old, which is greater than the average age of the mayor and the standing committee. the political elites have a higher education level than the standing cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 969 committee, but the vast majority party members have higher education experience. the background of political elite is more balanced; members of the standing committee have mostly social science backgrounds. approximately half of the secretaries and mayors are working in the household registration areas, but only 25.85% of the party committee members are native. the serving term of secretaries and mayors is 2.254 and 2.081 years respectively, which are shorter than that of the political elite of the party committee. all members of three decision-making bodies basically started to take up their current positions in the last year of change of leadership, namely around 2012, which shows which shows the consistency of the collective party committee. the rate of promotion of the political elite was 0.034 and 0.037 for secretaries and mayors, respectively, indicating that the collective promotion of the party committee is in a slower rate. regression analysis multiple sets of regression models are analyzed for similarities, differences and interactions between the local political elites and the party committee standing committees on the impact of education financial expenditures. using stata14.0 software to analyze the characteristics of the three leading subjects and the cross-sectional data of education fiscal expenditures of 283 prefecture-level administrative units in china in 2015, the regression results are shown in table 2. all models passed the collinearity test, and the heteroscedasticity was processed by weighted least squares (wls) for models 1, 2, and 4 according to the white test results, and robust regression results were obtained. the six models in table 2 reveal that prefecture-level officials and the local party committee members have a certain degree of influence on educational expenditures, but after controlling for common variables; regression coefficient analysis indicates that the mechanism of influence is not completely consistent. for example, in the regression model of the prefecture-level secretary, individual characteristics of the secretary has no significant effect on the proportion of the education fiscal expenditure in gdp, but has a significant effect on the proportion of education fiscal expenditure in the general public budge expenditures. specifically, the secretary from the minority nationality has a significant negative impact on the education fiscal expenditure. model 2 showed that when the secretary is of minority nationality, then the expenditures in education decrease by 1.3296%. in addition, the secretary who works in the household registration area is more likely to increase financial expenditures on education; that is, the secretary of the post has a geographical bias in the education and financial expenditure. it is worth noting that the faster the political promotion, the lower the support for education finance; the reverse effect is particularly obvious. judging from the regression model of prefecture-level mayors, the personal characteristics of the mayor have a significant impact on the proportion of education finance relative to gdp and fiscal expenditure. models 3 and 4 show these results: controlling for other conditions, women mayors increase education fiscal expenditures as a proportion of gdp by more than 0.5788% compared to male mayors. fiscal expendi tures on education for minority nationality mayors show a complex relationship; the mayor of a minority nationality increases fiscal expenditures on education by 0.9591% cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 970 table 2. regression model of the effect of the collective characteristics of political elites and party committees on education financial expenditure. secretary mayor standing committee collective model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 model 5 model 6 ex_gdp ex_fe ex_gdp ex_fe ex_gdp ex_fe g 0.0651 -0.3164 0.5788** 1.0087 fs 0.0068 -0.0215 -0.22 (-0.44) -2.15 -1.32 -0.65 (-0.83) n 0.5044 -1.3296*** 0.9591*** -0.9783* ms 0.0214*** -0.0237 -1.15 (-2.77) -4.01 (-1.73) -3.45 (-1.55) a -0.0055 -0.0767 -0.016 -0.0319 a_a -0.0617 -0.0438 (-0.25) (-1.04) (-0.54) (-0.44) (-1.13) (-0.32) ey -0.0095 -0.0125 -0.0652*** -0.0646 a_ey -0.1259* -0.1433 (-0.49) (-0.22) (-2.68) (-1.13) (-1.81) (-0.83) em 0.062 -0.2158 0.2418 0.054 pss 0.0093** 0.0139 -0.45 (-0.61) -1.62 -0.15 -2.23 -1.36 shra -0.2068 0.7371** -0.1605 -0.7019* ap_shra 0.0057 0.0097 (-1.59) -2.21 (-1.02) (-1.80) -1.23 -0.84 cpt 0.0342 0.0828 0.0314 -0.0075 a_cpt 0.0978 0.2381 -0.82 -0.73 -0.61 (-0.06) -0.9 -0.89 pr -1.0749 -92.8285*** -4.065 -25.8372 a_pr -32.1286* -98.0084** (-0.13) (-2.95) (-0.34) (-0.88) (-1.67) (-2.06) per_gdp -0.2121*** -0.2582** -0.1960*** -0.3256*** per_gdp -0.2219*** -0.2384** (-4.91) (-2.30) (-4.19) (-2.66) (-4.70) (-2.05) e -0.6477*** 0.2755 -0.4899** 0.476 e -0.4209* 0.4245 (-2.89) -0.49 (-2.25) -0.8 (-1.90) -0.78 c -0.9813*** -2.5500*** -1.0390*** -2.1664*** c -0.9761*** -2.1753*** (-4.53) (-5.14) (-5.36) (-4.23) (-4.95) (-4.47) pp -0.0005 0.0048*** -0.0002 0.0051*** pp -0.0007* 0.0048*** (-1.36) -5.23 (-0.53) -5.31 (-1.74) -4.82 ur -0.0154** -0.0254 -0.0182** -0.0358* ur -0.0219*** -0.0462** (-2.23) (-1.37) (-2.30) (-1.80) (-2.68) (-2.29) pse 0.0149 0.2487*** 0.0319* 0.2122*** pse 0.0208 0.2334*** -1.06 -6.35 -1.81 -5.35 -1.18 -5.34 fed 0.0317 -0.1722*** 0.0374* -0.1776*** fed 0.0550** -0.2757*** -1.55 (-3.06) -1.78 (-3.14) -2.31 (-4.69) fa -0.0200*** 0.0037 -0.0264*** 0.0121 fa -0.0183*** 0.0155 (-4.88) -0.25 (-4.24) -0.81 (-2.81) -0.97 constant 7.4100*** 23.8894*** 8.9141*** 21.6963*** constant 12.7566*** 25.3126*** -4.89 -4.95 -4.51 -4.48 -3.73 -3 observations 283 283 283 283 observations 283 283 r-square 0.6 0.485 0.621 0.413 r-square 0.619 0.418 ad r2 0.576 0.454 0.598 0.378 ad r2 0.596 0.383 f 24.9212 15.6637 27.1867 11.7111 f 27.0424 11.9181 t is the value in parentheses; * indicates p < 0.10, ** indicates p < 0.05, and *** indicates p < 0.01. cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 971 of gdp, but reduces education finance relative to the proportion of fiscal expenditure by 0.9783%. education expenditure is affected by the number of years of education the mayor has – where mayors have more education, less is spent on education. a significant negative effect of a domicile serving mayor occurs, that is, the local mayor doesn’t have regional favoritism in the education financial expenditure, inversely, it restricts the education financial expenditure level. judging from the regression model of the leaders of the prefecture-level standing committee, the collective characteristics of the standing committee of the party committee have a significant impact on the proportion of education finance relative to gdp and fiscal expenditure. in models 5 and 6, it can be seen that gender structure, average age, average tenure, and average household registration ratio of the standing committee of the prefecture-level party committee do not significantly affect local education fiscal expenditures. the proportion of minority nationalities, the average years of education, the professional background and the average rate of promotion all significantly affect fiscal expenditure for education. specifically, the party committee and the collective members of minority groups is positively correlated with proportion of education expenditure relative to gdp, indicating that members of the standing committee of minority background are more likely to approve education expenditures. prefecturelevel party committee members with more years of education on average are less likely to increase education spending. in the prefecture-level party committee collective, the more members that had a background in social sciences, the more the collective spent on education. in party committees that had a faster average promotion rate, the standing committee of the collective spent more on education. the collective characteristics of political elites and party committees have a consistent influence on expenditures in education. first, the national characteristics of the secretary, the mayor and the standing committee collectively have a significant and complex relationship to education expenditure. models 2 and 4 showed that party secretaries and mayors from minority nationalities tend to reduce the proportion of education finances relative to local officials from the han nationality. however, models 3 and 5 indicate that officials from minority nationalities will reduce the proportion of fiscal expenditures relative to gdp. this shows that the identity of minority officials of local officials can increase the overall level of education and financial expenditures, whether for individual officials or standing committees. however, their efforts they exert are insufficient under the limited financial conditions, and they would like to use other basic public fiscal expenditures to take over the education finance. second, both models 3 and 5 showed that the higher the education level of the officials, the less enthusiastic they are about financial expenditures on education. this shows that highly educated officials have high expectation of achievement and relatively strong promotion motivation. third, models 2, 5, and 6 showed that the promotion rate of the secretary and the party committee is significantly negatively correlated with financial expenditures on education. this shows that with a better development situation, officials do not increase education expenditure; the secretary and the standing committee have similar views on promotion. officials promotion assessment and non-financial situation of education cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 972 occupies an important portion, education has not been given sufficient attention in local development. fourth, regardless of whether the local political elite is an individual or a collective, financial expenditures on education are not affected by the age of the official or the length of the current term of office. the individual characteristics of the political elite and the party committee’s standing committee also have inconsistent effects on education expenditures. for example, genders have inconsistent impact. model 3 shows that female mayors can significantly affect education expenditures, but models 5 and 6 show no significant gender effects in the standing committee. secondly, the influence of professional background characteristics is inconsistent. models 1, 2, 3, and 4 showed that the professional background of the secretary and the mayor does not have a significant effect on fiscal expenditures in education, but model 5 shows that the collective professional structure of the standing committee does have a significant effect on the fiscal expenditure of education. in particular, members of the standing committee with social science professional backgrounds have a strong preference for educational expenditures. furthermore, the characteristics of serving in the household registration area or not does not affect this relationship. model 2 and 3 show that a geographical favoritism exists for the secretary but the mayor that act in opposition. models 5 and 6 show the standing committee of the collective centralized decision-making process, because the individual is subject to the influence of other officials of the standing committee, and such geographical favoritism disappears. this shows that the characteristics of the officials working in the household registration area have a significant impact on the education fiscal expenditure. however, due to inconsistent motivation and demand for the individual’s promotion, there is an inconsistent attitude toward the public fiscal expenditures on education. in general, influence of the political elite individual and the party committee standing committee on the educational fiscal expenditure is affected by nationality, years of education and the rate of promotion. gender and working in the household registration area at the individual level also affect spending on education, but this effect disappears after the collective “personification” is taken into consideration. professional background characteristics are not significant at the individual level of the political elite but are significant at the collective level. age and term characteristics have no significant effect. the degree of influence of each variable: δr 2 -based calculation after comparing and analyzing the relationship between the personal characteristics of political elites and the influence of the collective characteristics of the standing committee on the fiscal expenditure of education, moreover for clarifying what the impact is of demographic characteristics and job experience characteristics on the education fiscal expenditure, and what specific characteristics have a critical impact on the fiscal expenditure of education, we use δr 2 (r square change)to analyze the amount of change index; which is majorly used to measure the impact of explanatory variables on the de cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 973 table 3. r2 change of the effect of the secretary’s individual characteristics on the financial expenditure of education. dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se change statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f model 1 demographic characteristics 0.23 0.053 0.036 1.857 0.053 3.108 5 277 0.01 job experience characteristics 0.279 0.078 0.051 1.843 0.025 2.475 3 274 0.062 control variables 0 .760 0.577 0.552 1.267 0.499 39.212 8 266 0 model 2 demographic characteristics 0.111 0.012 0.006 3.784 0.012 0.685 5 277 0.635 job experience characteristics 0 .263 0.069 0.042 3.693 0.057 5.598 3 274 0.001 control variables 0.628 0.395 0.358 3.023 0.325 17.874 8 266 0 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; see: standard error. table 4. r-variation of the effect of the mayor’s individual characteristics on education financial expenditure. dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se change statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f model 3 demographic characteristics 0.371 0.137 0.122 1.773 0.137 8.823 5 277 0.000 job experience characteristics 0.384 0.147 0.122 1.772 0.01 1.069 3 274 0.363 control variables 0 .788 0.621 0.598 1.2 0.473 41.461 8 266 0.000 model 4 demographic characteristics 0.16 0.025 0.008 3.759 0.025 1.447 5 277 0.208 job experience characteristics 0 .182 0.033 0.005 3.764 0.008 0.735 3 274 0.532 control variables 0.613 0.376 0.338 3.07 0.342 18.224 8 266 0.000 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; see: standard error. table 5. r-variation of the effect of the collective characteristics of the standing committee on the education financial expenditure. dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se change statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f model 5 demographic characteristics 0.42 0.176 0.161 1.733 0.176 11.849 5 277 0.000 job experience characteristics 0.444 0.197 0.174 1.72 0.021 2.383 3 274 0.070 control variables 0 .787 0.619 0.596 1.202 0.422 36.867 8 266 0.000 model 6 demographic characteristics 0 .260 0.067 0.051 3.677 0.067 4.004 5 277 0.002 job experience characteristics 0.285 0.081 0.054 3.67 0.014 1.36 3 274 0.255 control variables 0.646 0.418 0.383 2.965 0.336 19.207 8 266 0.000 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; see: standard error. cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 974 pendent variable contrast level (chen & huan, 2010; hanaysha et al., 2011). it is a measure of the contribution of each dependent variable to the independent variables (johnson et al., 2004). the calculation formula is: δr 2 =r 2 current − r 2 previous where current is a model with an additional explanatory variable but is otherwise identical to the model previous. δr2 thus represents the contribution or additional explanatory power of the latest predictor variable on the dependent variable in the model interpretation. based on the nature and connotation of official characteristic variables, this study divides the independent variables into three dimensions and brings them into the regression model. gender, nationality, age, years of education and professional background variables represent basic information for the officer, referred to as demographic characteristics, while serving in the household area, current tenure and promotion rate, serving as official’s work experience characteristics. socioeconomic background is used as the control variable. the δr 2 in each dimension was calculated using spss 24.0 and the results were presented below: among the models, model 1 (table 3) reveals that demographic characteristics of the secretary can explain 5.3% of education expenditure relative gdp (δr 2 = 0.0053, n = 277, p < 0.05) and the explanatory power of the job characteristics is 7.8% (δr 2 = 0.025, n = 274, p < 0.1). thus, secretary individual demographic characteristics and work experience characteristics have significant explanatory power on education expenditure, with demographic characteristics explaining a greater proportion of education spending than work experience characteristics. the secretary has a relatively strong effect on education financial expenditure, explaining 6.9% of the entire model (δr 2 = 0.057, n = 274, p < 0.01), while population statistical characteristics had no significant influence. this suggests that demographic and work experience characteristics of secretaries need to be paid peculiar attention because it will significantly explain the financial supply of local education. from table 4, in individual statistical characteristics of the population, only the mayor had any influence on financial education (δr 2 = 0.137, n = 277, p < 0.01). this shows that the influence of the individual characteristics of the mayor on the financial expenditure in education mainly comes from its demographic characteristics, but the impact of work experience characteristics is relatively limited. in model 5 of the collective characteristics of the party standing committee on the proportion of education fiscal expenditure in gdp, demographic characteristics (δr 2 = 0.176, n = 277, p < 0.01) and work experience characteristics (δr 2 = 0.021, n = 274, p < 0.1) are significant factors (table 5). for the proportion of education fiscal expenditure in public fiscal expenditures, only demographic characteristics have significant influence (δr 2 = 0.067, n = 277, p < 0.05). this shows that the characteristics of the two dimensions of the standing committee are important factors influencing the state of education fiscal expenditure, but comparing models 5 and 6 shows that demo cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 975 table 6. the r2 changes of the secretary’s individual characteristics on the fiscal expenditure (% of gdp) of education. dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se adjusted statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f demographic characteristics n 0.202 0.041 0.037 1.856 0.041 11.93 1 281 0.001 ey 0.222 0.049 0.042 1.851 0.008 2.458 1 280 0.118 a 0.226 0.051 0.041 1.853 0.002 0.540 1 279 0.463 em 0.228 0.052 0.038 1.855 0.001 0.356 1 278 0.551 g 0.23 0.053 0.036 1.857 0.001 0.292 1 277 0.590 job experience characteristics shra 0.257 0.066 0.046 1.848 0.013 3.843 1 276 0.051 cpt 0 .266 0.071 0.047 1.847 0.005 1.342 1 275 0.248 pr 0.279 0.078 0.051 1.843 0.007 2.213 1 274 0.138 control variable 0 .760 0.577 0.552 1.267 0.499 39.212 8 266 0.000 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; see: standard error. table 7. the r2 changes of the secretary’s individual characteristics on the fiscal expenditure of education (the proportion of fiscal expenditure). dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se adjusted statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f demographic characteristics n 0.202 0.041 0.037 1.856 0.041 11.93 1 281 0.001 em 0.222 0.049 0.042 1.851 0.008 2.458 1 280 0.118 ey 0.226 0.051 0.041 1.853 0.002 0.54 1 279 0.463 g 0.228 0.052 0.038 1.855 0.001 0.356 1 278 0.551 a 0.23 0.053 0.036 1.857 0.001 0.292 1 277 0.590 job experience characteristics pr 0.257 0.066 0.046 1.848 0.013 3.843 1 276 0.051 shra 0 .266 0.071 0.047 1.847 0.005 1.342 1 275 0.248 cpt 0.279 0.078 0.051 1.843 0.007 2.213 1 274 0.138 control variable 0 .760 0.577 0.552 1.267 0.499 39.212 8 266 0.000 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; se: standard error. graphic characteristics (δr 2 = 0.176, δr 2 = 0.067) contribute more than do work experience characteristics (δr 2 = 0.021, δr 2 = 0.014). this indicates that for the collective identity, demographic characteristics have stronger explanatory power, but it is not sufficient to fully explain fiscal education supply factors if without consideration of the collective identity. although it is known that it is necessary to focus on the demographic and tenure characteristics of the secretary by calculating r 2 change in each dimension, the demographic characteristics of the mayor, and the demographic and work experiences cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 976 table 8. the r2 changes in the effect of the mayor’s individual characteristics on educational fiscal expenditure (% of gdp). dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se adjusted statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f demographic characteristics n 0.322 0.103 0.1 1.795 0.103 32.419 1 281 0.000 em 0.346 0.12 0.113 1.781 0.016 5.151 1 280 0.024 a 0.364 0.133 0.123 1.772 0.013 4.147 1 279 0.043 ey 0.368 0.136 0.123 1.771 0.003 1.041 1 278 0.309 g 0.371 0.137 0.122 1.773 0.002 0.518 1 277 0.472 job experience characteristics shra 0 .381 0.145 0.126 1.768 0.008 2.441 1 276 0.119 cpt 0 .382 0.146 0.124 1.77 0.001 0.392 1 275 0.532 pr 0 .384 0.147 0.122 1.772 0.001 0.386 1 274 0.535 control variable 0 .788 0.621 0.598 1.2 0.473 41.461 8 266 0.000 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; se: standard error. table 9. the r2 changes of the effect of the mayor’s individual characteristics on the fiscal expenditure of education (the proportion of fiscal expenditure). dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se adjusted statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f demographic characteristics n 0 .143 0.021 0.017 3.741 0.021 5.89 1 281 0.016 g 0 .152 0.023 0.016 3.743 0.003 0.781 1 280 0.378 em 0 .156 0.024 0.014 3.747 0.001 0.317 1 279 0.574 a 0 .160 0.025 0.011 3.752 0.001 0.31 1 278 0.578 ey 0 .160 0.025 0.008 3.759 0 0 1 277 0.983 job experience characteristics shra 0 .174 0.03 0.99 3.756 0.005 1.34 1 276 0.248 cpt 0 .179 0.032 0.007 3.76 0.002 0.518 1 275 0.472 pr 0 .182 0.033 0.005 3.764 0.001 0.355 1 274 0.552 control variable 0 .613 0.376 0.338 3.07 0.342 18.224 8 266 0.000 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; se: standard error. characteristics of the standing committee. however, we still do not know which characteristic independent variables would produce the greatest impact on the fiscal expenditure of education. next, we use the stepwise method to calculate the δr 2 of all characteristic independent variables. among the demographic characteristics, the contribution rate of nationality characteristics is the largest (δr 2 = 0.041, n = 281, p < 0.01; table 6). when combined with the regression coefficients in table 2, it can be concluded that the secretary originated from minorities nationality will inhibit education expenditure to a large extent, cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 977 table 10. the r2 changes of the effect of the collective characteristics of the standing committee on the education fiscal expenditure (gdp ratio). dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se adjusted statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f demographic characteristics n 0 .143 0.021 0.017 3.741 0.021 5.89 1 281 0.016 g 0 .152 0.023 0.016 3.743 0.003 0.781 1 280 0.378 em 0 .156 0.024 0.014 3.747 0.001 0.317 1 279 0.574 a 0 .160 0.025 0.011 3.752 0.001 0.31 1 278 0.578 ey 0 .160 0.025 0.008 3.759 0 0 1 277 0.983 job experience characteristics shra 0 .174 0.03 0.99 3.756 0.005 1.34 1 276 0.248 cpt 0 .179 0.032 0.007 3.76 0.002 0.518 1 275 0.472 pr 0 .182 0.033 0.005 3.764 0.001 0.355 1 274 0.552 control variable 0 .613 0.376 0.338 3.07 0.342 18.224 8 266 0.000 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; se: standard error. table 11. the r2 changes of the effect of the collective characteristics of the standing committee on the fiscal expenditure of education (the proportion of fiscal expenditure). dependent variable independent variable dimension r r2 ar2 se adjusted statistics δr2 f df1 df2 significant f demographic characteristics ms 0 .198 0.039 0.036 3.705 0.039 11.455 1 281 0.001 pss 0 .250 0.063 0.056 3.666 0.023 7.015 1 280 0.990 a 0 .257 0.066 0.056 3.667 0.003 0.975 1 279 0.324 ey 0 .259 0.067 0.054 3.671 0.001 0.38 1 278 0.538 fs 0 .260 0.067 0.051 3.677 0 0.064 1 277 0.800 job experience characteristics pr 0 .269 0.072 0.052 3.674 0.005 1.48 1 276 0.225 a_cpt 0 .280 0.079 0.055 3.668 0.006 1.849 1 275 0.175 a_shra 0 .285 0.081 0.054 3.67 0.003 0.75 1 274 0.387 control variable 0 .646 0.418 0.383 2.965 0.336 19.207 8 266 0.000 df: degree of freedom; ar2: adjusted r2; se: standard error. and that this feature should be focused more than any other demographic characteristics of the secretary. in the secretary’s tenure characteristics, the promotion rate contributed the largest component (δr 2 = 0.052, n = 276, p < 0.01), making it the most important focus (table 7). from this, it can be inferred that the secretary is overly concerned with personal political promotion, and this concern is unfavorable toward improving the fiscal expenditure on education. cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 978 tables 8 and 9 revealed that nationality in the demographic characteristics contributed the most for the mayor (δr 2 = 0.103, δr 2 change = 0.021), along with the professional background and age (δr 2 = 0.016, δr 2 = 0.013). this indicates that the difference in the individual characteristics of the mayor on education finance expenditure mainly comes from nationality, professional backgrounds, and age; but not the work experience characteristics. among the collective demographic characteristics of the standing committee, the contribution rate of nationality is the largest (δr 2 = 0.127, δr 2 = 0.039; table 10 and 11, respectively), followed by professional background (δr 2 = 0.023, δr 2 = 0.023), and then the average years of education (δr 2 = 0.011) and average age (δr 2 = 0.013); in the work experience characteristics, the current tenure had the highest contribution (δr 2 = 0.012, n = 276, p < 0.05). thus, in the standing committee of the party committee, demographic characteristics are an important influencing factor on the state of education fiscal expenditure, and its importance is greater than the characteristics of work experiences. by comparing δr 2 , it can be seen that the state of education fiscal expenditure is affected by the demographic characteristics of political elites and the collective characteristics of the standing committee. each subject has its own key characteristics; it is necessary to pay attention to the nationality characteristics and promotion rate of the secretary; the nationality, professional background, and age characteristics of the mayor; the nationality, professional background, average years of education, average age, and average years of service of the standing committee. it can also be found that nationality characteristics in the political elite and the party committee standing committee are always the more important factors affecting the state of education and financial expenditure; for the collective, in addition to the nationality, the professional background, the average years of education, and the average age are also very important; in the impact of the tenure characteristics on the financial expenditure of education, the secretary is more likely to be affected by the rate of promotion, whereas the standing committee is more likely to be limited by the average length of current tenure. discussion regression results (table 2) on the effects of the political elite’s individual characteristics and the standing committee’s collective characteristics on expenditures on education have similarities and differences. the δr 2 in each dimension responds to which type of characteristic has a greater impact; the δr 2 of each independent variable further presents the influence of each characteristic reflecting the importance and explanatory power of each feature. based on the empirical analysis above, we draw four main conclusions as follows. first, local officials from minority nationalities can increase education fiscal expenditure in terms of the proportion of gdp, while at the same time restraining this expenditure relative to public fiscal expenditures. in fact, local officials from minority nationalities are mostly distributed in administrative areas with settlements of minority nationalities. although the underdeveloped economic, the mandatory requirement of cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 979 education, the regional education financial expenditure lever is higher than the overall economic development level, and occupies an important position. however, due to the urgent need for public financial expenditures in the construction of basic public facilities and medical security in these areas, education has not maintained a priority in terms of limited public finances. this is exactly a direct reflection of the urgent needs in china’s minority nationality areas, such as economic development and the contradictory public finance expenditures (yao, 2008). it is precisely because of the realistic meaning of nationality, the characteristics of nationality have a high explanatory power, which, in turn, has a significant impact on both political elites and party committee members. second, the years of education of local officials are negatively correlated with fiscal expenditures on education, i.e. officials with higher education levels do not pay attention to funding education. this result agrees with tingjin lin (2009), ran song (2016), and dingxing wang (2017) who also found that for mayor or prefecture-level city secretary, the higher the education level was, the less local education expenditure was. thus, elites with higher education do not improve the local leaders’ passion for investing in public education. instead, it implies that the diminishing marginal benefit of the official’s own education experiences produces a negative impact on the personal cognition. local officials, no matter on the individual or collective level, have strong desire for the political promotion, therefore, the rate of promotion has a greater influence on the secretary’s decision-making of education fiscal expenditures, but this same effect is not significant for the mayor. the secretary has a stronger desire of promotion than the mayor, the reason is that the prefecture-level secretary is already the highestranking official at the prefecture level, so the next promotion target is a breakthrough from the prefecture level to the provincial level, and subsequently the competition is obviously more intense than that of the peers at the same level, which eventually requires more prominent political performance. besides, given the restrictions on the age of promotion, they will easily neglect the public expenditure of education that generally has a lag of efficiency, and pay more attention to the “dominant” performance project in economic development. for the mayor, the next step is to promote further to the higher prefecture-level as a party committee secretary, the internal promotion base of the same level unit and the pressure are small, so, it is easier for them to take into account the education in the public fiscal expenditures, and to guarantee a certain fiscal expenditure in education. third, the political elite has a geographically-biased effect at the individual level, i.e. in terms of the special demographic characteristics of gender and serving in the household registration area or not, individual political elites tend to bring in their own emotional factors to educational financial decision-making, confirming the results of persson and zhuravskaya (2016) and yiming wang (2015). relatively speaking, the standing committee of the party can avoid personal sensibility in collective decisionmaking, and is more likely to provide advice more rationally. finally, the differences in the professional background of the local political elites at the individual level do not significantly lead to decision-making differences. however, at the collective level, due to the collective efforts, each member can express cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 980 their own point of view on the basis of their personal cognition that depicts a significant impact of professional background, which exactly confirms the view that the local officials at the prefecture-level are “complementary” in administrative skills (chen, 2017). meanwhile, members of the standing committee who have the social science background are more inclined to spend on education than those with natural science background when make a decision collectively. this may be due to the impact of professional curriculum and professional ability, which makes them be more professional in interpreting local social phenomena and policies at length, and be greater in the preference of education development. in summary, the prefecture-level government is affected by the different characteristics of the secretary, mayor and standing committee of local party when deciding financial expenditure on education, but the chief executive effect of the secretary and the mayor changes during the operation of the democratic centralism. comparative analysis of models and δr 2 reveal that, individually, the political elites have only a few characteristics that have significant impact and explanatory power, but the standing committee has more collective characteristics that produce more significant influence and stronger explanatory power. this shows that the influence of the collective characteristics of the standing committee on education expenditure is more significant. the potential reason for this may be attributed to the stronger promotion desire of the political elite in comparison to the collective, and such promotion impulse has been “buffered” to some extent in the collective decision-making process. this also proves, at least in part, that prefecture-level governments adhere to and implement the principle of democratic centralism in the local education fiscal expenditures such as providing education as the public goods, and the collective decision-making under the leadership of the party committee plays a leading role in deciding the supply of education. conclusions and recommendations based on the 2015 data of 283 prefecture-level administrative units in china, we found that local governments embody collective leadership in education finance decisionmaking. local political elites and party committee leaders have a significant impact on education expenditures, with the influence of the latter greater than that of the former. the way in which individual characteristics and collective characteristics affect education fiscal expenditure is not completely consistent; however, nationality is always an important and significant influencing factor. our findings not only have important theoretical significance, but also have crucial reference value to further improve the choice of local leadership behavior, to optimize of local education financial decision-making, to understand the influence of local party and government leaders on education finance and the behavioral motives of local officials under the “chinese-style decentralization” system, and to improve the supply of local education, based on this, we make the following brief policy recommendations. first, rationally allocate of the structure of both local party and government officials and the standing committee, in order to reduce bias of education financial decicai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 981 sion-making. our data showed that the demographic characteristics of both political elites and standing committees have significant impacts on the fiscal expenditure of education. the influence of the individual characteristics of political elites will be restricted by other members of the collective, and their influence will change in collective decision-making. for example, the differences in the professional background of the local political elites at the individual level do not significantly lead to decision-making differences, but at the collective level it can produce significant impact; however, the localization of the political elite disappeared at the collective level of the party committee. considering that officials with different characteristics have their own advantages, we believe that the standing committee with complementary “skills” and “characteristics” should be able to comprehensively grasp the needs of local education development and rationally arrange local education and financial expenditures. therefore, the leadership team should be structured with special attention by combining the demographics and work experiences, and so strengthening the guarantee of financial expenditure for education from the composition of officials. second, adhere to democratic centralism, give full play to the advantages of collective decision-making, and encourage stakeholders to participate in education and financial expenditure decision-making consultation. our empirical results showed that the influence of local political elite characteristics on education expenditures is concentrated in a few individual characteristics, while the characteristics of standing collectives are relatively uniform; that is, local governments insist on democratic concentration in educational financial decision-making – the embodiment of the system. moreover, the political elite’s desire for political performance is significantly higher than that of the standing committee, indicating that officials may not fully guarantee their publicity in decision-making. therefore, in the decision-making process, the democratic system should be fully implemented, and the decision-making process strictly observed. the core leader, as the “squad leader” and the collective “squad”, must unite and work together to make a scientific and rational decision on education fiscal expenditure (hu & yang, 2018). third, increase education fiscal support for the poverty-stricken areas, supporting financial assessment and supervising administrative measures to ensure education “precise poverty alleviation”. in the individual model of the political elite and the collective model of the standing committee, nationality characteristic has the greatest explanatory power. as mentioned above, there exists dilemma of education fiscal expenditure in the underdeveloped minority nationality areas in recent years, a series of education poverty alleviation policies such as the “poverty alleviation and implementation program for deprivation of poverty in deep poverty areas (2018-2020)” are strengthening education support for minority nationalities, and guarantee special funds for education and local government funds to be timely available will enable the goal of education financial support to be truly achieved (the ministry of education’s state council office, 2018). therefore, the third-party evaluation agencies should be created to guarantee an open and transparent process to improve the financial situation of education in poverty-stricken areas. cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 982 fourth, innovate better evaluation mechanisms for appointment and removal of local government officials, convert public satisfaction with the education supply situation into performance appraisal and appointment criteria, and encourage local governments to increase education expenditure. our empirical study revealed that government spending behavior on education finance varies by geographical, nationality and other social logic, promotion and other bureaucratic logic and by personnel incentives and other marketing logic. as the attitudes of official education expenditure are easily affected by personnel evaluation systems, so we recommend reforming the organization and personnel system as a starting point, it is possible to start with the reform of the organization and personnel system, start with “incentive engagement”, and innovate in inspiring and restricting government behavior, and improve the enthusiasm of local governments in education and financial investment. for example, the provision of education as a “soft” public goods is included in the performance evaluation not only the performance during the current term, but also the prior performance to avoid the shortterm surface project, and give far greater weight of public satisfaction etc., so as to form a multi-faceted assessment system, to build up local government and diversified action logic, and to promote local governments to make reasonable behavioral choices in public education supply. notes 1. for convenience, this article refers to the mayor, the governor, the governor, and the executive head of the general administration of administration as the mayor. 2. among the 334 prefecture-level administrative units, there are 291 prefecture-level cities, 10 regions, 30 autonomous prefectures, and 3 alliances. there are 20 prefecture-level administrative units with serious socio-economic data missing: alashan league, shannan distric , sansha city, shigatse city, ganzi prefecture, nagqu district, liangshan prefecture, ali district, qiannan prefecture, linzhi city, wenshan state, golog prefecture, chuxiong, yushu prefecture, diqing, haixi, lhasa, kezilesukeerkezi states, chamdo, turpan city. 3. delete 24 samples of missing features of the secretary or executive head, namely shenyang city, benxi city, dandong city, jinzhou city, panjin city, jilin city, siping city, liaoyuan city, tonghua city, songyuan city, daxinganling region, zhangzhou city, putian city, sanming city, nanping city, xinyu city, jieyang city, yuxi city, baoshan city, zhaotong city, nujiang prefecture, hainan tibetan autonomous prefecture, shizuishan city, yili kazakh autonomous prefecture. 4. excluding the seven outlier samples of education fiscal expenditure as a percentage of gdp: huangnan, linxia, gannan, dingxi, guyuan, kashgar, and hotan. cai & zhang. impact of individual political elites and educational fiscal expenditure in china. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 983 acknowledgement: the author is grateful to dr. jingping sun, associate professor of the university of alabama, and professor huang bin of nanjing university of finance and economics for their guidance and assistance during the writing process. this article was reported at the annual meeting of the china education finance professional committee in 2018 and won the third prize for outstanding papers. the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the education finance annual conference for their review. references alesina, a. f., 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[chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.15894/j.cnki.cn113040/a.2014.03.031 received: 24 february 2021 revised: 12 march 2021 accepted: 17 march 2021 https://doi.org/10.19616/j.cnki.bmj.2015.08.004 https://doi.org/10.19616/j.cnki.bmj.2015.08.004 https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.49.4.1076 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1672-884x.2014.10.003 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1672-884x.2014.10.003 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-sjjj201312008.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-sjjj201312008.htm https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1001-8263.2008.08.020 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1001-8263.2008.08.020 https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=a0000151-200710-7-1-21-52-a https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=a0000151-200710-7-1-21-52-a https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=a0000151-200710-7-1-21-52-a https://doi.org/10.19572/j.cnki.ldkx.2014.08.016 https://doi.org/10.19572/j.cnki.ldkx.2014.08.016 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originalarticle-rucai-bece_title_march2021 originalarticlearticle-rucai-bece_maintextmarch2021 bece. newsletter vol.7, no.1, 2021 923 will the nine-year admission system lead to the increase of school district housing price? by zhang, b., wang, y., & liu, j. correspondence to: zhang, b., associate professor, school of government peking university, china. email: zhangbo@pku.edu.cn n recent years, people have been pursuing “sky-high school district housing”, and the price of school district housing continue to soar. the nineyear admission system is an effort to reduce the pressure of school choice, so as to promote the high-quality and balanced development of compulsory education. however, will this admission system directly affect the price of the related houses, and continue to pull up the housing prices of certain primary school housing districts if it is combined with a high quality junior high school? this article published in education & economy taking dongcheng district in beijing as an example, used the difference-in-differences model (did) to explore this issue:  setting the various communities within the seven schools affected by the admission system as the “treatment group”, and other communities in the same district as the “control group”. in order to confirm whether there exists a significant difference in the housing prices of those communities since the implementation of the policy in 2014, the treatment group was further divided into two groups: preand post-implementation  the housing price data comes from anjuke, which is the website of second-hand housing sales. after collecting the five-year data from the first quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2017, the statistical analysis shows that about the average price of secondhand housing for each community by quarter, the housing price of the treatment group was about 3,000 cny/m 2 higher than the control group, however, according to the data from 2013 in anjuke, the average price of the two groups did not differ a lot. therefore, it was determined that the difference was mainly caused by the policy’s implementation.  comparing with the housing prince after the policy implementation (each quarter of the 4 years) with the price of the first quarter in 2013, the analysis of did model can be roughly concluded that the policy indeed pushed up the price of school district housing. i vol.7, no.1, 2021 924 but the effect is rather than instantaneous but delays for more than one year.  re-calculate the aforementioned base period combinations with significant statistical differences, and control the other five variables that may affect housing prices: 1) whether it is located in the original chongwen district (taking administrative planning adjustment factors into consideration). 2) distance from the elementary school. 3) distance from the city center, subway station, and hospital. 4) community management fees. 5) community household amount. the results are as follows:  the policy plays a significant role in raising housing prices in school districts.  the impact of the policy on school district housing prices is not immediate. the significant difference in housing prices did not begin to emerge until the sixth quarter after the implementation.  the impact of the consistent policy on housing prices in relevant regions is not continuous. the significance of the price difference only lasted four quarters. after that, although the housing prices in the policy-affected areas are still slightly higher than those in other areas, there was no significant difference in the growth trend. finally, through the common trend test and counterfactual test, the did model was tested for robustness. the results of the two model tests were not obvious, which respectively explained: 1) the housing price of the treatment group and the control group before the policy does not exist. it can be considered that the price change trends of the two groups of houses before the introduction of the policy are homogeneous. 2) the difference in the average house price between the treatment group and the control group is precisely the effect of the nine-year education school policy. the research shows that the nine-year admission the system will not cause constant growth in the school district housing in the long term, and the external impact brought by which is relatively small, hence proved the policy itself worth promotion. source: education & economy, 2020; 36(4):40-49. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 1005 the influence of advanced learning experience in secondary school on the performance in top-notch university by lu, y. & leng, d. correspondence to: yi lu, phd candidate, institute of higher education, fudan university, china. email: luyi61@fudan.edu.cn ccording to the survey data of fundamentals collected from a total of 1,359 students from 6 top universities in china, this article used the multiple linear regression model and ordinal logistic regression model to explore the cohesive mechanism of secondary school and university, on the basis of cultivating stem talents, resource constraints, and china’s condition. the main research results are as follows:  experiences like winning an olympic competition, finishing a scientific research project, and studying in advance are considered as the three kinds of advantages to developing students’ innovation abilities. students with these experiences significantly creative and positive when introducing what they think to others in college, what’s more, they tend to strive for the resources required to achieve their scientific ideas.  the difference between students participating in olympic competition and those who have not prominently reflected in their academic performance, but the former’s learning motivation in the university was not significantly stronger than that of the latter.  students who had the opportunity to study college education in secondary school were generally more confident than others.  it is also noticeable family socioeconomic status has a significant impact on the motivation of top students to study in university. the cultivation of talents seems to be an educational issue; however, it is actually related to many non-educational factors such as social stratum differentiation and economic conditions.  finally, the imbalance of china’s economic development always affects the distribution of high-quality educational resources and the educational choices of talented students. talented secondary school students in beijing and shanghai have started to break away from competitions while devoting themselves to science and innovation a vol.7, no.2, 2021 1006 learning, which is highly dependent on educational resources. provincial capitals or municipalities directly under the central government are abundant with educational resources, while students in other cities are more likely to succeed in advanced learning in secondary school only through academic competitions. source: peking university education review, 2020; 18(4):129-150+188. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1163 exploration of the non-cognitive ability assessment the scientific value of the survey on social and emotional skills xiaoqiao cheng school of institute of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210097, jiangsu, china “the cognitive development of the players is enormously important, as well as social competence and character values such as discipline and teamwork.” –joachim low ompared with cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills cannot be accomplished through simple academic level tests. it is more through selfreported research and observation reports of others. these two methods are relatively easy to be proposed and tested, but they are easily affected by social expectations, response style and familiarity, resulting in deviations from the real results (braun et al., 2001; he & van de vijver, 2015). therefore, non-cognitive ability assessment is more challenging. the pisa test coordinated by the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) has become a teaching evaluation test system recognized by countries. the test measures the cognitive skills of 15-year-old adolescents around the world by testing and comparing students’ reading, mathematics, and science every three years. since most of the content of the test is the cognitive category of the students, it is considered that “too much emphasis on standardized testing, narrowing the content of students’ learning, ..., paying too much attention to the cognitive ability of young people while ignoring the development of non-cognitive ability” (huang, 2019). © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. c bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1164 in recent years, the oecd has also begun to focus on the research and development of non-cognitive capability. it tried to introduce international evaluation standards to test students’ creativity to test the “soft skills” of students from various countries, that is, social and emotional skills such as creativity, teamwork, communication and negotiation, and named it social and emotional skills. based on related research, the evaluation framework for students’ social and emotional skills has been constructed, and the evaluation project of “social and emotional skills” for adolescents were launched in 2018. this aims to evaluate the social and emotional skills of young people in participating countries and cities, and how to improve these skills through education, so as to promote the balanced development of cognitive skills and social emotions. at the end of 2019, the first round of official evaluation was completed in 10 cities in 9 countries around the world. on september 7, 2021, the oecd officially released the global report on the survey on social and emotional skills at its headquarters in paris, france. the evaluation of the sses project is based on complex measurement methods designed to capture characteristics that are difficult to quantify. it uses the “big five” personality characteristics as the fundamental test system. it measures 19 specific social and emotional skills produced by the “five” personality factors of psychology. furthermore, through a tripartite questionnaire of parents, teachers, and schools, collect information about the learning environment of students’ homes, schools, and communities, and finally obtain information about the conditions or practices that cultivate or hinder the development of these key skills. in terms of measurement methods, unlike other large-scale international assessments pisa conducted before, the oecd measures social and emotional skills based on the student-parent-teacher “triangulation” model (kankaraš et al., 2019). that is, in addition to the traditional student selfevaluation, the indirect evaluation of the students’ social and emotional skills by parents and teachers has improved the reliability of the evaluation. in order to achieve mutual verification between the collected information, the primary guardian is responsible for filling out the student-related information in the parent questionnaire. the teacher questionnaire is completed by the teacher who knows the student best, and each teacher is responsible for no more than 10 students. the school questionnaire is completed by the school principal or person in charge. in terms of measurement tools, in order to solve the validity problem and correct the methodological limitations of self-reporting and observer reporting, the sses test combines quantitative and qualitative methods. after many rounds of empirical inspection and testing, the evaluation rubric for each skill is finally developed. the rubric is not composed of simple, straightforward, and simple items of a certain reading level, but contains a series of overall items that share the same orientation and measure the same structure. multiple rounds of inspection and testing include cognitive inter bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1165 view, online survey, topic experimental test, trial test and final formal test (oecd, 2021, september 7). as for the test subjects, the sses evaluation comprehensively considers the age of the students and the sample size when selecting the samples to ensure that the samples are highly effective and representative. compared with pisa, the sses test object has been expanded, not only for 15-year-old students, but also for 10-year-old students. each country participating in the project has no less than 6,000 test subjects. in addition to students, the objects also involve parents of students, teachers who are most familiar with students, and school principals or principals (oecd, 2021). prior to this, other social and emotional competence tests have been carried out internationally, such as the program for the international assessment of adult competencies (piaac), the international early learning study (iels) and the teaching and learning international survey (talis). talis is aimed at teachers, piaac and iels are skills tests for adults and 5-year-old children respectively. therefore, in addition to more diverse testers, the sses test also fills in the gap in the experience data of 10 to 15-year-old teenagers in the relevant international tests. compared with the existing research on social and emotional ability in the world (such as the social emotional learning project organized by “academic, social and emotional learning” in the united states, the “teacher emotional intelligence” training project developed by the yale center for emotional intelligence at yale university and the united nations the unicef “social emotional learning” project, etc.), the sses project achieved a breakthrough in sample size and region. sses is based on a representative sample of students and is the first large-scale international study on the social and emotional skills of 10-year-old and 15-year-old adolescents and their impact on learning outcomes. even though many of the indicators and measurement dimensions it uses are derived from existing research, its greatest value lies in allowing these indicators and measurement dimensions to be measured and comparable on a large scale in different countries and cultural backgrounds. this not only promotes peer learning between countries, but also provides an international model for global non-cognitive ability testing. at the same time, we are also worried about some problems that may exist in the sses test. for example, did they pay attention to cultural and language differences in the preparation of the test questionnaire and interpretation of the results? will using the same questionnaire or scale between people of different languages and cultures affect the accuracy of the data? will it cause people to distrust the questionnaire translation? from the previous pisa test, although a series of measures have been taken to improve the reliability and validity of the test tool during the test, the limitations of geopolitics, linguistics and cultural background cannot be completely eliminated (forestier, & adamson, 2017). in addition, in terms of the representativeness of sample selection, the first round of testing was conducted in 10 cities in 9 countries around the world. then there were obvious differences in economy, bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1166 politics, culture and education among these 10 cities, which will inevitably affect the performance of students in social and emotional skills. how to define the relationship between the social and emotional skills of students and the factors mentioned above is also a question that needs to be explored (zhou, 2021). based on the above considerations, how to enhance the effectiveness of cross-regional non-cognitive ability assessment is of great significance. for example, in the evaluation method, the use of intelligent information technology (facial expression, action posture, eye movement, infrared brain imaging, etc.) can be used to explore diversified evaluation methods. in the evaluation tools, more contextual evaluation tasks are created. using real problem situations as the carrier, examine students’ creativity, perseverance, emotional regulation ability and social interaction and other advanced and complex constructions (zhang & liu, 2021). in addition, in terms of evaluation indicators, relying on the general indicators in the sses project to help build localized evaluation indicators for each country, and conduct multilevel and dynamic monitoring and measurement of social and emotional ability indicators, thereby forming a scientific localized evaluation system (zu & kyllonen, 2019). finally, we should know that non-cognitive ability is different from cognitive ability. it’s not about highlighting specific characteristics to the maximum, but about achieving balance. therefore, the idea of the sses project is not to create rankings, but to provide teachers, educators and policy makers with a “balanced” image in more dimensions. the final result of sses is not a simple international competition, but aims to find out the effectiveness and blind spots of each country’s education policy through evaluation, further analyze the problems existing in the education development of each country, and show their respective achievements and advantages to provide countries with experiences from other countries that can be used for reference. references braun, h.i., jackson, d.n., & wiley, d.e. (2001). socially desirable responding: the evolution of a construct. in the role of constructs in psychological and educational measurement (pp.67-88). routledge. forestier, k., & adamson, b. (2017). a critique of pisa and what jullien’s plan might offer. compare: a journal of comparative and international education, 47(3):359-373. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2016.1273095 https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2016.1273095 bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1167 he, j., & van de vijver, f.j. (2015). the value of keeping an open eye for methodological issues in research on resilience and culture. in youth resilience and culture (pp.189-201). springer, dordrecht. huang, z. (2019). the limits of the pisa test: criticism of international scholars. educational measurement and evaluation, 12(1):11-17+44. [chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2019.01.002 kankaraš, m., feron, e., & renbarger, r. (2019). assessing students’ social and emotional skills through triangulation of assessment methods. oecd education working papers, no. 208, paris: oecd publishing. doi: https://doi.org/10.1787/19939019 oecd. (2021). beyond academic learning: first results from the survey of social and emotional skills, oecd publishing, paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/92a11084-en oecd. (2021, september 7) oecd survey on social and emotional skills technical report. retrieved september 10, 2021, from http://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/thestudyonsocialandemotionalskills.htm zhang, j., & liu, d. (2021). three questions about social and emotional ability assessment. journal of the chinese society of education, 42(2):18-24. [chinese] https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2 021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp 31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9lolxyx%25mmd2b2zwc 3rvssg7su3u zhou, l. (2021). when the individual national culture meets a transnational research. science insights education frontiers, 8(2):1019-1021. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.ps011 zu, j. & kyllonen, p. (2019). the importance of non-cognitive ability and its measurement. journal of china examinations, 2019(9):22-31. [chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.19360/j.cnki.11-3303/g4.2019.09.003 correspondence to: xiaoqiao cheng, ph.d. school of institute of education science nanjing normal university nanjing 210097 jiangsu china e-mail: xqcheng2008@vip.163.com conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/sief.21.co017 https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2019.01.002 https://doi.org/10.1787/19939019 https://doi.org/10.1787/92a11084-en http://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/thestudyonsocialandemotionalskills.htm https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9lolxyx%25mmd2b2zwc3rvssg7su3u https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9lolxyx%25mmd2b2zwc3rvssg7su3u https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9lolxyx%25mmd2b2zwc3rvssg7su3u https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9lolxyx%25mmd2b2zwc3rvssg7su3u https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.ps011 https://doi.org/10.19360/j.cnki.11-3303/g4.2019.09.003 mailto:xqcheng2008@vip.163.com bece. newsletter vol.6, no.1, 2020 796 the impact of city size on the rate of return to education by yang, j., ai, m.t. correspondence to: yang, j. email: yangjuan@bnu.edu.cn or ai, m.t. email: aimeitong@pku.edu.cn n recent years, the capital cities represented by xi’an and wuhan have successively introduced policies to attracted talents to settle down. to better study the talent mobility strategy, research published in china economics of education review analyzed the impact of urban size on education returns in 2002 and 2012. the results show that: the effect of city size on the rate of return on education increased significantly over time. to be specific:  in 2012, for every 1% increase in the urban population, the labor force return to education increased by an average of 1.15%-1.21%. among them, the male return to education increased by an average of 1.60%, and the female return to education increased by 1.50%; and for every 1% increase in urban gdp, the return to education will increase by 1.07%-1.14%. among them, the male education returns rate increased by 0.80%, and the female education return rate increased by 0.72%. the results of correcting the endogenous bias through instrumental variables show that for every 1% increase in urban population, the rate of return to education will increase by 4.84%-5.14%; for every 1% increase in urban gdp, the rate of return to education will increase by about 2.80%-2.97%.  as the level of education increases, the impact of city size on the rate of return to education gradually increases. among them, for every 1% increase in the size of the urban population, the difference between the educational return rate of the high school group and the university group relative to the junior high school group should be increased by 5.2% and 8.5%; and for each 1% increase in the urban gdp scale, the high school group and the university group relative to the junior high school group should be increased by 4% and 7.4%, respectively. the size of the city has a greater i vol.6, no.1, 2020 797 impact on the educational returns of people with a college education or above.  compared with the educational returns of different age groups, the urban scale shows an inverted u-shaped relationship. as age increases, the urban educational returns premium increases first and then decreases. for the workforce of 30-40 years old, the size of the city has the greatest impact on the rate of return on education. as the age rises further, this effect will weaken. when considering the actual income adjusted by the price level, the positive effect of the city size on the return to education is weakened. when considering the actual income adjusted by the housing price level, the effect of the city size on the return to education changes from positive to negative. to this end, the author suggests that for smaller cities, it should be based on economic development, increase the degree of industrial agglomeration, and attract talents of all levels to employment, so as to achieve further expansion of the city's scale. source: china economics of education review, 2020; 5(1):110-132. bece. newsletter vol.6, no.1, 2020 801 the effect of teachers’ support on school adaptation of chinese migrant children by yang, k.c., jia, a.b., guo, x. correspondence to: yang, k.c. email: yangkuichen2007@163.com sing data from china education panel survey (2014-2015), the current study focused on the role and the internal mechanisms of teachers’ support on school adaptation of chinese migrant children. the research carried out data analysis by building relationship models among three dimensions of teacher support (academic support, emotional support, and relationship support), self-education expectations of migrant children, mental health status, and school adaptation. the research findings are as follows:  the school adaptation level of migrant children was significantly lower than that of the urban local children.  teachers’ support and its three sub-dimensions had positive effects on self-educational expectations, mental health and school adaptation.  self-educational expectations and mental health played an intermediate role between teachers’ support and school adaptation of migrant children.  the three dimensions of teachers’ support had different influence mechanisms on school adaptation of migrant children; teachers’ academic support influenced school adaptation through self-educational expectations, teachers’ emotional support influenced school adaptation through mental health, and teachers’ relationship support influenced school adaptation through self-educational expectations and mental health. therefore, in the design of the migrant children’s social integration policies, we should pay more attention to the problem occurs when facing school adaptation, fully play the protective role of teachers’ support for children’s school adaptation, establish and improve the mental health service system for the mobile children, and as a result, improve the external social and ecological environment for the living and learning of the migrant children with the intervention of comprehensive social integration policies. source: education & economy, 2020; 36(1):77-86. u bece. newsletter vol.6, no.1, 2020 794 the influence of technology’s interference on adolescent addiction to smartphone: the function of core self-evaluations and need satisfaction perceived online by chen, x., lin , y., liu, q.x. correspondence to: liu, q.x. email: qinxueliu@mail.ccnu.edu.cn hat is the impact of technology interference on smartphone addiction among teenagers? recently, a study published in psychological science selected 11-19 teenagers as the research object, through the science and technology interfere with the scale, the core self-evaluation scale, psychological demand, network meet the scale, and smartphone addiction scale as a research tool, using the method of cluster sampling from two middle schools in hubei province, a questionnaire survey was conducted among 4,856 students, eliminating invalid questionnaires and obtained 4,372 valid questionnaires. observe the influence on teen addiction to the smartphone through technology interference in parent-child interaction, and further respectively explore the mediation mechanism from the cognitive level (core self-evaluation) and motivation level (psychological demand network meet). after verifying that there is no serious common method deviation in the study, spss 21.0 combined with spss macro program process was used for data management and analysis. the results are as follow:  there was a significant negative correlation between technological interference and core self-evaluation; there was a significant positive correlation between technological interference, psychological needs network satisfaction, and smartphone addiction.  technology interference significantly positively predicted smartphone addiction.  both core self-evaluation and network satisfaction of psychological needs play an intermediary role in the influence of technological interference on smartphone addiction. based on the data analysis results, the study proposes several suggestions:  parents can reduce the frequency of using electronic devices in parent-child interactions to prevent smartphone addiction among teenagers and healthily use electronic devices in family life. w vol.6, no.1, 2020 795  when parents cannot avoid using electronic devices in parent-child interaction, it is suggested to participate in positive electronic device use activities with children.  by encouraging teenagers to have peer interaction offline and giving them opportunities to make decisions and express themselves freely, teenagers' needs for friendship and autonomy can be satisfied and their psychological needs can be satisfied in reality so as to reduce their psychological needs online.  provide adolescents with high social support to improve their core self-evaluation, thus playing an intervention role in teenagers' smartphone addiction. source: psychological science, 2020; 43(02):355-362. the impact of school resource investment on student performance: a meta-analysis based on chinese literature yahui tian, jijun yao nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china abstract. using meta-analysis, this study analyzes a total of 20 effects on 11 articles on the impact of chinese school resource investment on student performance. we found that: 1) the overall impact of school resources on student performance is significant (effect amount is 0.093, p = 0.001); 2) compared with the effect of school human resources investment and financial resources investment, human resources are superior, the effect amounts are 0.121 (p <0.01), 0.120 (p = 0.014); the effect of material resource is the lowest, but the impact is also very important with an effect amount of 0.099 (p = 0.009); 3) in human resource investment, teacher experience, teacher education, teacher qualifications, teacher training, teacher titles, and student-teacher ratios all have a positive and significant impact on student performance. among the material resources, computer networking rates, average student fixed assets, average classroom and school areas affect students’ achievements significantly; 4) from a disciplinary perspective, the impact of school resource investment on chinese language and mathematics is more significant, and from a regional perspective, the impact on central and western regions is more significant. we suggest based on our findings as: first, increase investment in school resources, especially financial resources and investment in schools in the western region; second, pay attention to the input and allocation of teachers’ resources, especially to improve the shortage of small-scale high-quality teachers in rural areas; third, keep pace with the times and improve the allocation of physical conditions in schools. best evid chin edu 2020; 4(1):389-410. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar011. keywords: meta-analysis; school resource investment; student performance tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 390 question he findings of the coleman report show that school resource investment does not have a significant impact on student performance (coleman, et al., 1966). this finding has sparked a lot of research and debate about the relationship between school resources and student achievement. since then, the use of educational production functions to study the relationship between school resources and student performance has become a hot topic in related fields. but until today, no consensus has been reached on such studies. two of the most representative views are the related arguments of hanushek and hedges. hanushek’s series of studies have not found direct evidence that school resource investment significantly affects student achievement, and therefore believes that education policy cannot be simply thought of when it comes to school resource investment (hanushek, 1989; hanushek, 1995; hanushek, 1997). but hedges and others have criticized and questioned hanushek’s research methods, research data, and research results. they used meta-analysis to re-analyze the data used by hanushek in 1989, and obtained the opposite of hanushek’s conclusion. the metaanalysis results show that most of the school’s resources have a significant impact on student performance, including the average student expenditure; teachers’ quality (teacher education, experience, and ability) has a positive and significant positive impact on student performance, while school size and class size have significant negative correlations with student performance (hedges, et al., 1994). a series of research by hedges et al. has re-ignited people’s emphasis on school resource investment. however, due to the complexity of the relationship between school investment and student achievement, a large number of subsequent studies have also found that: due to the country’s sentiment, research data, relevant research conclusions are not completely consistent for reasons such as the setting of the model and the selection of variables. for example, fuller analyzed the relationship between school resources and student performance in the third world, and found that in developing countries, school factors are the main cause of differences in student performance (fuller, 1987). hattie used metaanalysis to analyze more than 800 factors affecting student academic achievement, including comprehensive analysis of six types of factors: individual students, families, schools, teachers, courses and teaching, and found that school resources have a positive and significant impact on student performance. among them, the influence of teachers is the most significant and has been hailed as the “holy grail of teaching” by hattie (hattie, 2015). about the author: yahui tian, b.a., master’s candidate, school of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china. e-mail: 1358622935@qq.com. correspondence to: jijun yao, ph.d., professor, school of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china. e-mail: yaojijun_njnu@163.com. funding: this study was supported by the jiangsu province superior discipline construction project funding project (papd). conflict of interests: none. t tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 391 research from china on the relationship between school resource investment and student performance started late. at the end of the 1990s, jiang (2000) studied the rural bases through multivariate analysis of variance and related analysis, using statistics on education expenditure and education in 328 counties in nine provinces of east, central and west china in 1990 the relationship between education investment and student achievement (jiang, 2000). this study opened the prelude to china’s research on school resources and student performance. especially since 2006, more and more related studies have been conducted, but so far, no uniform conclusion has been reached. some scholars have found that school resources, such as teacher age, student-teacher ratio, average number of students, average school area, average classroom area, average student education expenses, average student career expenses, and average student public expenses, etc., have significant effects on student performance (hu, 2007), but some scholars have found that some indicators have little or no correlation with student performance. for example, zhao found that the average teaching age of teachers will negatively affect student performance (zhao, 2013). it can be seen that in the past 5 decades, there has been an endless stream of research on school resources and student performance, but so far, relevant research has not yet reached a clear and consistent conclusion. however, such studies have found that there are some correlations between school resources and student performance, and this relationship mainly exists in the three areas of human, finance, and material. compared with foreign studies, because chinese school-related data is more difficult to obtain, there are fewer empirical studies on the relationship between school resources and student performance. the reason did not reach a consensus conclusion. this leads to the lack of the best evidence of robustness in improving the process and efficiency of school resource investment, which affects the scientificity and pertinence of decisionmaking. considering that china is a large and rapidly developing country, synthesizing the evidence on the relationship between chinese school resource investment and school output will help us understand the relationship between the two in a more detailed and comprehensive manner, and it will also help us provide “best evidence” from china for theoretical research in this area. such research can not only have a more accurate understanding of the benefits of human, financial, and material inputs, but also have important reference values for improving future education finances, school-level education resource allocation, and funding input. because the conclusions of the existing empirical studies are not consistent, the most suitable analysis methods in this process are meta-analysis and systematic evaluation. but so far, the meta-analysis or systematic review of china in this field is almost blank. therefore, no matter from the theoretical research or policy improvement, it is urgent to give solid evidence for the following issues: (1) what is the relationship between school resource investment and student achievement? (2) which of the human, material and financial resources of school resources has a greater impact on student performance? definition tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 392 school resources school resources refer to the sum of resources occupied, used and consumed to maintain school education and teaching activities. school resources are usually divided into three dimensions: human, material and financial resources. specifically, the school’s human resources, that is, the school teacher team and students, of which the teacher team includes full-time teachers and non-full-time teachers, this study mainly discusses the impact of full-time teachers on student performance. material resources refer to tangible assets and low-value consumables invested in schools, such as school buildings, land, books, materials, and other fixed assets. financial resources usually refer to the monetary performance of human and material resources (hanushek, 1997). in the selection of indicators of various dimensions, we draw on the practice of scholars at home and abroad. teacher qualification, teacher education, teacher teaching age, teacher training, teacher-student ratio and teacher title were selected as the indicators of school human resources input. the average school area of the students, the average number of school books, the average classroom area of the students, the average building area of the students ‘school, the average number of students’ computers, and the computer network rate are taken as the indicators of the school’s material resources. the average public funding of students is used as an indicator of the financial resources of the school (see table 1 for the meaning of each indicator). academic performance students’ academic performance is the primary concern of parents and an important indicator for measuring the effectiveness of school education (li & zhang, 2018). it also predicts the level of education that students may receive in the future and the benefits in the labor market (lipsey & wilson, 2001). this article measures the impact of school resource investment on student performance, including both the student’s overall academic performance and various subjects (such as mathematics, chinese language, english, science, etc.). research design analysis methods and tools the analysis method used in this study is meta-analysis, which is a literature analysis method combining qualitative and quantitative analysis methods (xia, 2005), that is, a method of statistical analysis of a single research result by synthesizing existing related research findings (gu & hu, 2018; glass, 1976). unlike traditional literature analysis, it extracts relevant information from existing research, such as sample size, standard deviation, correlation coefficient, etc., calculates the effect amount, and judges the degree and direction of the impact based on the size and direction of the effect amount. this avoids the subjectivity and non-repeatability of traditional literature analysis and helps people to obtain “best evidence” (gu & hu, 2018). tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 393 the effect size refers to the comparison between different studies by standardizing the results of each study. different types of meta-analysis have different effect sizes (lipsey & wilson, 2001). there are two types of commonly used effect quantities. one is the standard difference type, such as cohen’d, hedges’g, and glass δ (lu, et al., 2011). because most of the current meta-analysis are based on experimental studies to investigate the effect of an experimental intervention on the experimental results, d or g are mostly used for the effect amount. the other is the correlation effect, which mainly includes rpearson and rpb (ferguson, 2009). most of this type of effect is suitable for univariate correlation analysis and analysis of variance. as the research on the relationship between school resource investment and student performance is mostly based on multiple regression analysis or multi-level linear models, these types of effect quantities are not applicable. for this reason, in many such studies, standardized regression coefficients are used as the effect size (mark et al., 2001). when hedges et al. analyzed the impact of school resource investment on student performance, considering that in all studies, input variables and output variables are usually not measured on the same scale, the partial regression coefficients obtained cannot be directly calculated or compared. therefore, standard regression coefficients are used as effect quantities for combination and comparison (greenwald et al., 1996). the standard regression coefficient measures the change in the output variable caused by a standard deviation change in the input variable. since not all studies have reported standardized regression coefficients. therefore, in the following research, we first refer to the calculation formula of nieminen et al. (nieminen et al.,2013).to convert the non-standardized regression coefficients into standardized coefficients; then use comprehensive meta analysis 2.0 (cma 2.0) software developed by biostat to calculate the effect amount test heterogeneity, perform sensitivity analysis, and test for publication bias. in addition, in specific calculations, in order to ensure the principle of sample independence, using documents as the unit, first calculate the overall effect amount of each document and the corresponding effect amount of human, material and financial resources; then combine the overall effect amounts of all documents, manpower input effect amount, material input effect amount, and financial input effect amount. collection and selection first, determine the inclusion criteria for the literature. the inclusion criteria need to be accurately framed, including the type of document, year, language, research method used, and whether the effect size can be calculated. the rest depends on the specific research purpose. this process should be avoided as much as possible based on the personal preference of the researcher, and its criteria need to be determined more based on the research purpose, research content, literature characteristics and statistical requirements. the criteria for document inclusion need to include at least the following basic elements: the salient features of the document to be included, the research object, the key variables, the study design, the cultural and linguistic range, the time range, and the tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 394 type of document. based on the research purpose and the basic elements that the inclusion criteria should include, this study has developed six criteria to screen the literature: 1. the study was published between 1990 and 2018. the language used is chinese and/or english, and the type of literature is not limited. 2. the research content is the impact of school running conditions on the academic performance of basic education students. the school running conditions include human, material and financial resources or one of them. 3. the research objects only include research from ordinary middle and elementary schools in china, excluding pre-school education, vocational education, and higher education. 4. the research must present clear, clear and complete statistical data results. statistical information such as the mean, standard deviation, sample size or t value, f value should be reported to ensure that the effect amount can be calculated. 5. research methods are limited to empirical research. including (quasi) experimental research and research based on experimental research ideas (such as research using rdd, did, psm methods), and research using multilayer linear model (hlm), structural equations, correlation analysis and other methods. 6. the dependent variable of the research model is the student’s academic performance, including the total score and the results of various subjects such as chinese language, mathematics, and english. secondly, the literature was searched according to the criteria. the keywords we searched are “school resources”, “school conditions”, “academic performance”, “academic performance”, “academic achievements”, “teacher resources”, “teacher human capital”, “school investment”, “financial investment in education”, “education production function”, etc. the search database includes educational databases such as cnki, cqvip, wanfang data, baidu academic, google academic mirror, ebscohost, jstor retrospective database, etc., and obtained more relevant literature through the “snowball” method. a total of 161,897 articles were retrieved through keyword searches. by contrasting with the inclusion criteria, first of all, screening is performed according to the title of the document to exclude studies that do not meet the requirements. after screening based on the keywords, the title and abstract of the article are read to further exclude the research that does not meet the requirements. finally, the remaining documents are read in full. a total of 11 studies were included, including 20 effect sizes. the details of the literature search in each database are as follows (figure 1). extract and encode bibliographic information the information included in the extracted literature includes author, publication year, research grade, research area, data type, research method, independent variable selection, dependent variable selection, sample information (including sample size, and demographic characteristics of the sample) and average, t value, standard deviation and tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 395 table 1.the meaning of each indicator. school resources indicator variables and meanings human resources teacher qualification: whether there is a teacher qualification certificate, the proportion of teachers qualification certificate teacher age: that is, using the number of years of teaching as a proxy for teacher experience teacher’s education: the education level of the teacher teacher training: the total training time for teachers teacher-student ratio: number of full-time teachers / number of students teacher titles: namely junior titles, intermediate titles, senior titles material resources students are school area; the ratio of the number of students and the school covers students are school drawing book ratio of the number of copies :: books and school books count the number of students classroom area per student: ratio of school classroom area to student population school building area per student: ratio of school building area to student number number of computers per student: ratio of computers to students in schools computer networking rate: ratio of the number of computers connected to the school to the total number of computers owned by the school financial resources public funds per student: ratio of public funds to number of students other information to calculate the effect amount. the encoding rules used are as follows (table 2). 1. input variable: in human resources, the student-teacher ratio is coded as p/t; the teacher-student ratio is coded as t/p; the teacher qualification code is teq; the teacher experience code is texp; the teacher education code is ted; the teacher the title code is tet, and the teacher training code is tec. in material resources, the number of students per book is coded as psb; the number of students per computer is coded as psc; the computer network rate is coded as rc; the number of students per year of fixed assets is coded as pcfa; the average construction area per student is gfps. among the financial resources, the public expenditure code per student is ppe. 2. output variable: the total score is coded as total, the math score is coded as math, the language score is coded as chinese, the language reading score is reading, the english score is coded as english, the science score is coded as science, and other scores are coded as u. 3. grade: elementary school code is p, middle school code is s, and high school code is h. tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 396 table 2. document coding. # author iv ov rs sa ss rd lt dt 1 liang huang (2018) psc, rc, teq , ted math, reading, science s e hlm fl j g 2 xiangyun li, ping wei (2014) t/p, tet, psb , pcfa, ppe chinese, math p m hlm fl j i 3 xue xia (2009) tet math p w hlm fl nonj c 4 yuhong du, yongmei hu (2009) psb , safa, teq , p/t , texp, ppe chinese, math s w ols ql j c 5 haiping xue, weifang min (2008) ppe, ted, teq , tet, tec, texp chinese, math s em hlm ql j c 6 yongmei hu (2007) psca, psb , safa, p/t , teq , ppe chinese, math p, s w hlm ql nonj c 7 xuehui an, emily hannum, tanja sargent (2008) texp, ted total p n hlm ql j c 8 jennifer adams (2012) texp, tet, ted math p w hlm fl j c 9 qiuyi weng (2009) safa, gfps, total s ew ols fl j c 10 yanqing ding, haiping xue (2008) ppe, ted, teq , t/p total h w hlm ql j c 11 haiping xue, rong wang (2009) ppe, ted, teq , tet, tec, texp, p/t math p, s em hlm ql j c note: iv: input variable; ov: output variable; rs: research section; sa: study area; ss: sample size; rd: research design; lt: literature type; dt: data type. 4. study area (area): the national code is n, the eastern code is e, the central code is m, the western code is w, the eastern and central and central and eastern codes are both em, and the central and western and central and western codes are mw. 5. method: the multivariate linear model is ols, and the multilayer linear model is hlm. 6. study design: with reference to the practice of greenwald et al., the research design is divided into longitudinal studies (coded as l) and quasilongitudinal studies (coded as l) according to whether the study includes front-to-back testing, whether to control student iq, and previous performance. coded as ql and non-longitudinal studies (fl). in this sample, only quasi-longitudinal and non-longitudinal studies are included. 7. literature type (lt): articles published in journals are coded as j, and non-journal literatures are coded as non-j. 8. data sources: according to the data sources, the data is divided into three categories: first, international data, such as pisa, authoritative data with global significance, coded as g; followed by some important issues in tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 397 china there are semi-official and authoritative data in china. such data is usually large-scale survey data of multi-agency cooperation across provinces. the measurement tools used by them are authoritative institutions or experts to develop standardized test papers. the relevant questionnaires have also been repeatedly verified and coded as c; once again, the data obtained by researchers and their research groups through self-made questionnaires, and the reliability and representativeness of the results sex is worse than the former two, coded as i. in many previous meta-analysis studies, the sample size, randomness of sampling, etc. are often coded and discussed. however, in our research, all samples are large samples, and the sampling methods are generally consistent, so we did not separately encode and analyze such information. analysis framework we first analyzed the overall impact of school resources on student performance, and then separately analyzed the impact of student human resources, material resources and financial resources on student performance, thereby determining which aspects of investment are more effective. on this basis, we further analyzed the impact of human resources and material resources on student performance. student grades include student grades and total student grades. at the same time, the introduction of moderating variables, that is, the impact of different disciplines, different academic periods, different research areas, different research methods, different research designs, literature types and data types on student performance, in order to test the sources of heterogeneity between different studies, and then comprehensively evaluate the impact of school resource investment on student performance (see figure 2 for the analysis framework). according to the steps of the meta-analysis, the quality of the included literature should be evaluated. however, in most cases, such quality evaluation standards are mainly applicable to the literature of experimental research, from whether the experimental design and process of the included literature are scientifically and rationally evaluated (valentine & cooper, 2003). such criteria are not suitable for this study. because the documents we included are all officially published academic papers, which have undergone strict peer review, the research process is rigorous, and the conclusions are robust and reliable, the included documents have high quality and can meet the requirements of meta-analysis. results heterogeneity test and model selection in order to accurately examine the impact of school resource investment on student performance, a heterogeneity test was first performed. tests for heterogeneity refer to whether different studies have heterogeneity and what causes heterogeneity. it is also called tests for homogeneity or homogeneity test. with reference to the results of heter tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 398 figure 1. database retrieval flowchart. ogeneity analysis, a suitable statistical model is selected (rücker, et al., 2008; xia, 2005). if the test result is not significant (p> 0.05), it indicates that the studies are homogeneous, and a fixed effect model is selected; if the test result is significant (p <0.05), it indicates that there is heterogeneity between different studies. if there is heterogeneity, there are usually two processing methods. one is to use subgroup analysis and sensitivity analysis to eliminate heterogeneity processing methods such as extreme values or statistics with opposite directions, and then make it homogeneous using a fixed effects model (xia, 2005); another method is to use a random effects model. however, borenstein et al. proposed that the choice of analysis model should also be based on the source of heterogeneity. if the heterogeneity originates only from sampling errors, a fixed-effect model is selected. if it is assumed that in addition to sampling errors, heterogeneity also comes from factors such as study design and sample characteristics, a random effect model is selected (borenstein, et al., 2009). tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 399 figure 2. analysis framework diagram. in the heterogeneity test of the overall impact of school resource investment on student performance, q = 674.236 (p < 0.001) indicates that there is heterogeneity between the samples, and i2 = 97.182, indicating that about 97% of the variation comes from the difference between the effect values. only 3% of the variation was due to sampling errors, so a random effects model was used for analysis. the test of the heterogeneity of the impact of school human, material and financial resources on student performance also shows that there are differences between different studies, and the variation mainly comes from factors other than errors, so a random effect model is also adopted. the overall impact of school resource investment on student performance tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 400 in the analysis of the results, referring to the practice of greenwald et al., the effect size (table 3) obtained was analyzed according to the standard regression coefficient, and the influence of this variable on student performance was analyzed (2009). the overall impact of school resource investment on student performance is shown in table 4. the effect amount es = 0.093 (p = 0.001), which is equivalent to a standard regression coefficient of 0.093. that is, an increase of one standard deviation in school resource investment will increase student performance by 0.093 of the standard deviation. this effect is very significant. increasing investment in school resources will have a large impact on student performance, a result that is consistent with the conclusions of hedges et al. (1994) and hattie (2015). the impact of school personnel, finance, and material inputs on student performance according to the results in table 4, it can be seen that the input of school human resources has the greatest impact on student performance, with an effect amount of 0.121 (p <0.001), that is, an increase of one standard deviation in school human resource investment will increase student performance by 0.121 standard deviation, which is quite large impact. the impact of financial resources investment is equivalent to that of human resources, with an effect size of 0.120 (p = 0.014). the last is the impact of the school’s material resource investment, with an effect amount of 0.099 (p = 0.009), which is less than the impact of financial and human resources, but it is sufficient to have an important impact on student performance. use subgroup analysis to explore the impact of human resource variables on student performance (see table 5 for results). since the teacher-student ratio and the student-teacher ratio are inverse relations to each other and cannot be simply merged, referring to the practice of hedges et al., the effect magnitudes of the teacher-student ratio and the student-teacher ratio are calculated separately. the results in table 5 show that in human resources, teacher experience, teacher training, teacher education, teacher titles, teacher qualifications, and student-teacher ratio all significantly affect student performance, and the effect range is [0.101, 0.185]. the results of this study are consistent with hedges’ report (hedges, et al., 1994). however, the results show that the teacher-student ratio has no significant effect on student performance. this result may be because only three teachers-student ratios were used in the collected samples, so this result needs to be treated with caution. similar to human resources, subgroup analysis of the input effect of each variable of material resources was used (table 6). however, unlike the results of various human resources variables, among the material resources, only the computer networking rate, the average fixed assets per student, the classroom area per student, and the school area per student significantly affect student performance and the effect range is [0.032, 0.222], but the number of students per computer, building area per student, and number of books per student did not significantly affect student performance. however, it should also be noted that the sample size of each variable in the material resources is tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 401 table 3. effect amount report. # author output variable effect size overall human resources e-material resources financial resources 1 liang huang (2018a) math 0.021 0.131 0.008 / 2 liang huang (2018b) reading 0.009 0.1 0.002 / 3 liang huang (2018c) science 0.023 0.117 0.019 / 4 xiangyun li, ping wei (2014a) chinese 0.243 0.441 -3.512 0.242 5 xiangyun li, ping wei (2014b) math 0.121 0.064 0.05 0.181 6 xue xia (2009) math 0.058 0.058 / / 7 yuhong du, yongmei hu (2009a) math 0.001 0.219 0.096 -0.263 8 yuhong du, yongmei hu (2009b) chinese 0.101 0.222 0.239 -0.158 9 haiping xue, weifang min (2008a) math 0.126 0.17 / 0.123 10 haiping xue, weifang min (2008b) chinese 0.104 0.066 / 0.145 11 yongmei hu (2007a) math 0.114 / 0.106 0.122 12 yongmei hu (2007b) chinese 0.143 / 0.096 0.144 13 yongmei hu (2007c) math 0.231 0.232 0.204 / 14 yongmei hu (2007d) chinese 0.181 0.19 0.193 0.178 15 xuehui an, emily hannum, tanja sargent (2008) total -0.0021 -0.0021 / / 16 jennifer adams (2012) math 0.085 0.053 / / 17 qiuyi weng (2009) total -0.219 -0.219 -0.052 / 18 yanqing ding, haiping xue (2008) total 0.081 0.081 / 0.168 19 haiping xue, rong wang (2009a) math 0.199 0.164 / 0.234 20 haiping xue, rong wang (2009b) math 0.235 0.143 / 0.322 table 4. calculation of effect amount. eq effect amount (point estimate) sem variance confidence interval z value p value random effect fixed effect overall impact 20 0.093 0.089 0.027 0.01 [0.039-0.147] 3.393 0.001 human resources 18 0.121 0.060 0.020 0.00 [0.082-0.161] 5.972 0.000 financial resources 12 0.120 0.105 0.049 0 .002 [0.024-0.215] 2.458 0 .014 material resources 12 0.099 0.103 0.038 0.001 [-0.025-0.173] 2.629 0.009 note: eq: effect quantity; sem: standard error of mean. tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 402 table 5. calculation of the effect amount of each sub-variable of human resources. human resources variables eq effect amount (point estimate) sem variance confidence interval z value p value random effect fixed effect teacher experience 8 0.185 0.177 0.059 0.003 [0.069,0.301] 3.315 0.002 teacher training 3 0.137 0.145 0.038 0.001 [0.062,0.211] 3.607 0.000 teacher education 8 0.144 0.160 0.023 0.001 [0.099,0.188] 6.292 0.000 teacher title 8 0.101 0.081 0.025 0.001 [0.052,0.151] 3.996 0.000 teacher qualifications 11 0.134 0.109 0.030 0.001 [0.075,0.193] 4.478 0.000 studentteacher ratio 6 0.150 0.154 0.032 0.001 [0.089,0.212] 4.763 0.000 teacherstudent ratio 3 0.263 0.015 0.196 0.038 [-0.120,0.647] 1.346 0.178 note: eq: effect quantity; sem: standard error of mean. table 6. calculation of effect size of the sub-variable of material resource. material resource variables eq effect amount (point estimate) sem variance confidence interval z value p value random effect fixed effect computer networking rate 3 0.032 0.032 0.006 0.000 [0.020,0.043] 5.307 0.000 number of computers per student 3 -0.012 -0.012 0.008 0.000 [-0.027,0.002] -1.659 0.097 per capita fixed assets 2 0.238 0.238 0.103 0.011 [0.037,0.439] 2.325 0.020 construction area per student 1 -0.052 -0.052 0.033 0.111 [-0.704,0.600] -0.156 0.876 classroom area per student 4 0.112 0.106 0.045 0.002 [0.201,2.485] 2.485 0.000 number of books per student 5 -0.106 -0.040 0.173 0.030 [-0.445,0.234] -0.610 0.542 area per student 4 0.222 0.265 0.048 0.002 [0.129,0.315] 4.664 0.000 note: eq: effect quantity; sem: standard error of mean. tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 403 not large, so this result needs to be treated with caution. regulatory effect analysis according to the above analysis, it is known that heterogeneity exists between samples, and the source of heterogeneity is not caused solely by sampling errors. this paper explores possible sources of heterogeneity through the analysis of regulatory effects. in the meta-analysis literature related to student learning outcomes, moderating variables are usually selected from research disciplines, research stages, and research areas (gu & hu, 2018; zheng, et al. 2018; wang & hu, 2018). zhang et al. proposed that subgroup analysis can also be divided from professional perspectives such as research quality, design schemes, and statistical perspectives (zhang, et al., 2015), and the principles of subgroup analysis and adjusted variable analysis are similar, so this perspective can also select the manipulated variable. therefore, this paper selects seven variables as research subject, research area, research period, research design, research method, document type and data type as moderator variables. because the results of the analysis of the adjustment effects of human resources input, material resources input, and financial resources effects of the school are consistent with the overall analysis results, they are limited in space and only report the analysis results of the overall adjustment effects (see table 7). from the results in table 7, it can be seen that the research subject (qb = 36.128, p < 0.001), the research area (qb = 9.762, p = 0.045), and the data type (qb = 11.604, p = 0.003) are the main reasons for the difference in the effect amount. there is a significant difference in the amount of effect between different disciplines. the impact of school resource investment on chinese and mathematics is significant, and the amount of effect is 0.171 and 0.123, respectively. it shows that the school’s investment in resources will increase by one standard deviation. students ‘language performance will increase by 0.171 standard deviations, and students’ mathematics performance will increase by 0.123 standard deviations. different regional effects are not the same, but except for the eastern region, the effect amount is not significant. the effect amount of the results of studies conducted in the central region and the eastern part of the country, and in the central and eastern parts of the country, shows a positive and significant effect with the range of [0.081, 0.193]. robustness test after calculating the research results, further publication bias testing and sensitivity analysis are needed to ensure the reliability of the research results. publication bias means that statistically significant positive research results are easier to publish than statistically insignificant negative research results. if there is a publication bias, the combined effect amount will be greater than the actual effect amount, so the combined effect amount calculated in the fifth step needs to be corrected. there are usually two types of publication bias testing methods: the funnel graph method and the egger test. the former determines whether there is a publication bias by checking whether the fun tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 404 table 7. analysis of regulatory effects. manipulated variable (coding) k qb es 95% ci p output variable (output) chinese 5 36.128 (p<0.0001) 0.171 0.126-0.216 <0.001 mathematics 10 0.123 0.080-0.166 < 0.001 science 1 0.023 -0.016-0.062 0.250 reading 1 0.009 -0.044-0.062 0.739 total 2 -0.048 -0.238-0.143 0.625 study area (aera) nationwide (n) 1 9.762 (p=0.045) 0.081 0.030-0.132 0.002 central (m) 2 0.193 0.075-0.310 0.001 west (w) 9 0.115 0.069-0.160 <0.001 central and eastern (em) 4 0.149 0.100-0.198 <0.001 east (e) 4 -0.043 -0.187-0.102 0.563 research section (grade) elementary school (p) 8 1.365 (p=0.505) 0.118 0.073-0.164 <0.001 middle school (s) 11 0.074 -0.038-0.86 0.194 high school (h) 1 0.081 0.030-0.132 0.002 research design (study design) quasi-longitudinal research (ql) 12 2.551 (p=0.110) 0.133 0.096-0.171 <0.001 non-longitudinal research (fl) 8 0.042 -0.065-0.148 0.444 research method (method) hlm 17 2.363 (p=0.124) 0.113 0.078-0.147 <0.001 ols 3 -0.077 -0.316-0.162 0.529 literature type (lt) papers (j) 15 1.949 (p=0.163) 0.074 -0.009-0.158 0.080 non-journal papers (non-j) 5 0.144 0. 093-0.195 <0.001 data sources international data (g) 3 11.604 (p=0.003) 0.019 -0.01-0.047 0.209 large domestic monitoring data (c) 15 0.097 0.033-0.161 0.003 self-made experimental data (i) 2 0.193 0.075-0.310 0.001 nel graph is symmetrical, and the latter quantifies the publication bias by intercept. the funnel chart of the overall impact of school resources input on student performance is shown in figure 3. the chart is approximately symmetrical, so there may be no publication bias, but to ensure the accuracy of the test, an egger test is also required. egger’s test results also showed that there was no publication bias for this meta-analysis result (b0 = 0.043, t = 0.016, p1 = 0.494, p2 = 0.987). sensitivity analysis refers to whether the results change with the analysis conditions (xia, 2005). the fail-safe n method is usually used to judge the possibility of publication bias to change the meta-analysis conclusion (zeng & yao, 2018). the larger n is, the more studies need to be included and the more stable the results. generally, it is necessary to increase the sample size to be 5k + 10 or more of the existing sample size to determine that the result is stable (rosenthal, 1979). the coefficient of insecurity tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 405 figure 3. funnel chart of the impact of school resource input on student performance. calculated in this study is n = 1,676 (α = 0.050, p < 0.0001), so the conclusion can be proved to be robust. discussion school resource investment significantly impacts student performance the effect amount of school resources on student performance is 0.093. since the standard regression coefficient is used as the effect amount in this study, an increase of one standard deviation in school resource investment will increase student performance by 0.093 standard points. it can be seen that the impact of school resources on student performance is very significant. the results of this study are consistent with the results of greenwald et al. regarding 60 studies from the usa, but the results are slightly larger than those of greenwald et al. this shows that the effect of chinese school resource investment may be greater than that of the united states, and it also shows that the chitian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 406 nese school resource investment is relatively insufficient, and the marginal efficiency of resource investment is still at the marginal increasing stage, and it has not reached the optimal input level. the school’s investment in human, financial and material resources significantly affects student performance, and human resources are more effective this study finds that different resources invested in schools have different effects on students. among them, the school’s human resources investment has the best effect, with an effect amount of 0.121. an in-depth analysis of the impact of various variables on school human resources input found that teacher experience, teacher education, teacher qualifications, teacher training, teacher titles, and student-teacher ratios all have a positive and significant impact on student performance. the research results are consistent, and they all conclude that teachers are the most important factor affecting student performance (hedges, et al., 1994; hattie, 2015). teachers have always been considered to be an important factor affecting student performance. nye et al. found that nearly 7%-12% of differences in student performance are caused by teachers (nye, et al., 2004). rowe et al. studied that only schools with effective teachers can be called effective schools (rowe & rowe, 1993). in addition, hattie, through a meta-analysis of more than 800 students’ academic achievements, obtained “teachers” as the main reason for education excellence, and praised teachers as the “holy grail of teaching” (hattie, 2015). however, the teachers that hattie refers to are not just teachers ‘human capital factors such as their education, qualifications, and experience, but more influences on teachers’ teaching, such as teaching strategies and teacher-student relations. therefore, after drawing the conclusion that teacher resources investment, especially teacher experience, teacher qualifications, teacher qualifications, teacher training, teacher titles, student-teacher ratios have a positive impact on student performance, further research on its impact mechanism, namely teacher human capital, is needed. how do you influence student performance? in the current research on the relationship between teacher human capital and student achievement, more attention is paid to whether it has an impact, the degree of influence and direction, and less attention to whether its impact mechanism is through the influence of teacher human capital on teacher teaching style and student performance, or through teaching. strategies to influence student achievement, or to achieve impact through other means need further exploration in the future. the second is financial resources. in the past meta-analysis of investment in education funding, it was considered that the impact of education funding on student performance was small. how to use is more important than the amount of funds (hanushek, 1989; hanushek, 2003). rolle also reached this conclusion, arguing that a large amount of investment is not necessary, and more importantly, how to use existing resources more efficiently (rolle, 2004). in contrast, a series of studies by hedges et al. found that educational investment has a positive and systematic impact on student pertian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 407 formance, and thus refutes the view that financial investment has only a limited impact on student performance (hedges, et al., 1994; hattie, 2015). our results are roughly consistent with the results of hedges, which found that the investment of school financial resources has a positive and significant impact on student performance. however, in our research, the impact of financial resources input on student performance is not inferior to human resources, with an effect amount of 0.120, which is only 0.001 lower than the effect amount of human resource investment. this is slightly different from the conclusion that hedges et al found that teachers are more important. the reasons may be caused by the selected variables and samples, or they may be caused by different national conditions between china and the united states. the last is the investment of material resources, with a standardization coefficient of 0.099, which is less than the effect of the school’s financial and human resources, but the impact cannot be underestimated. in the analysis of input of different material resources, computer networking rate, fixed assets per student, classroom area per student, and school area per student significantly affect student performance. the effect of school resource investment varies by subject, region, and data type from the results of the adjustment effect, it can be found that the effect of school resource investment varies in different disciplines and regions. among them, the subject of chinese language and mathematics is more susceptible to impact, while the impact on other subjects is not significant. there may be two reasons for this research result: first, the difference caused by the uneven sample size; second, in china, chinese language and mathematics are considered basic subjects, and they often get more education and teaching resources. therefore, the impact of changes in school resources input on mathematics and chinese subjects is more obvious. the effect of school resource investment in different regions is also different, and the effect is better in the western region. the reason may be that, in addition to the uneven sample size, compared with the eastern region, china’s central and western regions have a slightly lower level of economic development and insufficient economic strength. in particular, the western region has a weak economic foundation and limited investment in school resources. in this case, a slight increase in school resource investment in the central and western regions may produce better results, that is, the marginal efficiency of school resource investment is higher than in the east. for example, ling used the data envelopment method to evaluate the efficiency of china’s urban education financial expenditure, and found that there is a problem of pure technical inefficiency in urban education in china, and the pure technical efficiency of the eastern region is lower than that of the central and western regions. this shows that although the eastern region is rich in resources, the utilization efficiency of educational financial resources is not high and needs to be further improved (ling, 2015). in recent years, china’s investment in school resources in the central and western regions has increased significantly. the growth rate of financial education funding is significantly higher than that tian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 408 in the eastern regions, especially in the poor regions (yu, 2019). therefore, we ask whether the efficiency of school resource utilization is affected by the economic level of the school’s location, whether the education input has a “ceiling effect”, and the optimal input level should be an explanation, etc. all these need to be studied further. different data sources have different effects on the investment of educational resources. the effect of international data is the smallest, and the effect of self-edited data is the highest. this result may be related to the rigor and representativeness of data compilation. there is a possibility that the self-edited data is not as rigorous as the international data and large domestic data, resulting in a high effect amount. conclusion and perspective conclusion and inspiration this study used meta-analysis to analyze 11 literatures on the impact of chinese school resource investment on student performance, a total of 20 effect quantities. the research results found that: (1) the overall impact of school resources on student performance is significant (the effect amount is 0.093, p = 0.001), especially in master thesis and doctoral dissertation. (2) compared with material resources, school human resources the input effect is even better, with affect amounts of 0.121 and 0.120 respectively. the effect of material resource investment is the lowest, but the impact is also very important. the effect amount is 0.099. (3) in human resources input, teacher experience, teacher education, teacher qualification, and teacher training , teacher title, and studentteacher ratio all have a positive and significant impact on student performance; among the material resources, computer networking rates, fixed assets per student, classroom area per student, and school area per student significantly affect student performance. (4) from a disciplinary perspective, the impact of school resource investment on chinese and mathematics is more significant, and from a regional perspective, the impact on central and western regions is more significant. based on the analysis above, we believe that the input of human, material and financial resources in schools can promote the improvement of student performance. china’s current investment in school resources is inadequate in terms of human, material and financial resources. it is necessary to continue to increase, and in the face of effective educational resources, we should consider how to allocate these resources more effectively in order to make the development of education better, faster and more balanced. for each school, in the face of limited educational resources, we should consider how to make more effective use of these resources, and how to make internal school deployment more effective. therefore, we believe that china still needs to increase investment in school resources, especially increase financial resources and investment in schools in the central and western regions. at the same time, it is necessary to strengthen the input and allocation of teacher resources, and effectively improve the treatment of teachers. at the same time, increase teacher training, increase investment in teacher resources in weak schools and regions, and build a more reasonable and sufficient and efficient teacher team. on this basis, we should further strengthen the research on edutian & yao. impact of school resource on student performance vol.4, no. 1, 2020 409 cation input and output, better grasp the laws, and improve the efficiency of resource utilization through scientific decision-making, and better promote student development. perspective because china does not currently have a unified measurement tool for student performance, it is difficult to obtain uniform and nationally comparable student performance data. and the complexity of school-level input data also makes it difficult for researchers to obtain this part of the data. therefore, in this study, the comparability between results needs to be further discussed. although they have been standardized, different measurement tools and different processing methods may still affect the results. in addition, due to the late start of quantitative research in the chinese education industry and the existence of non-standard reports, the number of studies that can be included and the number of effect sizes are small. therefore, the results of this study need more research for further verification. acknowledgement: the authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. this article was selected for the fifth national educational empirical research forum sponsored by east china normal university of china in 2019 and made a keynote speech. the authors thank their colleagues for their constructive suggestion. references borenstein, m., hedges, l.v., higgins, j.p.t., & rothstein, h.r. 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(2018) can mobile learning promote learning performance: a meta-analysis based on 92 studies of international english journals in 2011-2017. modern dist edu, 6:45-54. received: 24 september 2019 revised: 17 november 2019 accepted: 15 december 2019 bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 1013 the impact of the new college entrance examination reform on inequality of educational opportunities by zhang, w., ha, w., & zhu, h. correspondence to: wei ha, deputy dean, institute of economics of education, peking university, china. email: wha@pku.edu.cn ecently, an empirical study published in research in educational development conducted the variance analysis of students’ different social strata around the new college entrance examination reform based on the survey data of 2016-2019 freshmen cohorts in a key state university and also explored the compensation effects of career education in senior high schools. the research findings are as follows:  the early trail of the reform put the background selection much more severe, while students from the advantageous social level occupy the dominant position. the complexity of the reform, such as mark-giving methods and college application processes forced students to collect adequate and effective information to make the proper decisions. however, the disadvantaged students who relatively lack in the family economy, culture, and social capital are very likely to face the situation of asymmetric information or even the social stratum dilemma.  the career education in high schools shows a positive effect on the participation of parents in college preparation for their children, but it has not yet shown significant compensation effects. however, school career education has shown signs of narrowing the gap in parental involvement between classes. the study suggests that it may be just because of the exploratory period of school career education in the reform process and the lag period of its effectiveness, which highlights the role and the role played by family capital in this competition. this just emphasizes that under the background of the new college entrance examination system, continuing to effectively promote school career education plays an important regulating role in students’ development and the realization of real educational equity source: research in educational development, 2020; 40(z1):57-66. r is the standardization of compulsory education school helpful to improve students’ performance? an empirical analysis based on monitoring data in province a yanli liu, 1 jijun yao, 1 shike zhou 2 1. nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china 2. jiangsu teaching and research office of primary and secondary schools, nanjing 210024, china abstract. the standardization of compulsory education schools is an essential measure to promote education balance and improve education quality. however, when the implementation effect of this policy was evaluated, the improvement of input factors such as facilities and equipments, teaching faculty and funding were only focused on, but with less attention was paid to the impact of the standardization on students’ academic performance. this kind of imbalance makes it difficult to fully grasp the real effects of standardization and its potential problems, which may lead to deviations in the direction of standardization construction. therefore, this study used the monitoring data in province a that includes the standardized construction of compulsory education schools and academic quality of students to analyze the correlation between standardization construction and student performance through ordinary least square (ols). further, a regression discontinuity design (rdd) was used to analyze whether standardization construction is the cause of differences in student performance. the results showed that there was no significant correlation between standardization construction and elementary school students’ performance, and negative correlation with middle school students’ performance; no substential causal relationship exists between standardization construction and student performance. this is majorly due to the emphasis on the conditions of school-running was set too much, and then the student performance was neglected. therefore, future evaluation should be gradually changed while deepening the standardization construction with more attention paid to the connotative development and efforts made to the improvement of the education quality. liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no.1, 2020 592 best evid chin edu 2020; 5(1):591-608. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar039. keywords: standardization construction; academic performance of students; regression discontinuity; adequate education about the author: yanli liu, school of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing, china, e-mail: 1609604712@qq.com. shike zhou, school of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing, china, e-mail: jyszsk@163.com; correspondence to: jijun yao, school of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing, china, e-mail: yaojijun_njnu@163.com. funding: the study was funded by the national social science foundation of china (project number aha160006) and the priority academic program for development of jiangsu higher education institutions (papd). conflict of interests: none. liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 593 introduction n 2010, china issued the “outline of the national middleand long-term education reform and development plan (2010-2020)”, which proposed that “advancing the standardization of compulsory education schools and balancing the allocation of resources such as teachers, equipment, books, school buildings, etc.” “establish the national basic quality standards and monitoring system for compulsory education” (july 29, 2010) strive to continuously improve the standardization of compulsory education, promote education equity, improve education quality, and promote balanced development of compulsory education. in this context, local governments have successively issued relevant policy documents to vigorously promote the standardization of compulsory education schools. take province a as an example, in 2015, the government of the province a released the “standards for provincial a compulsory education schools (trial)” (provincial government of a, 2015). subsequently, the education department of province a (2016) also developed the “monitoring indicators for the standardization of provincial a schools for compulsory education (trial)”, through which the schools do self-assessment and self-test first, and then county-level and city-level review, and finally provincial review that formed the monitoring data of school standardization construction of province a. the formulation and implementation of these measures have being greatly promoted the standardization construction of compulsory education schools (“standardization construction” for short). “the compulsory education school standardization construction monitoring report of province a in 2017” showed that the standardization construction compliance rate has gotten significant improvment and the effect was remarkable. up to 2017, “71.26% of schools in province a have basically reached the provincial standard”, and the rate of compliance has increased by 15.3% compared with 2016; the average compliance rate of compulsory education schools in 13 districts and cities is 73.34% on average, 16% higher than that in 2016; in addition, the achievement of indicators had also been at a high level. in 2017, “the first-level indicators reached over 60%, three first-level indicators were close to 100%”, “60% of the second-level indicators reached 80%”, and “46 third-level monitoring points was above 80%” (education evaluation institute of province a, 2018). from the data above, we can see that the standardization construction of province a has reached a high level. based on the experience of countries around the world, the construction of education standardization is an essential step to promote a balanced development of education and improve education quality. these achievements made by province a in standardization construction were undoubtedly of great significance. however, in terms of specific indicators and construction content, most provinces, including a, currently focus on condition improvement in the process of standardization. although this can improve school security, promote education equity, and provide a better learning environment, but as far as the ultimate goal of education policy implementation is concerned, it is obvious that it should be the development of students, rather than “input factors”. when taking only the input such as facilities, equipment, teachers, and funds i liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 594 as the first evaluation criteria, it will make us depend too much on the conditions for running schools, but not on students’ development. however, it is hard to obtain the answer directly from the results of such evaluations. since 1980, the united states has promoted a gigantic “education standardization movement”. during that process, the transformation of educational evaluation criteria had become the major reform point. starting with rose v. council for a better education in kentucky in 1989, a series of education lawsuits were passed and the standards for american education investment and accountability had gradually realized a change from “fair” to “adequate”. the so-called “adequate education” was definitely different from the “fair” one, of which did not simply stop at judging whether the educational opportunities and resources were being equally allocated (this is exactly the starting and end points of most chinese domestic education policy evaluations), but from the perspective of the extent to which the education provided by the education system for the educated has realized the development of the educated to assess the effectiveness of various educational measures. this is a typical result-oriented educational evaluation and resource allocation. however, the “adequate education” largely refers to students’ academic performance that judges whether an education policy is effective, through looking at the improvement of students’ performance (yao, 2018; li & tao, 2015) the reason for result-oriented education policy evaluation as an essential one is majorly due to “it is not enough to only focus on the fairness of resource allocation, it is necessary to combine the fair resource allocation to the quality of education, so as to achieve a balanced high-quality development” (li & zeng, 2002). regarding china’s education practice, studies on the result-oriented evaluation is yet adequate. taking compulsory education school standardization construction as an example, the existing studies mainly focus on the discussion of standards, necessity and feasibility, construction principles, strategies, methodologies, and issues. but it remains unclear whether standardization promotes student performance. today, china has basically realized “letting each child learn”, but the urgent problem is how to realize “making each child learn better”. so, the lack of evaluation research and practical exploration of output dimension is obviously not conducive to the completion of this core task. ideally, for output-oriented education policy evaluation, a comprehensive assessment of the impact of a policy on student performance, abilities, and attitudes should be made. however, most of these indicators are difficult to measure, so most of the output-oriented education policy evaluations use student performance as a proxy for output. in view of this, we, in the following content, will try to analyze the policy effects of standardization construction based on student performance. through this type of analysis, we tried to answer whether standardization construction has improved the learning output situation represented by academic performance? furthermore, we analyzed the differences in standardization construction and whether they met the standards, and explore whether it was the cause of academic differences between schools. therefore, we first used the ordinary least square (ols) to study the correlation between the degrees of standardization construction, whether or not the standardization construction liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 595 meets the standards and the academic performance. secondly, regression discontinuity design (rdd) was used to infer causality between both these variables. finally, the research conclusions were analyzed, discussed and related suggestions were put forward. research design research framework based on the available data, we took students in grades 3 and 8 in the compulsory education stage of province a as the research objects, used the academic performance of the students as the dependent variable, and standardize construction work as the independent variable. so we examined the impact of standardization construction on student development from the output side. based on this, we first studied the correlation between standardization construction and student performance. specially, we used the standardized construction evaluation data of province a to describe the implementation effect of the policy by using the two variables: one is the standardized construction scores of each school (continuous variables) and whether the standardized construction had reached the standard (categorical variables). on this basis, ols was used to analyze the relationship between the degree of standardization construction, the achievement of the standard, and student performance. we need to point out that general regression analysis can help us figure out the relationship between independent and dependent variables, but it is difficult to do the causal inference. as mentioned earlier, we wanted to understand not only the relationship between standardization construction and student performance, but also whether this policy was responsible for differences in performance between schools. to this end, we used rdd to analyze whether there was a causal relationship between standardization construction and student performance. rdd was first proposed by thistlethwaite and campbell (1960) in 1960 and it is a method for estimating processing effects in non-experimental environments. using this method, they analyzed the impact of scholarships on students’ future academic success. students' scholarships depend on observable test scores. however, between the students who just met the award criteria and the students who almost reached the award criteria, in addition to whether they received scholarships (differentiated by the score standard), other characteristics are in line with the principle of randomness, so they are comparable. if the student’s test score was greater than or equal to the cutoff value, then a scholarship was awarded to enter the experimental group; otherwise, the student was assigned into the control group. if there was a difference in the academic performance of the two groups, we could conclude that this difference is caused by the scholarship policy. initially, this evaluation strategy did not receive much attention. however, since this method has advantages that other methods do not have in terms of causal inference, after the 1990s, more and more studies began to use this method to estimate policy effects in various backgrounds, making it gradually become an important method of causal inference in social science research (lee & lemieux, 2010). in the field of education, liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 596 some representative research results have also appeared. for example, lee (2018) took tennessee as an example and used fuzzy regression discontinuity to study whether a grade-based bursary policy would affect students' bachelor's degree within six years. li and konstantopoulos (2016) used 2011 timss data from 14 european countries, and used instrumental variable method and regression discontinuity design to study the impact of class size on the mathematics performance of fourth grade students. wei (2012) studied whether the “no one child left behind act” improved the performance of students with disabilities based on rdd. but so far, the research on the use of rdd by chinese scholars is relatively rare ( chen et al., 2014; chu & meng, 2017; liu et al., 2016; wang & sun, 2015). in particular, within our scope, no researcher has used this method to carry out causal relationships between the standardization of compulsory education schools and student performance. according to the “monitoring report on the standardization construction of compulsory education schools in province a in 2017”, the schools with more than 80% of the monitoring points that have reached the standard are defined as “basically meeting the standardization construction standards” (“achieve the standard” for short) and the schools with less than 80% are defined as “not meeting the standardization construction standard”(“below the standard” for short). this formed a quasi-experimental data structure at the policy level and provided the conditions for causal inference using rdd. we set the schools with “achieve the standard” as the treatment group, other schools as the control, and set the policy rate of reaching standard 80% as the threshold. in this way, we can observe whether there is a “cutoff” in the performance of schools near this critical value, so as to determine whether the standardized construction of the compulsory school as an exogenous shock variable has become the cause of the difference in student performance. model set-up and variable description based on the above idea, we first used the ols to explore the relationship between the degrees of standardization construction, whether or not the standardization construction meets the standards and student performance. the specific model is set as follows: (1) (2) among them, xxmeani represents the average score of the test results of students in i school; xzhachratei represents the degree of standardized construction of i school; ti is a categorical variable, which indicates whether the standardized construction of i school has reached the standard, ti = 1 represents reached the standard, ti = 0 represents not reached; wi is the control variable, it includes socio-economic variables such as the area to which the i school belongs, the per capita gdp of the city where the school located, the education demands of the city where the school located, and urbanrural categories; μi is the residual. liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 597 on this basis, we set the basic standards (that is, the rate exceeds or equal to 80%) defined in the standardization construction assessment of province a as cutoff, and use sharp regression discontinuity to infer causality. the specific study design is: according to whether each school’s degree of standardization construction exceeds 80%, the following formula can be obtained: (3) where ti is treatment variable, xzhachratei is assignment variable. if the degree of standardization construction xzhachratei ≥ 80% of i school, then ti is equal to 1; otherwise, ti is 0. whether the school enters the treatment group or the control group depends entirely on whether the degree of standardization construction xzhachratei exceeds 80%. according to this, the school are randomly grouped in the smallest neighborhood [80% ε, 80% + ε] near the cutoff to obtain quasi-experimental design , so, the local average treatment effect (late) near xzhachrate = 80% can be estimated: (4) set the regression discontinuity model as follows: （-h ≤ xzhachratei－x0 ≤ h） (5) among them: xxmeani represents the average score of the test results of students in i school; xzhachratei indicates the degree of standardized construction of i school; x0 indicates the cutoff value, which is 80%; xzhachratei-x0 is central treatment for the degree of standardization construction; ti indicates whether the standardized construction of i school has reached the standard with 80% as the cutoff, 1 means that achieve standard, and 0 means that not up to standard; zi is the control variable, which includes the area where i school belongs, the per capita gdp of the city in which the school is located, education needs, and urban-rural categories; the interaction term β3ti·(xzhachratei-x0) is to allow regressions on both sides of the cutoff to have different slopes. data source and variable description the data used in this study mainly came from the monitoring data of standardization construction of compulsory education schools in province a, the test data of academic liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 598 quality of compulsory education students, and the statistical yearbooks of various cities in province a. among them, the monitoring indicators of standardization construction of province a in 2017 were composed of 8 first level indicators (school setting, campus construction, educational equipment, teacher team, education and teaching, school management, quality evaluation, and funding guarantee), 40 second level indicators and 69 monitoring points. the elementary schools (including teaching center), middle schools and nine-year schools with compulsory education in 13 cities and 116 counties (cities and districts) in province a were estimated. the academic quality monitoring of compulsory education students in province a was an independent test of the academic quality of fourth and ninth grade students in province a. the test content was the academic level of chinese and mathematics of the third grade students, and the academic level of chinese, mathematics, english and science of the eighth grade students. in 2016, the province a adopted a two-stage stratified sampling method and sampled 1,771 elementary schools. among them, the number of students sampled was 141,516 in chinese, and 141,460 in math. in middle school, chinese and mathematics had 992 schools were sampled, and 82,358 and 82,319 students were chosen respectively; english and science had 883 schools were sampled, 78,246 and 78,685 students were chosen, respectively. the statistical yearbook data of 13 cities in province a were from the websites of statistical bureau of each city. it was for obtaining the annual data of economic development and education demand of each district and city. on this basis, we conducted data processing according to the research design. given the research focus was on the relationship between standardized construction and students’ academic performance, so we matched the school standardized construction data and student academic performance data. in the end, the data of 1,619 elementary schools and 880 middle schools were used. among them, the academic performance of elementary school was measured by the average of chinese and math performance of each school; the academic performance of middle school was measured by the average of chinese, math, english and science performance of each school. the calculation of the degree of the school’s standardized construction was divided by the number of compliance monitoring points divided by the actual number of monitoring points. to make the estimation more accurate, control variables were added. under the decentralized and county-based education management system in china, the development of local education was related to the local socio-economic level, so the per capita gdp index of the city where the school was located represented the level of local economic development. in addition, the demand for education was also one of the factors affecting the standardization of schools. therefore, we divided the number of students in school in each prefecture-level city in the statistical yearbook of province a by the number of permanent residents (calculated separately for elementary and middle schools) to represent the educational needs of the city where the school is located. in addition, urban-rural disparities and regional differences (central, southern, and northern province a) might also affect student perforliu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 599 mance, so the urban-rural categories and regions to which schools belong were used as control variables in the model. the specific variable settings are shown in table 1. there was a large difference in the test results of elementary and middle schools in different schools. the minimum test score for elementary school was only 342 points, and the highest score is 663 points. the degree of the standardization construction of elementary schools was between 58.1%-100.0%, and the average rate was 82.4%. the level of middle school standardization was between 58.1%-98.4%, and the average rate was 84.8%. in addition, there were large differences in the level of economic development and education demand of different regions. results correlation analysis based on ols first, the relationship between school standardization and student performance was analyzed by ols. through the white test, we found that there was a problem of heteroscedasticity in the regression equation. therefore, weighted least squares regression (wls) was used for heteroscedasticity correction. models (1) and (2) showed that after controlling the school’s area and urbanrural category, the education demand of the city, and the per capita gdp of the region where the school is located, the degree of standardization of elementary school construction and whether it meets the standard or not was negatively related to the average student’s performance, but not show statistical significance. the regression results of model (1) showed that under the control of related variables, for every 1% increase in the level of standardization, the grade of elementary school students decreased by 0.113 points, but it was not statistically significant. the regression results of model (2) showed that the difference between achieve the standard or not of standardization construction in elementary schools and the achievement of students was 1.802 points, but it was not significant. models (3) and (4) showed that the degree of standardization construction in the middle school and whether the standardization construction meets the standards or not was significantly negatively related to student performance. model (3) found that the degree of standardization construction increased by 1%, and the score of middle school students reduced by 1.225 points. model (4) showed that compared with below the standard schools, the average score of students in middle schools that reached the standard was 15.779 points lower. in terms of controlling variables, the economic level of the city where the elementary school is located had a significant positive impact on student performance, and there was a positive but not significant impact on the educational demands and student performance in the middle school stage. the coefficient of the region to which the school belongs indicated that the performance of the central province a was higher than those of the northern province a. students in urban areas were significantly better than rural students. liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 600 causal inference based on rdd based on the previous design, we used the standard of 80% as cutoff to analyze whether there is a causal relationship between standardization construction and student academic performance. figures 1 and 2 are the rdd data of the degrees of standardization construction and students’ academic performance after centralized processing. the academic performance of elementary and middle school students had a slight fluctuation at 80% of the standardization construction indicating that no significant causal relationship exists between the construction of standardization and the differences in student performance at various schools. in order to accurately estimate the causal relationship between them, we performed further analysis. for rdd, the choice of bandwidth is critical. we chose the optimal bandwidth based on minimizing the mean square error of the two regression functions at the cutoff proposed by imbens & kalyanaraman (2012). we used a rectangular kernel and half and twice the optimal bandwidth for causality tests. table 3 shows that under different bandwidth settings, there is no significant causal relationship between the standardized construction of elementary and middle schools and student performance. in order to ensure the robustness of the discontinuity regression results, we also tested the continuity of the conditional density of the group table 1. variable descriptive statistics. variable variable meaning mean sd min max xxmean test score elementary school 503.524 57.054 341.750 663.014 middle school 495.080 47.461 301.453 649.278 t i reach the standard or not of standardization construction elementary school 0.676 0.468 0 1 middle school 0.773 0.419 0 1 xzhachrate the degree of standardization construction (%) elementary school 82.442 6.898 58.060 100 middle school 84.800 6.922 58.060 98.390 citygdp per capita gdp by city (10,000 cny) based on elementary school sample 9.932 3.227 4.831 14.556 based on middle school sample 9.867 3.238 4.831 14.556 qy1 central province a elementary school 0.200 0.400 0 1 middle school 0.206 0.404 qy2 southern province a elementary school 0.460 0.499 0 1 middle school 0.444 0.497 cx1 city elementary school 0.525 0.500 0 1 middle school 0.557 0.497 cx2 county town elementary school 0.343 0.475 0 1 middle school 0.362 0.481 edudemand education demand of 13 cities in province a (%) elementary school 6.216 2.021 4.480 10.390 middle school 2.383 0.460 1.800 3.460 liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 601 figure 1. regression discontinuity (elementary school). figure 2. regression discontinuity (middle school). liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 602 table 2. ols regression results of compulsory education school students’ performance and the degree of standardization. elementary school middle school (1) (2) (3) (4) the degree of standardization construction (%) -0.113 -1.225*** (-0.636) (-5.807) reach the standard or not of standardization construction -1.802 -15.779*** (-0.724) (-4.374) per capita gdp by city (10,000 cny) 2.928* 6.129*** 0.562 1.737 (1.792) (3.134) (0.291) (0.813) educational demand of the city where the school is located (%) -0.364 -0.471 8.789 8.527 (-0.307) (-0.383) (1.518) (1.432) school location central province a 44.796*** 41.883*** 43.286*** 41.001*** (5.175) (4.865) (5.388) (4.990) southern province a -12.517 -34.746** 35.986** 24.875 (-0.967) (-2.535) (2.464) (1.621) type of school area city 27.568*** 29.380*** 17.730*** 15.556*** (6.275) (7.562) (2.942) (2.728) county/town -1.204 -1.568 9.087 7.543 (-0.270) (-0.389) (1.537) (1.365) constant term 467.430*** 439.001*** 534.434*** 438.892*** (21.346) (26.616) (18.670) (19.640) number of samples 1,619 1,619 880 880 f 43.667 53.652 23.708 22.813 adj. r 2 0.156 0.186 0.153 0.148 note: the value of t in parentheses; ***p , **p , and *p indicate that the levels of significance of 1%, 5%, and 10%, respectively. table 3. regression discontinuity results of compulsory education school student performance and reach the standard or not of standardization construction. achieve the standard or not of standardization construction elementary school ±3.541 ±7.083 ±14.165 -6.146 -11.164 8.661 7.619 8.158 5.845 (-0.551) (-0.963) (1.190) (1.005) (1.583) (1.083) middle school ±3.76 ±7.53 ±15.06 12.216 11.222 4.217 5.549 2.026 1.815 (0.754) (0.670) (0.456) (0.571) (0.278) (0.238) add control variables or not y n y n y n note: z value in parentheses; ***p, **p, and *p indicate that the levels of significance of 1%, 5%, and 10%, respectively. liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 603 ing variables and control variables at the cutoff point. the results showed that there is no obvious change at the cutoff between the assignment variable and the control variable, which was in accordance to the continuity assumption. in summary, through rdd analysis, we did not find a clear causal relationship between standardization construction and student performance, that is, the level of standardization construction is not the cause of differences in student performance. discussion and reflection based on our analyses, from the monitoring indicators of the standardization construction of compulsory education schools, in the dimensions involved in the indicators, especially in terms of hardware security, province a had basically completed the task of balanced development, and the standardization construction work had reached a higher level. in other words, from the input side, the effectiveness of the standard construction was satisfactory. however, many previous studies found that the improvement of school running conditions may not necessarily lead to the improvement of education quality. for example, the coleman report found that investment in educational resources was not the biggest cause of differences in student performance (coleman et al., 1966). in addition, hanushek at stanford university analyzed 377 related studies and found that no strong correlation exists between student performance and school resources. simple resource policies had little effect on improving student performance (hanushek, 1997). similarly, studies from china also reached these conclusions. for example, hu (2007) used the data of rural public elementary and middle schools in western china through regression analysis and found that most of the physical and financial resources invested in elementary and middle schools did not significantly improve student performance. hou and shen (2014) used the 2009 shanghai pisa test data for middle school students and found that there was no significant correlation between the quality of school education resources and student performance. as thus, these findings show further that when we do policy assessment, we cannot look at the “inputs” only, but also the “outputs”. although we do not think that output-oriented evaluation is a better performance evaluation method than inputoriented one; on the contrary, we firmly believe that in the process of standardization, improvement and balance of guarantee conditions are the top priority of this work. however, we also believe that while most of the current similar evaluations focus on input performance, the review of output performance is a necessary link to ensure that the evaluation conclusions are comprehensive, scientific and robust. in fact, our analysis also showed that when we conducted output-oriented policy performance evaluation, we oftentimes got different results from the input-oriented evaluation. in this study, although the construction results on the input side was impressive; many problems were revealed on the output side. ols regression results showed that no significant correlation exists between standardized construction policies and elementary school students ‘performance; but there was a negative correlation with liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 604 middle school students’ performance, and the average score of school that was 15.78 points lower than those who were below the standard. the rdd analysis also found that there was insufficient evidence that standardization construction is the cause of differences in student performance. our conclusions are obviously different from the results of input-oriented performance evaluation. we are more concerned about what exactly caused this difference. so, we further analyzed the monitoring data of standardized construction, and performed variance analysis on 62 quantifiable detection points according to achieve the standard group and below the standard group to determine whether the students’ performance in each group was significantly different under different indicators. 1 the results showed a significant difference between the two groups in the number of school tracks, the area per student, sports area per student, the provision of network multimedia classrooms per student, the setting of reading rooms, electronic reading rooms, and the number of stored books in libraries, etc. taking the “number of school tracks” as an example, the anova results show that the average score of the students in the schools that meet the standards is 13.01 points lower. according to the requirements in the standardized monitoring indicators, “complete elementary school is below 6 tracks”. only schools with less than or equal to 6 classes in one grade can be included in the compliance group. however, in the course of our investigation, we found that most of the rural elementary schools in province a meet this condition, and in urban elementary schools, especially many “quality elementary schools” are often difficult to find. therefore, it is impossible to reach the target on this indicator. however, the quality of teaching in such schools is often much higher than the average level, which in general raises the student performance of schools that do not meet this target. at the level of middle school, indicators such as the number of school tracks, the average building area per student, the number of books per student, the number of new books per student per year, the student-computer ratio, and the ratio of middle school teachers with undergraduate or higher education levels were significantly different between achieve and the below the standard. taking the “student-computer ratio” as an example, those who were achieve-the-standard scored 14.31 points lower than the contrast ones. according to the requirements of the monitoring indicators, “the ratio of the number of students in the school to the number of students using computers in the network environment must reach 8:1 in middle schools.” high-quality schools often have difficulty in meeting this requirement due to the large scale. the low scores of resource indicators per student are often the main reason why the “high-quality schools” with higher grades have difficulty meeting the standards. from our analyses, in many indicators, the phenomenon of “below the standard” group has better performance, which reveals exactly everyone's thirst for quality education resources. the relative shortage of quality education resources has led to a shortage of “good schools”. the expansion of the scale of running a school will reduce the supply of resources per student, which will inevitably lead to lower-than-expected results at the output end. this divergence between the actual quality of running a school and the evaluation results at the input side reminds us once again that we need to reflect on the liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 605 setting of such education policy evaluation indicators, so as to use a more comprehensive perspective to define and evaluate the implementation of education policies. conclusions and suggestions we can draw the conclusions based on our analyses: from the perspective of input, the standardized construction of compulsory education schools in province a had achieved gratifying results, but from the perspective of output, such kind of input had not significantly affected student performance. no sufficient evidence indicates that standardization construction is the cause of differences in student performance. we need to point out that this conclusion does not mean we deny the value and significance of resource input. after all, resources are the bottom line guarantee, and our conclusion shows that the current standardization construction still has much room for improvement in terms of how to achieve balance between input and sufficient output. in particular, we suggest: first, in the direction of standardization construction, we must achieve a transition from equal input to sufficient results. as pointed out by existing research, “quantity and hardware standards are the appearance of standardized school construction, and quality and connotation standards are the essence of standardized school construction; therefore, the quality of school running must always be the first place for standardized evaluation” (zhang & zhang, 2017). currently, the desire for higher quality education and the contradiction between the imbalance and inadequate supply of quality education resources are the main conflict in the process of educational reform and development. as mentioned earlier, since the 1980s in the united states, the principle of education supply had gradually changed from fairness to adequateness, and its core idea was to allow each child to achieve the maximum possible development under the conditions of certain resources (xue, 2011). this is also of value to china’s current standardization construction. second, in the focus of construction and the selection of performance evaluation indicators, to avoid “seeing things but not seeing people,” we must coordinate the relationship between the unified requirements and the development of the school's characteristics. this requires that standardized construction is to increase the evaluation of output quality while ensuring the necessary facilities and equipment, teachers, curriculum resources and funding for the development of each school. in order to promote hardware investment and condition improvement to truly serve the development of students, and thus effectively improve the quality of education, strive to achieve the growth and development of each student. in this process, it is necessary to avoid setting all indicators in a balanced and stable manner. it is necessary to allow the development of school characteristics and the substitution and coordination between different evaluation dimensions. it is not necessary to be confined to the full realization of the indicators, as long as the construction of the school can better achieve the development of students, it should be regarded as completing the task of “standard construction”. third, strengthen scientific research and set scientific and rational evaluation indicators for standardization construction. an important finding of our study is that liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 606 simply focusing on the standardization of the input side does not promote the improvement of student output. the reason for this is largely due to the fact that in the setting of standardized construction indicators, the relationship between “input” and “output” has not been thoroughly explored. many indicators are often designed based on experience rather than scientific evidence. in the process of evidence-based reform, european and the usa require solid empirical evidence as the basis for making major policy decisions. in the “every child success act”, the united states not only continues the requirements of evidence-based decision-making in the “no one child left behind” act, but also makes clear the strength of various types of evidence (slavin, 2017). from this point, china has a lot of room for improvement. in the process of future standardization, more emphases should be placed on the rationality and scientificity of the index setting, and each index should be fully demonstrated to make the evaluation play a better role in finding problems and guiding reform. note: 1. due to space limitations, we did not report the results of variance analysis of 62 indicators. for complete information, please contact yao, the corresponding author of this article. contact email: yaojijun_ njnu@163.com. how to cite: liu, y., yao, j., zhou, s. 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(2017). reflection on construction of standardized school in compulsory education: status, problems and choices. res edu dev, 37(18):1-7. received: 27 february 2020 revised: 02 march 2020 accepted: 11 march 2020 liu et al. standardization of compulsory education school and students’ performance. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 608 the chinese version of this article has been published educational academic monthly 2019, (05): 87-95.the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 刘燕丽, 姚继军, 周世科.义务教育学校标准化建设改善了学业成绩吗?: 基于 a 省域内监测数 据的实证分析. 教育学术月刊, 2019(05):87-95. review-yanliliu-bece_title_30april2020 review-yanliliu-bece_maintext30april2020 i covid-19 and education: world’s issue ince the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, all schools have been forced to suspend classes. chinese schools impacted by the covid19 pandemic started “school is out, but class is on” in universities, middle and elementary schools as early as the spring semester of 2020, and launched the world’s largest online education. to study and summarize the current teaching and education status of the covid-19 pandemic timely, best evidence of chinese education actively contacted chinese educators and professionals to write for the issue of “school is out, but class is on” of the journal. after the publication of the special issue on the “school is out, but class is on” in march, 2020, it has received great attention from education peers around the world. educational researchers in some countries have written to the journal and authors to express their interests in hoping to learn more about the implementation of “school is out, but class is on” in chinese schools. the journal reported the world response of the special issue to the editorial board and received active support from the editorial experts. at the same time, the journal paid attention to the education of countries in the world under the background of the covid-19 pandemic. at the initiative of professor alan cheung, the editor-in-chief, and professor jijun yao, the executive editor-in-chief, experts of the editorial board also conducted research on their own national education under the covid-19 pandemic from an international perspective, and wrote special articles for the journal. although the journal is dedicated to empirical studies in china, when countries around the world face the challenges of the covid-19 pandemic to education, we need to learn from each other’s successful experience and jointly solve the problems we face. the editorial board members of the journal are from north america, europe, australia and asia. their contributions to the journal will definitely broaden the research horizon of the journal and provide diverse experience for the education of countries around the world to respond to the covid-19 pandemic. correspondence to: editorial office best evidence of chinese education e-mail: eif.bece@basehq.org. conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ed009 s bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1067 how can interdisciplinary collaborative learning be effective? by ma, z., li, h., wang, w., & li, y. correspondence to: ma, z., jiangnan university, china. email: mzq1213@qq.com n order to explore the application effects of computer supported collaborative learning (cscl) in stem education, this study used the method of meta-analysis to quantitatively analyze 142 pieces of empirical research literature in relevant fields, so as to examine the effects of cscl on different learning types, as well as the differences in the effects of stem education supported by cscl in the dimensions like discipline, learning stage, technology, and teaching strategy. the results of the study are as follows: the application of cscl in stem education can help improve students’ learning effects, but there exist differences in the effect degree of various learning effects, in particular, the effects on cognitive learning are the most significant. the effects of cscl on stem education on different disciplines are different. the impact on science, engineering, and pedagogy is relatively large, while the impact on health education and computer education is relatively small. cscl has an impact on the effects of stem education in different learning stages, comparatively speaking, it has a greater impact on graduate and elementary stages. communication technology, dynamic presentation technology, and sharing and co-construction technology have a more significant impact on the effects of stem education, while the multi-technical combination may not significantly improve the effects of stem education. teaching strategy has moderately influenced the stem education effects. among all the strategies, case-based, game-based, knowledgeconstructing and inquiry-based teaching methods are the more effective. the researchers suggested that it is important to pay attention to using cscl to achieve emotional goals, strengthening the design of emotional goals; adopting co-construction and sharing technology to support interdisciplinary collaborative learning, focusing on the application of co-construction and sharing technology in knowledge visualization representation and i vol.8, no.1, 2021 1068 knowledge tracking; integrating various teaching strategies to promote collaborative inquiry learning. source: modern distance education research, 2021; 33(1): 97-104. substitution or complementation: the relationship between school education and shadow education jiali li shanghai normal university, shanghai 200234, china abstract. in order to explore the relationship between school education and shadow education, this study applied two-level bernoulli model to estimate the school-level determinants of private tutoring by analyzing the data of pisa 2015 of four regions of china (beijing, shanghai, jiangsu, and guangdong). the results indicated that: (1) the four regions have large scale of private tutoring ranging from 58.7% to 74.0% for science, mathematics, and reading; (2) the participation rate of private tutoring in villages is much higher than that in cities; (3) the quality of school teachers significantly negatively affects the likelihood for receiving tutoring. shadow education plays both substitutional and complementary roles for school education, and the growth of shadow education is in accompany with the low quality of school education in rural areas but with high quality of school education in urban areas. instead of increasing education resources and improving infrastructure, increasing teacher quality will reduce the participation probability of private tutoring. best evid chin edu 2019; 4(1):411-424. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar015. keywords: shadow education; private tutoring; education quality; two-level bernoulli model correspondence to: jiali li, research institute for international and comparative education, shanghai normal university, shanghai 200234, china. e-mail: eduhappycharlie@163.com. funding: the national natural science foundation project "family capital, shadow education and social reproduction" (nsfc, 71774112). conflict of interests: none. li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 412 introduction hadow education, which is also called private tutoring, has been becoming of great popularity in china, especially in developed regions, such as beijing, shanghai, and guangdong. in 2014, 48.9%-58.1% of elementary students and 66.8%-74.4% of middle school students received private tutoring in shanghai (zhang & bray, 2016). in beijing, 60.5% of elementary students and 58.4% of middle school students attended private tutoring in 2015 (lu, 2016). early in 2012, the participation rate of tutoring in guangzhou ranged from 51.7% to 73.1%. with the global expansion of private tutoring, a growing number of studies explored the factors underlying the demand for private tutoring. macro-factors, such as culture, education competition, and development of economic, have significant impact on the demand of tutoring. for example, confucianism, one of the cultural factors, places value on education and instills a hard work ethic on children, is often mentioned as the “soil” (driver) for private tutoring (zhu, 2013). the high-stakes examination exhibits great demand for tutoring as well as other supplementary learning activities. the growing of family income increases the chance to purchase tutoring service for their children, and institutionalization of public schooling stimulates parents and students to seek extra learning activities (park et al., 2016). family background, gender, and ethnic minorities are also strongly associated with the development of tutoring. however, before embarking on the factors underlying the development of tutoring, it’s necessary to explore the definition and nature of shadow education. the term of shadow education refers to various type of tutoring, and the metaphor of “shadow” highlights the relationship between private tutoring and regular schooling. private tutoring exists only because of the existence of regular education though; its shape and size change following that of the regular education; the curriculum in the “shadow” ones mimics the curriculum inside the regular schools and changes accordingly (bray, 1999). the relationship means that the development of private tutoring can be explained by the public education, and it also reflects the development of education quality and equity. some debates exist about the relationship between regular education and shadow education. first, when the mainstream education system is perceived to be of poor quality, parents and students may be motivated to seek extra forms of academic learning in private market, so some studies have attempted to find a link between quality of public schooling and demand for private tutoring. popa and acedo (2006) noted that the backdrop of reduced funding for public schooling, increasingly poor population and teachers’ low salary were the reasons for the increasing of private tutoring in eastern europe. in korea, students from schools with higher student-teacher ratios tended to spend more time in private tutoring (kim & lee, 2010). similarly, dang (2007) found that as teacher quality increased in vietnam, the amount of money families spent on private tutoring decreased. this assumption postulates that the inadequacies of public education stimulate the high demand for private tutoring. given the limitations of public schooling in meeting individualized needs for learning, private tutoring may play a role as a substitutional institution. however, institutional perspective on educational devels li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 413 opment offers a counter-explanation for the relationship between schooling quality and the demand for shadow education. baker and letendre (2005) argued that growing demand for private tutoring reflected the institutionalization of public schooling. as the demand for educational opportunity and quality increases across social classes within and between countries, middle-class parents begin to seek private sources of additional learning for their children, because it becomes more difficult for them to influence regular schooling processes to maintain their children’s advantage. for example, during the years of 2003 to 2010, the participation rate of private tutoring was much higher in urban areas and in high-quality schools in china (xue & ding, 2009; tseng, et al., 2010). from this perspective, growing demand for shadow education is complementary to the regular education, which is supported by the theory of supply and demand as well as the theory of effectively maintained inequality (emi). based on the microeconomic theory of supply and demand, the demand for private tutoring depends on the quantity and quality of public education. when the quantity of public education cannot meet the demand of all the families, the families with high demand will take advantage of family capital to obtain more and better public education. while, when the supply of public schooling increases, the families with low demand can also receive regular education, the high-demand families will seek out-ofschool activities to keep their advantage to access to higher education (dang & rogers, 2008). xue (2015) employed emi to indicate the relationship between regular education and shadow education, and they mentioned that when compulsory education basically universal has not been achieved, the core of education competitive is the access chance to regular education for students from different social classes. when the compulsory education basically universal is completed, the core of education competitive is the quality of school education. when the government takes measures to decrease the gap of educational quality between urban and rural areas, and between different schools, the core of education competitive will shift from educational quality to shadow education. thus, more empirical study is in need to verify whether the demand for shadow education is driven by the quality of public education. is growing demand for shadow education due to the poor quality of school education, being substitutional to regular education, or due to the high quality of public schooling, being supplementary to regular education? although previous studies indicated that students from better schools are more likely to receive private tutoring (xue, 2009; tseng et al., 2006), the dataset of these two studies were collected from urban cities in 2004 and 2009, when the compulsory education has not been completed. in order to explore the relationship between shadow education and regular school education, this study applies two-level bernoulli model to estimate the school-level determinants of private tutoring by analyzing the data of pisa 2015 of four regions of china including beijing, shanghai, jiangsu, and guangdong. methods li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 414 sample this study uses the data of the pisa 2015 of four regions (beijing-shanghai-jiangsuguangdong). pisa program has been sponsored by the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) every three years since 2000. it applied two-stage stratified sampling to randomly select 9,841 students of 286 schools in the four regions, and the weighted sample covered 96% of all the 15-year-old students. apart from the international assessment of mathematics, reading, and science, and the survey also collected extensive background information of teachers and schools. variables previous empirical studies have found that students’ family background, demographic and academic ability are related to their participation in private tutoring (bray, et al., 2014; choi & park, 2016; li & hu, 2017), and this study will control these factors to estimate the impact of school-level factors on students’ probability of receiving private tutoring. education quality will be measured from three dimensions, i.e., education input, education process and education output. items measuring education input and education process are usually taken as independent variables, while items measuring education output are used to be dependent variables (hanushek, 1986). education input variables include education resources, quality of teachers, and quality of students (shavelson & baxter, 1992). education resources include a questionnaire with 8 items about school resources, the school principals’ perceptions of potential factors hindering the provision of instruction at school. the quality of teachers includes the index on staff shortage, which is derived from 4 items, as well as the proportion of teachers with bachelor or master degree. the quality of students is measured by the average escs of students’ family background. education equity, which is called quality of education opportunity, emphasizes that students from different escs background should have equal access to education (coleman, 1966). in china, educational equity is also called “education balance”, measured by three disparities, i.e., urban-rural disparity, region disparity and individual disparity (wu, 2010). this study will analyze the relationship between education quality and shadow education by exploring the urban-rural disparity and schooling disparity in receiving tutoring. for a more detailed description of the variables, refer to table 1. data analysis a two-level bernoulli model that is also called two-level hierarchical generalized linear model (hglm) was used to estimate the effects of various studentand school-level variables on students’ participation in private tutoring. the two-level bernoulli model was used because student-level variables nested in the school-level, and the dependent variable is a dummy variable indicating whether or not the student participates in private tutoring. the level-1 and level-2 models are as follows: li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 415 level-1 model: level-2 model: where xi is a vector of level-1 control variables, βij refers to regression coefficient of level-1, εij is the error term for level-1; kj is a vector of level-2 control variables, γ0s refers to regression coefficient of level-2, μ0j is the error term for level-2. (only intercept term is random, and the coefficients of level-2 are fixed) results descriptive statistics table 2 shows the results of the descriptive statistics. in general, the participation rate of science, mathematics and reading tutoring is 58.7%, 74%, and 63.4%, respectively in the four regions. the academic achievement of students from cities, high quality schools and high escs families is better than that of the students from villages, low quality schools, and low escs families. but the scale of tutoring is larger in villages, low quality schools, and low escs families than in their counterparts. comparing with the high school students, middle school students received more tutoring, but the academic achievement of high school students is much higher than middle school students. there are significant intergroup disparities in the distribution of participation in private tutoring and students’ performance regarding urban-rural areas, institutional, family backgrounds, and individual ability. the results, that the participation rate of private tutoring in villages is much higher than that in towns and cities, and the lowest escs families have the highest participation rates, are totally different from the results of xue’s report, from which the participation rate of tutoring is much higher in undeveloped county-level towns, poor quality schools than that in capital cities, high quality schools in 2009. the results based on pisa2015 indicated that the prevalence of tutoring might gradually transfer from urban areas to rural areas, and the tutoring market has also begun to attract students from poor families. due to the availability of data, most of previous studies mainly focused on the prevalence of tutoring, as well as the determinants and impacts of tutoring, few studies explored what kind of tutors the students preferred. our study estimates the selection and distribution of tutors to explain the relationship between school education and shadow education. table 3 indicates that regular teachers are most frequently used tutors, with over 50% of students indicated tutoring by their own teachers. around 29% li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 416 table 1. variable descriptions. variable variable descriptions dependent variable private tutoring 0=no, 1=yes; three subjects: science, mathematics, reading. independent variables student-level female 0=male, 1=female. study program 0=middle school, 1=high school. students’ ability the mean score of science, mathematics, and reading. students’ educational expectation 1= middle school, 2=two-year high school, 3= high school, 4=vocational high school, 5=three-year college, 6=four-year college and above. family economic, social and cultural status (escs) parents’ highest education level, parents’ highest occupation status, and home possessions compute the index of family escs. more the scores are, higher the family escs status is. school-level school location a village, hamlet or rural area (fewer than 3000 people)(reference group), a small town (3,000 to about 15,000 people), a town (15,000 to about 100,000 people),a city (100,000 to about 1,000,000 people), a large city (with over 1,000,000 people). quality of education resources the shortage of school education resources is scaled using four items: a lack of educational material (e.g. textbooks, it equipment, library or laboratory material), inadequate or poor quality educational material (e.g. textbooks, it equipment, library or laboratory material), a lack of physical infrastructure (e.g. building, grounds, heating/cooling, lighting and acoustic systems), inadequate or poor quality physical infrastructure (e.g. building, grounds, heating/cooling, lighting and acoustic systems). more the scores are, lower quality of the schooling resources is. quality of teachers (1) staff shortage is derived from four items: a lack of teaching staff, inadequate or poorly qualified teaching staff, and a lack of assisting staff, inadequate or poorly qualified assisting staff. more the scores are, lower quality of teachers is. (2) the proportion of teachers with bachelor qualification (proat5ab), the proportion of teachers with master qualification (proat5am), the proportion of fully certified teachers (proatce). quality of students the mean scores of students’ family escs aggregated in school level. more the scores are, higher the family escs status of school is. note: 1. pisa 2015, additional instruction is translated to 课外辅导 in the mainland of china, which is also called 课外补习. 2. family economic, social and cultural status is escs. 40% of the students choose specialized tutors working for a business or organization. non-specialized tutors are the least used. the academic achievement of the students choosing specialized tutors is the highest, whereas the students choosing nonspecialized tutors are the lowest. to explain why the participation rate of tutoring in village and small town is much higher than that of in city, we explored whether the choice of tutors varies across the groups of students. the choice of tutors varies significantly across students’ school and familybackgrounds. regular teachers are mostly used tutors for the students from village schools, but low quality schools with smallest number of teachers with master qualification and lowest escs families. although special tutors working for a business li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 417 table 2. the distribution of private tutoring in the four regions. science mathematics reading % mean scores % mean scores % mean scores total sample 58.7 518 74.0 531 63.4 494 school-level regions a village 65.0 488 80.3 506 74.4 466 a small town 61.6 495 76.9 509 70.2 471 a town 59.2 527 74.7 541 66.0 502 a city 52.0 544 65.0 555 56.0 524 a large city 55.0 587 71.2 593 48.4 566 x 2 =54.1 p<0.001 f =392.8 p<0.001 x 2 =88.4 p<0.001 f =307.6 p<0.001 x 2 =304.7 p<0.001 f =379.5 p<0.001 the proportion of teachers with master qualification the lowest 1/4 62.4 469 75.6 483 73.2 441 the lower 1/4 57.7 505 72.2 517 65.6 4801 the upper 1/4 56.4 528 73.7 539 61.9 501 the top 1/4 58.3 561 74.4 572 52.0 541 x 2 =16.4 p<0.001 f =598.2 p<0.001 x 2 =6.9 p<0.1 f =541.2 p<0.001 x 2 =205.1 p<0.001 f =657.8 p<0.001 student-level escs the lowest 1/4 62.4 475 75.6 488 73.2 444 the lower 1/4 57.7 516 72.2 530 65.6 496 the upper 1/4 56.4 534 73.7 547 61.9 515 the top 1/4 58.3 589 74.4 597 52.0 567 x 2 =16.4 p<0.001 f =674.5 p<0.001 x 2 =6.9 p<0.1 f =575.4 p<0.001 x 2 =205.1 p<0.001 f =714.0 p<0.001 study program middle school 64.4 498 79.6 510 71.3 473 high school 51.0 567 66.4 579 52.4 547 x 2 =144.2 p<0.001 t =-36.5 p<0.001 x 2 =189.4 p<0.001 t =-36.6 p<0.001 x 2 =309.1 p<0.001 t =-37.3 p<0.001 are the mostly used for the students from lager cities, high quality schools with largest number of teachers with master qualification and highest escs families. although more and more disadvantage students start to access to tutoring market, the quality of tutoring they receive might be not as good as the advantage students. we can also spec li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 418 table 3. type of tutors used by the students receiving tutoring. science mathematics reading % mean scores % mean scores % mean scores 1. one of my regular teachers 53.4 496 52.3 510 56.4 468 2. other regular teachers in school 36.7 505 33.2 515 29.6 479 3. specialized tutors works for a business or organization. 39.9 510 34.4 524 29.6 486 4. non-specialized tutors 16.2 470 13.6 488 14.4 439 note: this is a multiple-choice question. 1. the teacher is one of my regular teachers in this year’s school courses; 2. the teacher regularly teaches students my age in school but is not my teacher in any of my regular school courses; 3. the teacher mainly works for a business or organization specialized in additional instruction; 4. the teacher is not specialized teaching personnel (e.g. a student). table 4. type of tutors used across groups of students. science mathematics reading 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 region a village 58.9 37.0 41.5 19.3 55.1 32.2 37.0 17.3 57.9 30.3 33.2 15.6 a small town 61.2 36.9 37.5 17.8 59.1 33.3 31.9 14.7 62.5 30.8 29.6 16.1 a town 56.6 36.5 34.6 16.2 58.2 31.2 29.9 13.2 59.3 27.9 25.6 14.2 a city 51.6 35.1 36.6 15.9 53.0 31.6 31.3 14.2 53.5 27.4 26.6 14.8 a large city 36.1 37.1 48.7 11.8 34.7 36.0 42.7 9.4 40.9 29.0 34.0 9.1 the proportion of teachers with master qualification low 1/3 62.3 38.6 37.5 20.3 61.7 32.7 31.1 17.1 61.9 31.6 29.7 16.8 middle 1/3 52.8 35.9 37.6 14.8 53.0 33.2 34.1 13.2 57.0 28.7 28.3 14.0 top 1/3 43.2 35.6 45.8 12.8 40.4 34.0 39.0 10.3 47.2 27.8 31.5 11.4 escs the lowest 1/4 64.9 33.7 33.3 21.8 63.5 31.5 27.6 19.0 63.5 29.8 27.0 18.4 the lower 1/4 55.0 37.1 36.5 16.6 57.1 30.5 32.1 13.7 59.2 28.5 26.2 14.7 the upper 1/4 53.9 37.5 40.0 15.1 50.8 33.4 36.4 11.7 55.2 30.4 32.5 12.8 the top 1/4 39.4 38.8 50.4 11.1 37.9 37.3 41.7 10.2 43.8 29.6 34.4 10.1 note: 1= one of my regular teachers; 2=other regular teachers in school; 3=specialized tutors working for a business or organization; 4=non-specialized tutors. data are percentages. li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 419 ulate that most of regular teachers still provide paid tutoring, especially in village and small town (table 4). the determinants of private tutoring given participation rate of private tutoring varies across groups of students, we analyzed the determinants of receiving private tutoring by employing a two-level bernoulli model. table 5 displays the results. for the individual student-level factors, students’ gender, education expectation, and ability, are significantly related to the probability of receiving private tutoring. female students are more likely to receive science and reading tutoring than male students. education expectation can significantly positively predict the probability of receiving science and mathematics tutoring. students’ academic achievement has significantly negatively associated with the demand of private tutoring, which means chinese students may seek tutoring for remedial purposes. it is obvious that students from prosperous families (high escs) have more chance to receive private tutoring than those from low economical families (low escs). for the school-level factors, we constructed three models to estimate the impact of schooling quality on private tutoring. in model 1, we explored the relationship between the locations of schools with the demand of tutoring. in model 2, we estimated the impact of education resources and teachers’ quality on the demand of tutoring. in model 3, we discussed whether the quality of students can predict the probability of receiving tutoring. the results showed that: (1) students from village schools are more likely to receive private tutoring than students from (large) city schools, and the quality of education resources, teachers, and students drives this result. with that when we put the variables of the quality of education resources, teachers, and students into the model 3, students from large city schools become less probability to receive private tutoring than students from village schools. (2) the quality of school teachers negatively predicts the possibility of receiving tutoring. the lower proportion of teachers with master qualification the schools have, the students are more likely to receive science, mathmatics and reading tutoring. students from schools with lower proportion of fully certified teachers have more possibility to take reading tutoring. the urban-rural disparity does appear to affect the likelihood of participating in private tutoring, and students of village schools are more likely to receive private tutoring. the shortage of high-quality teachers in the village schools stimulates parents to purchase tutoring service to substitute for regular school education. conclusion and discussion this study applies two-level bernoulli model to estimate the school-level determinants of private tutoring by analyzing the data of pisa 2015 conducting in four regions of china (beijing, shanghai, jiangsu and guangdong). the major findings are summarized below: li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 420 table 5. results of the two-level bernoulli model. science mathematics reading m1 m2 m3 m1 m2 m3 m1 m2 m3 fixed effects small town 0.04 (0.34) 0.01 (0.27) -0.18 (0.20) 0.08 (0.27) 0.12 (0.23) 0.10 (0.24) -0.09 (0.39) 0.01 (0.32) 0.08 (0.29) town -0.17 (0.36) -0.24 (0.32) -0.51 † (0.21) -0.19 (0.28) -0.25 (0.26) -0.28 (0.29) -0.37 (0.41) -0.27 (0.37) -0.09 (0.35) city -0.46 (0.34) -0.56 † (0.28) -0.53 † (0.24) -0.67 † (0.27) -0.71 ‡ (0.23) -0.75 ‡ (0.26) -0.81 † (0.41) -0.75 † (0.32) -0.56 * (0.32) large city -0.44 (0.33) -0.26 (0.29) -0.41 * (0.22) -0.30 (0.26) -0.11 (0.25) -0.18 (0.29) -1.10 ‡ (0.39) -0.66 † (0.33) -0.31 (0.36) resources shortage 0.08 (0.08) 0.09 (0.08) 0.13 (0.07) 0.13 * (0.07) 0.04 (0.09) 0.07 (0.08) staff shortage -0.08 (0.07) -0.09 (0.07) -0.10 (0.06) -0.09 (0.07) -0.03 (0.07) -0.07 (0.06) proat5ab 0.35 (0.37) 0.49 (0.41) 0.36 (0.38) 0.28 (0.41) -0.06 (0.44) 0.36 (0.46) proat5 am -2.38 ‡ (0.65) -1.75 † (0.81) -1.73 ‡ (0.61) -2.13 ‡ (0.76) -3.88 ‡ (0.72) -1.88 † (0.83) proatce -2.17 (1.41) -2.08 (1.39) -1.36 (1.22) -1.42 (1.22) -2.09 * (1.15) -1.81 * (1.04) average escs -0.14 (0.12) 0.09 (0.11) 0.45 ‡ (0.03) high school 0.01 (0.16) 0.01 (0.16) 0.01 (0.16) -0.33 * (0.19) -0.33 * (0.19) -0.33 * (0.19) -0.20 (0.18) -0.21 (0.18) -0.21 (0.18) girls -0.21 ‡ (0.07) -0.21 ‡ (0.08) -0.21 ‡ (0.08) -0.06 (0.08) -0.06 (0.08) -0.06 (0.08) -0.32 ‡ (0.08) -0.33 ‡ (0.08) -0.33 ‡ (0.08) ability -0.67 ‡ (0.07) -0.68 ‡ (0.07) -0.68 ‡ (0.07) -0.82 ‡ (0.07) -0.82 ‡ (0.07) -0.82 ‡ (0.07) -0.89 ‡ (0.07) -0.91 ‡ (0.07) -0.91 ‡ (0.07) education expectation 0.09 ‡ (0.03) 0.10 ‡ (0.03) 0.10 ‡ (0.03) 0.12 ‡ ( 0.03) 0.12 ‡ ( 0.03) 0.12 ‡ (0.03) 0.04 (0.03) 0.05 (0.03) 0.05 (0.03) escs 0.14 ‡ (0.05) 0.14 ‡ (0.05) 0.14 ‡ (0.05) 0.22 ‡ (0.05) 0.22 ‡ (0.05) 0.22 ‡ (0.05) 0.09 † (0.04) 0.09 † (0.04) 0.09 † (0.04) intercept 0.53 ‡ (0.07) 0.50 ‡ (0.06) 0.48 ‡ (0.06) 1.22 ‡ (0.06) 1.19 ‡ (0.06) 1.21 ‡ (0.06) 0.81 ‡ (0.08) 0.75 ‡ (0.06) 0.70 ‡ (0.06) random effects variance component 0.37 0.34 0.34 0.35 0.33 0.33 0.53 0.46 0.41 x 2 847.3 ‡ 793.4 ‡ 787.5 ‡ 750.6 ‡ 704.1 ‡ 702.8 ‡ 1030.0 ‡ 906.8 ‡ 838.4 ‡ note: standard error of mean in parentheses; *<0.1, †<0.05, ‡<0.01. li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 421 similar to the previous studies (zhang & bray, 2016; lu, 2016; wu, 2014), shadow education is prevalent in developed areas of china. the four regions we studied have a large scale of private tutoring, and the participation rate of private tutoring on science, mathematics and chinese is 58.7%, 74.0%, 63.4%, respectively. the distribution of demand for private tutoring in the four regions of china has the following characteristics: village-city gap, interschool disparity, and regular teachers as paid tutors. in 2015, students from village schools with low quality are more likely to receive private tutoring than the students from city schools that have high quality. this finding is different from the previous studies, for example, according to lei (2005), both the participation rates of private tutoring and tutoring expenditure in urban areas are much higher than that in rural areas in beijing and jiangsu. the following discussion is mainly concerned with the reason why the private tutoring is more prevalence in village than in city in 2015. first of all, when the goal in the effort to make nine-year compulsory education basically universal has been attained, the demand for school education increases in undeveloped areas, but the poor quality of regular education cannot meet students’ demand, so parents have to send their children to tutoring centers. second, the results showed that regular school teachers are mostly used tutors for the disadvantage students, while specialized tutors are most likely used for the advantage students. perhaps regular teachers might be the best choice for disadvantage students in villages and small towns, where do not have any specialized tutoring organizations, because the fee is low and it’s convenient to study in teachers’ home. however, it is the low quality of public schools in villages and ineffective teaching practices in school education stimulates parents seeking private tutoring service as a “substitution” for regular school education. in fact, the phenomenon of regular teachers as paid tutors is common in china, especially in villages and small towns. although school teachers are strictly prohibited from providing tutoring in china, it seems that this official policy has not been effectively implemented. tutoring provided by mainstream teachers is a double-edged sword, the dark side is that we cannot prohibit the school teachers from reducing the coverage of regular lessons or revealing examination answers in tutoring class to foster demand for tutoring. what’s worse, teachers might trade off their own students with other teachers to avoid being penalized by the policy. the village-city gap and interschool disparity on the quality of regular education have significant association with the prevalence of shadow education. the results indicated that students from public schools in villages have more probability to receive private tutoring and poor quality of teachers in school lead to high demand of private tutoring in 2015. during the past ten years, the scale of shadow education in villages began to expand. we attempt to explain this change based on the theory of supply and demand: when compulsory education basically universally has not been attained, shadow education is more common in city. because the quantity of public education cannot meet the demand of disadvantage families in village, they have to fight for more public education. however, advantage families in city who enjoy the quantity and quality of public education purchased tutoring service as a “complementation” to make sure they will success in education competition. when compulsory education basically universalli. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 422 ly has been completed, shadow education becomes more popular in village and small town. for the quality of education cannot meet the demand of disadvantage families in village and small town, they have to purchase tutoring service as a “substitution” to obtain more entrance opportunity. although families in large cities still purchase tutoring service to keep their advantage in university opportunities, the participation rate of private tutoring increased slower than that in village and small town because the quality and equity of public education has been further developed in these areas. in overall, shadow education plays both substitutional and complementary role in school education, that the growth of shadow education is in accompany with the low quality of school education in village and small town, where families purchase shadow education as a “substitution” to obtain more entrance opportunity when the quality of school education cannot meet their demand. the growth of shadow education develops with the high quality of school education in city, where families purchase shadow education as a “complementation” to make sure they keep their advantage in education competition. however, shadow education is mostly provided by regular teachers of public schools in village and small town, and in city, most of the students choose specialized tutors. it’s necessary to re-examine the problem of school education according to the development of shadow education. first, there is still urban-rural disparity in educational quality. to decrease the participation probability of private tutoring, the government should increase teacher quality of regular education, with the increasing of the quality of education resources and improving of the infrastructure building. second, the phenomenon of regular teachers as tutors is common, especially in undeveloped areas, such as villages and small towns. “why do school teachers provide paid tutoring? do the students participate in tutoring provided by teachers on their own? are there any “corruption” behavior for school teachers to attract more students to participate in their tutoring class?” schools and educational institution should pay more attention to these problems. third, no matter the “substitutional” role of shadow education in village, or the “complementary” role in city, shadow education seems to replicate educational inequality outside school, which has negative impact on the quality and equity of regular education. of course, it remains to be verified whether the results of the relationship between regular education and shadow education based on the data of these four regions are applicable to other provinces and cities. li. relationship between school education and shadow education vol.4, no. 1, 2020 423 references baker, d., letendre, g. k. 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(2013) shadow education cultural capital theory under globalization of education. tsinghua j edu, 4:51-55. received: 22 october 2019 revised: 11 december 2019 accepted: 20 december 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in beijing social sciences, 2019; 5: 57-68. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 李佳丽. “替代”还是“补充”: 从影子教育发展审视学校教育质量-基于 pisa2015 中国四省市 数据的分析. 北京社会科学, 2019; 5: 57-68. article-jialili-bece_title_30jan2020 article-jialili-bece_maintext30jan2020 the effect of preschool education on noncognitive skills of middle school students: empirical study based on ceps xin gong, zhenyi li central china normal university, wuhan, china abstract. preschool education has been being seen as a crucial factor of individual cognitive skills, but it is yet clear regarding its effect on children’s non-cognitive skills. apart from cognitive skills, the “capabilities” in the human capital model should also include non-cognitive skills. using the baseline data of the “china education panel survey”, this study explored the influence of preschool education experience on the non-cognitive skills of middle school students by using the method of propensity score matching. the results showed that children’s chances of receiving preschool education has been affected by factors like the health status of the children before schooling, family economic status, and parents’ education level. more importantly, preschool education had a statistically significant positive impact on the students’ ability of curiosity, acceptance of new things and self-discipline, and showed a negative impact on negative emotionality. best evid chin edu 2019; 3(1):287-303. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1070 keywords: preschool education; middle school students; non-cognitive skills; propensity score matching correspondence to: xin gong, college of education, central china normal university, wuhan, china, e-mail: gongxin@mail.ccnu.edu.cn. about the author zhenyi li, college of education, central china normal university, wuhan, china, e-mail: lizhenyi0206@163.com. conflict of interests: none. gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 288 research background and problem reschool education, is of great significance to children’s physical and mental health, habit formation and intellectual development, and has a foundational role in individual’s lifelong development. in recent years, more and more attention has been paid to preschool education in china, and the gross enrollment rate of preschool education has increased from 35.9% in 2001 to 77.4% in 2016. the rapid progress of preschool education, on the one hand, benefits from the rapid growth of the social economy; on the other hand, the increasing realization of the economic and noneconomic value of preschool education for children’s overall growth. james j. heckman, a nobel laureate in economy, has found that early childhood development interventions before formal elementary school are the highest-reward form of human capital investment, which is worth more than later investments in school education and on-thejob training (heckman, 2006), and the economic benefits of universal preschool education is far greater than the traditional economic plan (qiu & liu, 2011). in terms of the specific impact of preschool education on children’s development, it mainly focuses on the following two aspects: cognitive ability including in language, mathematics, and academic achievement; and non-cognitive ability such as sociability, self-confidence, motivation, etc. under the traditional human capital model, the word “ability” is always equated with cognitive ability, while the non-cognitive ability is usually ignored. however, in empirical studies, the cognitive ability from the controlled individuals only cannot explain the whole variety of individual outcomes. therefore, bowles proposed that “ability” in the human capital model should not be limited to “cognitive ability”, but should also include “non-cognitive ability” (bowles & osborne, 2001). in recent decades, supporters of the new human capital theory headed by heckman divided the “ability” in human capital into two parts: cognitive and non-cognitive abilities, emphasizing the important role of non-cognitive ability that is independent from cognitive ability (heckman, 2007). in studies over the past decade on non-cognitive ability, most of them have confirmed the important role of non-cognitive ability in individual’s academic performance and income (eren & ozbeklik, 2013; heckman & rubinstein, 2001; heineck & anger, 2010; scick & steckel, 2015). li et al. (2017) found that non-cognitive ability has a significant positive impact on students’ academic performance. le et al. (2017) used the data of the “chinese family panel survey” in 2012 and 2014, and according to “the big five-factor model of personalities”, showed that the non-cognitive ability has a substantial effect on the income of laborers, and its contribution was even higher than that of the core variable concerned by traditional human capitaleducation years. huang and xie (2017) found an explanatory effect of the non-cognitive ability on labor income difference that is independent from cognitive ability. compared with cognitive ability, the non-cognitive ability has a greater impact on workers’ income (yu et al., 2017). the non-cognitive ability has also been found to improve individual’s happiness and was p gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 289 more conducive to a healthy and long life (friedman et al., 2010; kubzansky et al., 2009). in addition to the “instrumental” value of non-cognitive ability such as on an individual’s academic performance, income, and health, researchers start to realize its own value of the non-cognitive ability. for example, from an emotional perspective, if an individual rarely shows negative emotionality, then its immediate happiness will be relatively higher indicating the intrinsic value of the non-cognitive ability. in recent years, attention has been paid to the key competencies of students in china, and formulated the overall framework of “key competencies of chinese students’ development”, emphasizing on the cultivation of comprehensive quality of students’ both cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. with the attention paid to the non-cognitive ability, more discussion was raised on the cultivation of non-cognitive ability and its potential influence. studies showed that the formation of non-cognitive ability needs several periods within a long developing period (almlund et al., 2011), and the important period for the non-cognitive ability acquisition is the early childhood (coneus & laucht, 2014; heckman, 2006). moreover, abilities formed in different stages were closely related each other, and the development of one skill would help to acquire other skills during the next period (borghans et al., 2008). preschool stage is a sensitive period essential to cultivate children’s initiative, good personality, sense of responsibility, self-esteem, and self-control (zhu, 2003; shen, 1997), and to develop qualities such as curiosity, thirst for knowledge, imagination, and sociability as well (pang et al., 2003). in particular, various game activities during the preschool period had an important impact on the cultivation of the non-intellectual abilities (shen, 1997). duncan et al. (2007) found in their empirical study that stable emotional characteristics cultivated in the early stage contribute to the development of children’s exploration ability later. a large number of empirical studies have confirmed that preschool education has a positive impact on the development of children’s cognitive and non-cognitive abilities (social skills, attention, etc.) (nores & barnett, 2010). the earlier the intervention would, the more beneficial would follow to the formation of both the cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. besides, families and preschoolers might be more motivated to focus on the cognitive and non-cognitive development as it is too early to consider the competitive college entrance test during the preschool period. based on the analysis and consideration above regarding the education reality in china, we proposed that the acquisition of preschool education may possess an important role in the development of children’s non-cognitive abilities. however, it is yet known about the clear relationship between preschool education and the non-cognitive ability. in view of this, this study was designed to use the baseline data of china education panel survey (ceps) to observe the influence of preschool education on the development of the non-cognitive abilities in middle school students’ via propensity score matching method and, at the same time, to investigate the factors that affect the preschool education opportunities. as the prominent role of non-cognitive ability is increasingly recognized, it is particularly pivotal to explore the role of preschool education in developing the non-cognitive ability. first, it is important for public education policy makers in establishing capital investment, implementation and improvement of gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 290 the preschool education plan, popularization of preschool education, and promotion of human capital accumulation; second, it is crucial to provide with empirical evidence to the role of preschool education in the development of students’ non-cognitive ability. literature review accumulating data have showed the contributing effects of preschool education on both cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. at the same time, some pieces of evidence have confirmed the significant role of preschool education in the improvement of children’s non-cognitive ability. reynolds (1995) investigated the impact of the child-parent center educational program on children’s cognitive and social development, and found that students in grades one to six who had received one or two years of preschool education had 0.34 standard difference higher in cognitive and social development than those who had not received the preschool education. adaptability is another important characteristic for those who receive preschool education. sammons (2010) found that preschool education has a long-term impact on children’s “hyperactivity”, “self-discipline” and “anti-social” behaviors. furthermore, sammons et al. (2014) used data from the uk and found that high-quality preschools (v.s. low-quality ones) had a significant impact on the non-cognitive ability (such as self-discipline) of 16-year-olds. andersson et al. (1992) obtained similar results in a study carried out in sweden that students who participated in the public childcare system were more independent and confident. gormely et al. (2011) used the fixed effects regressions with propensity score matching examined the effect of the early childhood education on children’s social-emotional outcomes in tulsa, oklahoma, and found that children participated in early childhood education programs showed lower timidity and higher concentration, and this effect was more significant on male children who came from the low-income families. heckman (2006) indicated that the reason why the perry preschool program in the united states could effectively improve the future success of participants was majorly due to its role in improving the non-cognitive ability. chetty et al. (2010) found that high-quality education in k grade in the united states, had a significant impact on students’ non-cognitive abilities such as autonomy and effort in the grades of 4 and 8, and could reduce students’ destructive behaviors. however, in china, few studies did the same observation. several studies focused on the impact of preschool education on children’s cognitive development, but most of them were small sample and did not examine the long-term impact. peng et al. (2011) investigated 182 children from three rural elementary schools in sichuan province and found that children with kindergarten learning were more likely to be praised by their peers and less likely to be downgraded than the comparisons. rao et al. (2012) observed 370 rural children in guizhou province and showed that children who had attended kindergarten or preschool classes were significantly better than those who had not in reading and mathematics. liu et al. (2013) studied 1,360 children in beijing and shanxi province and found that one-year preschool education had a significant effect on the mathematical learning and language development, reaching 0.61 and 0.33 standard deviations, respectively. li et al. (2016) investigated the influence of preschool educagong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 291 tion on children’s language, mathematics, and social cognition ability and found a significant relation between them. chen and liu (2017) used a sample of 5,177 students from the program of international student assessment (pisa) shanghai 2012 data and propensity score matching and ols estimation methods, they found that preschool education had a significant positive impact on the mathematics, reading and scientific literacy for 15-year-old students, and the academic achievements in those who received more than one-year preschool education were higher than those who received only oneyear preschool education. gong et al. (2016) used assessed the long-term impact of preschool education on the development of rural children with the age over 10 on the basis of the “chinese family panel survey” (cfps) data through fixed-effects model, ols estimation method, and propensity score matching, and found that preschool education had a substantial impact on the social and emotional skills, which were displayed as preschool attendees in a rural area tended to have 1.32–1.53 more friends and an 11%17% higher chance to be a school leader than the non-attendees. the above-mentioned studies focused on the influence of preschool education on students’ cognitive abilities such as mathematics, language, and reading, but rarely explored its effect on the non-cognitive ability. however, the impact of preschool education on children’s development is a multi-dimensional, multi-level and multi-faceted complex system, and researchers and decision-makers should pay more attention to its impact on children’s non-cognitive development. this study evaluated the effect of preschool education from a new perspective and empirically tested the influence of preschool education on the development of the non-cognitive ability of middle school students with a nationwide sample. data this study used data from the china education panel study (ceps) baseline survey for the 2013-2014 academic year. the survey was designed and implemented by the national survey research center at renmin university of china. the middle school (7th graders) and high school (9th graders) students were the objects, and multi-stage probability proportional to size (pps) sampling method was used. after four sampling stages, the county (district), school, class, student/parent/teacher/main subject teacher/school leadership and other four sampling units were extracted. in the baseline survey, a total of 28 counties, 4 schools from each county, and 4 classes from each school were selected, and a total of 19,487 seventhand ninth-graders from 112 schools and 438 classes were sampled including 18,034 sample booklets with complete information on the preschool experience. variables outcome variables the outcome variable of this study was the non-cognitive ability. at present, there is no unified standard for the definition and measurement of non-cognitive ability. it is generally believed that the non-cognitive ability is not a representative of a single ability, gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 292 but a combination of multiple abilities. in western, the concept of “non-cognitive skills” was defined as those that are different from calculation, reading or reciting and can be measured by personality traits. for example, curiosity, attention, grit, self-control, social-emotional ability, self-discipline, motivation, self-esteem, sociability, time preference and so on (borghans et al, 2008; duckworth & yeager, 2015; gutman & schoon, 2013). in china, yan (1988) divided “non-intelligence factors” into three levels: (1) in the broad sense, they refer to all psychological factors other than intelligence factors; (2) in the narrow sense, they mainly include motivation, interest, emotion, intention, character and other psychological factors; (3) specific non-intellectual factors, including achievement motivation, thirst for knowledge, and enthusiasm for learning; self-esteem, self-confidence, and competitiveness; sense of responsibility, obligation and honor; self-control, tenacity and independence. in the past two decades, the “big five personalities” measurement method developed by personality psychology has gradually been recognized and applied to measure the non-cognitive abilities that include extraversion, openness, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. since no uniform measurement index exists, empirical researchers often reconstruct the proxy index of the non-cognitive ability according to specific questionnaire index and the characteristics of the “big five personalities”. openness according to the four related questions in the questionnaire, they can express opinions clearly, respond quickly, learn new knowledge swiftly, and be curiosity about new things (1 = completely disagree to 4 = completely agree). through factor analysis, this study found that these four items naturally stayed together to form one factor value (α = 0.72). combined with the “big five grid” model, we define this factor value as “openness”, and set it up as a measure of non-cognitive ability to keep consistent with the method used by li et al. (2017). negative emotionality the ceps questionnaire asked students if they felt dispirited, depressed, unhappy, listless, or sad in the past seven days, using a five-point scoring system (1 = never to 5 = always) to measure the frequency of these feelings. factor analysis showed that these five measures had a high similarity and could be naturally aggregated into one factor value (α = 0.85). combined with the negative emotionality in the temperament type of children, we define this factor value as “negative emotionality”. the higher the factor score is, the stronger the negative emotionality would be. self-discipline according to the ceps questionnaire, whether students often skip classes or late, a factor value (α = 0.69) was obtained by factor analysis. referring to the research idea of cawley et al. (2001) that took truancy, lateness and other behaviors as proxy variables of “self-discipline”, our study reversed scores of the above-mentioned factor value (1 = gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 293 completely agree to 4 = completely disagree) and defined it as “self-discipline”. the higher the factor score is, the stronger the self-discipline would be. sociality we took the number of students’ self-reported good friends as a social indicator. in previous studies, the number of friends has been used as a proxy indicator of social communication skills. for example, gong et al. (2016) used “the number of good friends they have” and “whether they are class cadres” as proxy indicators of non-cognitive social skills. some western studies also took the number of good friends as the proxy variable of social communication (kingery et al., 2011; pettit et al., 2011). in addition, studies have shown that people who have more friends as childhood had better social and emotional well-being in adolescence and adulthood. kingery et al. (2011) found that students who had more friends showed reduced loneliness and increased selfesteem. wentzel et al. (2004) found a positive correlation between the number of friends and various adaptive indicators. above-mentioned studies indicated that the larger the number of friends, the stronger the transitional adaptability from one stage of development to the next. in addition, our study added a reflection of the quality of friends that was composed of friends’ academic performance, effort, educational expectations and discipline. 1 independent variables the key independent variable of our study is preschool education experience. the ceps questionnaire asks a student whether he or she has attended preschool or a one year preschool class before grade 1 after the age of 3, and we construct a binary variable (yes = 1, no = 0) based on the student’s answer whether he or she has received preschool education (79.8%). 2 control variables on the basis of the literature reviewed above, this study controlled for the other factors that may affect both preschool education acquisition and the non-cognitive ability of middle school students, including:  at the personal level, gender (female = 1, male = 0) and grade are used (nine grade = 1, grade 7 = 0), nationality (han = 1, minority = 0), household registration (agricultural as the reference), one-child (one-child = 1, non-only child = 0), birth weight (low birth weight or birth weight less than 2.5 kg = 1, normal birth weight = 0), illness before elementary school (severe illness = 1, not severe = 0), and other variables.  at the family level, two variables are included: the years of education of the parent; the subjective evaluation of the family economic status before the children enters elementary school, including “family economic status is medium” and “family economic status is rich” two binary variables, taking “family economic status is difficult” as the reference. 3 gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 294  at the regional level. a region of the average level of teaching education to a certain extent reflects the local social and economic development. to observe the influence of regional social, economic and cultural level on preschool education and the development of the cognitive ability, we selected students in the county level with average education years as a regional social, economic and cultural development level proxy variable. 4 method first, we used descriptive statistical methods to analyze whether there were differences between students with or without preschool education in terms of individual characteristics and family background, so as to understand whether the basic characteristics of both groups matched. on this basis, the logit method was used to investigate the factors that affect the preschool attending. second, in order to accurately evaluate the influence of preschool education on children’s non-cognitive ability, we adopted the ols estimation and the propensity score matching (psm) methods. conventional ols estimation roughly assumes that the observed value of the treatment group is the influence after receiving preschool education, which will lead to biases of the estimation results. it is not a natural process if receive preschool education or not or how long preschool education lasts, but generally is influenced by factors such as students’ individual characteristics and family socioeconomic background. so it is impossible to observe the outcomes of the same individual in the two states of both preschool and non-preschool education at the same time. selective bias is a problem we need to take care of in order to accurately estimate the effect of preschool education on the non-cognitive ability. compared with ols, psm can match the background of both groups more effectively and reduce the selective bias. therefore, our study was based on the estimation of psm. psm was first proposed by rosenbaum and rubin, and has been increasingly recognized and widely used in recent years. the basic feature of psm is its good match of the control group with the treatment group to balance the data of the probability (propensity score). it degrades the multidimensional standard of both groups into one dimension to greatly improve the matching degree and guarantee the comparability of both groups, and to get a better estimation of the intervention effect of the treatment group. the net effect of preschool education on the non-cognitive ability of middle school students was recorded as average treatment effect on the treatment group (att) in the psm model, and the model was as follows, att = e {e [y1i y0i | di = 1, p (xi)]} where y1i and y0i represent the scores of the non-cognitive ability of individual student in preschool and non-preschool education, respectively. di is the processing variable, which represents the dummy variable of whether students receive preschool education. if student i receives preschool education, di = 1; otherwise, di = 0. p(xi) is the propensity score value, which represents the conditional probability of student i receiving pregong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 295 school education under the control of sample characteristic covariate x. psm is generally divided into four steps: (1) select appropriate covariates. based on the previous research experience, we selected a group of variables that have an influence on both preschool education participation and children’s non-cognitive abilities (see control variables above); (2), calculate propensity scores. the propensity score was calculated by logit regression; (3), match samples according to propensity scores. in this study, the nearest neighbor matching method is used, and the radius matching and kernel matching methods were used to test the robustness of the estimated results; (4) by comparing the estimation results of various matching methods, the net effect of preschool education on the non-cognitive ability of middle school students is obtained. results descriptive picture table 1 shows significant differences between preschool attendees and non-attendees in terms of individual and family background. specifically, among the samples receiving preschool education, non-agricultural households account for 43.5% of the total sample, which was significantly higher than the proportion of non-rural households in the group without preschool education (30.2%). in addition, compared with non-preschool attendees, the proportions of individuals with low birth weight and serious illness before elementary school were much lower in students who received preschool education, and the proportion of only children was higher. from the point of family economic background, the parents of preschool attendees have more years of education, with a difference of 1.27 years than the non-attendees, and the proportion of moderate and rich family in the preschool attendees was significantly higher than the comparisons. finally, there was a significant difference in the average length of education (~0.68 yrs). in sum, obvious difference exists in individual characteristics and family background between preschool attendees and non-attendees. factors affecting individual’s acceptance of preschool education on the basis of above-mentioned descriptive analysis, we found significant differences between the two groups in terms of individual characteristics and family background. in order to observe the factors that influence individual acceptance of preschool education, we used logit regression analysis method to analyze the specific factors affecting individual acceptance of preschool education, and the estimation results are shown in table 2. since most independent variables in the model are discrete variables, the table presents both odds ratio and the original non-standardized coefficient of the model. table 2 shows that factors such as gender, ethnic group, grade, individual health status, family economic status and years of education of parents all had significant influences on individual’s acceptance of preschool education. specifically, onlychild families were more likely (22.9%) to receive preschool education than non-only children. seventh-graders were 12%more likely than ninth-graders to receive preschool education, which may be related to the development of preschool education. students in gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 296 table 1. sample characteristics. variables overall sample preschool attendees preschool non-attendees t-test preschool attendance 0.798 1 0 female 0.485 0.490 0.470 0.020* han ethnicity 0.910 0.924 0.857 0.067*** grade 9 0.473 0.464 0.505 -0.041*** non-agricultural household 0.409 0.435 0.302 0.133*** low birth weight 0.322 0.295 0.433 -0.138*** had major illness before entering elementary school 0.091 0.083 0.126 -0.043*** the only child 0.434 0.468 0.300 0.168*** parent’s education 10.767 11.082 9.793 1.273*** family economy medium 0.731 0.749 0.652 0.097*** family economic affluence 0.056 0.060 0.041 0.019*** average number of years of education in the county 9.485 9.481 8.938 0.543*** note: *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001. the value in the table is the mean value of each variable. since most of the result variables are standardized factor score values, the mean value of the result variables is not shown here. poor physical condition before elementary school were significantly less likely (25.7%) to receive preschool education than those in good physical condition. in comparison, students came from families with economic difficulties had a 43.3% of preschool education acceptance, but those from family with good economic status had a 63.1% of the preschool education acceptance, this is mainly because of poor families are unable to afford the high cost of preschool education. in addition, the level of local education level had a statistically significant impact on students’ access to preschool education. therefore, the analysis confirmed that students in a better position were more likely to receive preschool education. moreover, the family’s economic status is the most significant factor influencing students to receive preschool education. influence of preschool education on non-cognitive ability of middle school students we first used the ols regression method to estimate whether preschool education had a significant impact on students’ non-cognitive ability after controlling other confounding factors. then, the psm method was used for further analysis. the results are shown in table 3. the psm results showed that a stable and significant relationship exists between preschool education and students’ non-cognitive abilities such as thinking openness, negative emotionality, and self-discipline and friend quality. after controlling the gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 297 table 2. influencing factors of preschool education: logit regression results. variables preschool attendance coef odds ratio female 0.082* 1.086 (0.039) grade 9 -0.128*** 0.880 (0.039) han ethnicity 0.195** 1.217 (0.065) non-agricultural household 0.033 1.034 (0.469) low birth weight -0.291*** 0.743 (0.041) had major illness before entering elementary school -0.131* 0.872 (0.062) the only child 0.206*** 1.229 (0.046) parent’s education 0.064*** 1.070 (0.012) family economy medium 0.355*** 1.433 (0.043) family economic affluence 0.487*** 1.631 (0.112) average number of years of education in the county 0.198*** 1.219 (0.017) n 18,034 note: *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001. personal and family factors, the thinking openness in students who had received preschool education were 0.04-0.05 standard deviations higher than those who had not received preschool education, that is, students who have received preschool education were better than those who had not received preschool education in terms of curiosity and ability to accept new things. regarding the negative emotionality, students who have received preschool education showed less negative emotions such as depression, sadness and unhappiness indicating that in terms of emotional regulation, students who had received preschool education were stronger than those who had not received preschool education. in addition, on self-discipline, students who had received preschool education rarely ran away from school and late when compared with those who had not received preschool education. finally, in terms of the quality of friends, students who had received preschool education showed better performance. among the friends they mentioned, most were students who learnt hard, achieved outstanding results and per gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 298 table 3. influence of preschool education on non-cognitive ability of students. outcome variable ols psm nearest neighborhood matching radius matching kernel matching openness 0.036** 0.042** 0.036** 0.045*** (0.015) (0.019) (0.017) (0.017) negative emotion -0.071*** -0.071*** -0.073*** -0.071*** (0.017) (0.022) (0.020) (0.019) self-discipline 0.028* 0.011 0.032* 0.034* (0.014) (0.019) (0.017) (0.017) number of good friends 0.547 + 0.278 0.149 0.198 (0.279) (0.344) (0.307) (0.301) quality of friends 0.151*** 0.176*** 0.197*** 0.206*** (0.037) (0.052) (0.047) (0.046) note: + p<0.1, *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001. other control variables are included in both ols and psm estimates. in psm estimation, the nearest neighbor matching (k=4), radius matching (caliper= 0.01), kernel matching and other matching methods were adopted. the standardized mean differences of almost all variables after matching were less than 10%, and the standardized mean differences of most variables were significantly reduced. att was reported in the table. formed well. in addition to preschool education, parents’ education level and the status of family economy were also important factors affecting these non-cognitive abilities. 5 chinese scholars have analyzed the important role of preschool education in cultivating children’s curiosity from the theoretical point, but no corresponding empirical study was conducted. our study demonstrated that preschool education has a significant positive effect on the development of students’ curiosity that provides an empirical evidence for the theoretical analysis mentioned above. in addition, this study found that preschool education has a significant positive impact on the self-discipline of middle school students, which is consistent with the conclusion of sammons (2010). different from gong et al. (2016), they found that preschool experience had no significant effect on the number of students’ friends, which may be related to the differences in the samples used in the two studies, gong et al took rural students as the research objects, whereas this study covered students from both urban and rural areas, and this variable was given priority, and therefore may exist a certain difference. although the conclusions were inconsistent in terms of the number of friends, our study found that the students who received preschool education were more likely to have good academic performance, learn hard and perform well with their best friends, which supplemented the study of gong et al. these two studies verified the significant influence of preschool gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 299 education on the development of the non-cognitive ability of elementary and middle school students from different aspects. matching effect analysis the propensity score matching method was used to satisfy two basic assumptions: (1) equalization of covariate distribution in the post-match treatment and control groups; (2) the propensity scores of both treatment and control groups with common support areas. our study focused on the balance of variables that also affect the preschool enrollment and the non-cognitive abilities of children. the balanced variables include parents’ educational attainment, family economic status before elementary school, household registration, and only-child family. the balance test found that these variables matched well and standardized mean differences were less than 5%. meanwhile, the standard mean difference of the other control variables was less than 10%. according to the distribution map of propensity scores between the treatment and the control groups, there were overlapping areas of propensity scores between the preschool attendees and nonattendees indicating that the matching reduced the initial difference of characteristic variables between both groups. conclusions and suggestions given the prominent role of the non-cognitive ability in personal growth and development, it is increasingly recognized that “ability” in the human capital model includes not only cognitive ability, but also the non-cognitive ability. it has become the latest trend of world education practice to try new teaching methods to develop children’s non-cognitive abilities in social emotion, curiosity, and thirst for knowledge, selfdiscipline, and initiative. in this context, it is particularly important to explore the role of preschool education in the development of children’s non-cognitive ability. based on the national sample of the 2013-2014 baseline data of the ceps, this study empirically investigated the effect of preschool education on the non-cognitive ability of middle school students in china using the propensity score matching method, and attempted to answer the following questions: what factors affect the access to preschool education? does preschool education affect the non-cognitive ability of the middle school students? the main research conclusions are: first, there is inequality in access to preschool education. our study found that students’ physical condition before elementary school, family economic condition, parents’ years of education and local economic level all possess role in affecting students’ access to preschool education. in comparison with students from poor families, students from middle and wealthy families are 43.3% and 63.1% more likely to receive preschool education. second, preschool education has a significant impact on the non-cognitive ability of middle school students. we found that students who have received preschool education had a strong curiosity and ability to accept new things, less negative emotions, better self-discipline, and less truancy and lateness. in addition, in terms of the quality of friends, students with preschool education had more good friends who are more likegong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 300 ly to get good academic and other school performance. therefore, preschool education can improve the non-cognitive ability of human capital and play a positive role in promoting individual’s future development. based on these findings, we strongly suggest that the government should continue to pay attention to and invest in the preschool education. meanwhile, because children from poor families with poor health are significantly less likely to receive preschool education, so the government’s financial expenditure on preschool education should incline to vulnerable children to guarantee the right of the disadvantaged children to receive preschool education. we need to point out the limitations that our study has. first, the two methods we used in this study are non-experimental ones. although the psm method can reduce the selective bias to some extent, it only controls the influence of observable variables. if there is an unobservable endogenous variable, so “hidden bias” cannot be avoided. second, we observed a number of non-cognitive indicators such as self-discipline, negative emotionality, and thinking openness, but most of these indicators are self-reported measures. so they were more subjective. with the development of measurement technology, more objective indicators can be investigated in the future. finally, future studies can observe the impact of preschool education with different types and quality on the development of children’s non-cognitive ability. note: 1. the ceps questionnaire asks the following questions: “do some of the good friends mentioned above have the following situations: good academic performance, hard study, and want to go to college”, then the answer is “no such” (1) “one or two” (2) and “many such” (3) another related question is: “good friend mentioned above have the following situation: skipping classes, truant, kip, in violation of the rules being criticized, disposition and fight back and learned”, because the behavior such as skipping classes and grades excellent performance, such as is on the contrary, to facilitate research, do the reverse score here, answer “no such assignment 3,” answer “one or two” assignment 2, answer “many of these” assignment 1. on this basis, the index of “friend quality” (a = 0.80) was synthesized by principal component analysis. 2. the preschool education here is mainly for children aged 3-6, but not limited to this. in the ceps survey, no matter how old a child is enrolled in kindergarten or pre-school, or how many preschools he or she has received, the figure is better than the three-year gross enrollment rate reported by the national statistics. 3. during the survey, the hospital asked parents and students for subjective evaluation of the economic status of the family before elementary school. we give priority to the parents’ questionnaire data, and then use the students’ questionnaire data when the parents do not answer, and finally generate derived variables that reflect the family economic status of students before they enter elementary school. gong & li. preschool and non-cognitive skills of middle school students vol.3, no. 1, 2019 301 4. based on the data of the sixth national census, the ceps project works out the average years of schooling in the samples’ districts and counties. 5. limited by space, other control variables from the results of omission. references almlund, m., duckworth, a. l., heckman, j. j., & kautz, t. d. 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(in chinese). received: 22 july 2019 revised: 10 august 2019 accepted: 15 september 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in edu econom 2018; 34(4):37-45. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 龚欣, 李贞义. 学前教育经历对初中生非认知能力的影响: 基于 ceps的实证研究. 教育与 经济, 2018; 34(4): 37-45. article-title-bece_v3n1_30sep2019-zyl article-maintext_bece_v3n1_30sep2019-zyl evaluation of the development level of information and communications technology in education based on the entire-arraypolygon indicator method: taking the questionnaire survey data of 13 cities in province w as an example danxia xing, chun lu central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china abstract. the objective assessment of the development level of information and communications technology (ict) in education can support the government in formulating and implement ict policies. the article first introduced the entire-array-polygon (eap) indicator method and then designed an evaluation indicator system which containing five first indicators and 31 secondary indicators. finally, using the questionnaire survey data of 13 cities in province w as an example, the eap indicator method was used to carry out on the evaluation of ict development level. the study drew the following conclusions: eap indicator method can objectively assess the development level of ict; the overall development level of ict in the 13 cities in province w is average and above, and most of them are level ii. when using the eap indicator method to assess the development level of ict, experts do not need to determine the indicator's weight. also, this method presents the evaluation results more concisely and intuitively, so it can be promoted as an essential method of evaluating on the development level of ict in education. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 7(2):987-997. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.ar013. how to cite: xing, d. & lu, c. (2021). evaluation of the development level of information and communications technology in education based on the entire-arraypolygon indicator method: taking the questionnaire survey data of 13 cities in province w as an example. best evidence in chinese education, 7(2):987-997. keywords: information and communications technology; ict in education; development level; entire-array-polygon indicator method xing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no.2, 2021 988 about the authors: danxia xing, ph.d. candidate, national engineering research center for e-learning, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. email: xingdanxia613@163.com. correspondence to: chun lu, associate professor, educational informationization strategy research base ministry of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. email: luchun_et@163.com. funding: this work was supported by the national educational science "13th five-year plan" key project "artificial intelligence and future education development research" (project number: aca190006). conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. xing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 989 introduction he evaluation of ict is an important of the development of ict in education, runs through the entire its construction process and is an essential guarantee for its healthy and orderly development (xu et al., 2018). through the evaluation, the implementation of related planning and policies can be clarified, and then the problems in the process can be found, which provides a basis for its formulation of the next stage of planning and resource allocation (wu et al., 2017). the evaluation of its development level is a multi-attribute comprehensive assessment. its purpose is to assess the status quo of ict development, clarify development needs, and provide a basis for developing development plans or goals for the next stage. the evaluation process is complicated, and the objects involve educational administrative departments, schools, teachers, and students (wu et al., 2018). the main methods for its evaluating on the development level include the analytic hierarchy process and the delphi method (lv & ke, 2020; yin et al., 2020). however, in using these methods to evaluate on its development level, the determination of indicator weights is subjectively arbitrary, which leads to deviations between the evaluation results and the actual situation. this study introduces the eap indicator method into the ict development level evaluation in response to the above problems. entire-array-polygon (eap) indicator method is an objective, comprehensive evaluation method. there is no need to subjectively determine each indicator’s weight value in the evaluation process, which can reduce subjective factors’ influence on the evaluation results and make the evaluation results more objective and accurate (wu et al., 2005). also, this method presents the evaluation results more concisely and intuitively. there are both single index value and comprehensive index value, which is convenient to reflect the evaluation object’s comprehensive status objectively. this study uses the questionnaire survey data of 13 cities in province w as an example and uses this method to evaluate the development level of ict. it is expected to reference province w’s relevant departments to formulate ict development plans or goals. eap indicator method the eap indicator method is a comprehensive evaluation of the object evaluated based on the relationship between the upper limit, critical value, and lower limit of the evaluation index value. and then realize the vertical and horizontal comparison of the same index or dimension (kosajan et al., 2018). the basic idea is as follows: suppose there are a total of n indicators (standardized values), and use the upper limit value of these indicators as the radius to construct a central n-sided polygon whose vertices are a full array of n indicators connected end to end. there are a total of n indicators that can form (n-1)!/2 irregular central n-sided polygons. the comprehensive index is defined as the ratio of the mean value of the area of all irregular polygons to the area of the central polygon. t xing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 990 standardization of indicators the standardization of the indicators can be realized by the hyperbolic function f(x), as shown in formula (1). among them, a, b, and c are the parameters of f(x). (1) according to the above conditions, the hyperbolic standardized function f(x) can be obtained, as shown in formula (2). among them, u represents the upper limit of indicator x, l represents the lower limit of indicator x, t represents the critical value of indicator x (usually the mean value), f(x) satisfies f(l) = -1, f(t) = 0, f (u) = 1. f(x) maps the index value between l-u to between -1 and 1. the growth rate after the mapping has changed: when it is lower than the critical value, the standardized growth rate gradually decreases; when it is higher than the critical value, the standardized growth rate gradually increases. (2) according to the eap indicator method’s basic idea, each indicator needs to be standardized before calculating the comprehensive index. the standardization process of indicator xi is shown in formula (3). si is a standardized value of the indicator, and ui, li, and ti are the maximum, minimum, and average values of the indicator xi, respectively. (3) comprehensive index calculation after the indicators are standardized, the total index s value can be calculated by the formula (4). si is the i-th indicator value, sj is the j-th indicator value (i ≠ j), and n is the number of indicators. according to the basic idea of the eap indicator method, s’s value is between [0, 1], and the larger the value of s, the better. (4) based on the eap indicator method’s quartile classification standard, the ict development level can be divided into four levels: i, ii, iii, and iv, which represent excellent, good, fair, and poor, respectively in table 1. xing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 991 table 1. ict in education development level classification. level i ii iii iv s value [0.75, 1.00] [0.50, 0.75) [0.25, 0.50) [0.00, 0.25) qualification excellent good fair poor design of ict in education development level evaluation indicator system this research follows scalability, accessibility, and comprehensiveness and has designed an evaluation indicator system of ict development level. the formation process is as follows: (i) construction of core indicator system. based on the development strategy needs of china’s “ict ten-year development plan (2011-2020)”, “ict 13th five-year plan” and other documents and its exact requirements for core indicators, it refers to the typical foreign school technology and readiness chart (star) , the selfreview framework (srf) and ict application maturity model (texas education agency, 2006; becta, 2009; solar et al., 2013). this study proposed a core indicator system of ict with 32 indicators in five dimensions: ict infrastructure, digital resources, ict usage, ict management, and guarantee mechanisms (wu, et al., 2014). (ii) this study supplemented ict development level evaluation’s scalability indicators based on this ict core indicator system, combined with the current research status of ict development level evaluation in domestic and overseas. taking the eastern province s as an example, research on ict performance evaluation at the district and county level was carried out (lu et al., 2015). (iii) according to the development requirements of the ict 2.0 stage, the core indicator system will be further improved. based on the expanded core indicator system, combined with the requirements of province w’s 2019 related policy documents, this research organizes experts, education management leaders, school ict managers, and frontline teachers to focus on the availability and comprehensiveness of individual indicators discussion. this study has constructed an evaluation indicator system of its development level with five primary indicators and 31 secondary indicators through the above steps. it is used to evaluate the development level of ict in province w (wu et al., 2020), as shown in table 2. the evaluation case of ict in education development level based on eap indicator method xing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 992 table 2. ict in education development level evaluation index system. first-level index secondary indicators infrastructure 1. proportion of multimedia classrooms 2. proportion of schools with innovative laboratories 3. average number of terminals per 100 students 4. number of teaching information terminals held by teachers 5. percentage of schools connected to the internet 6. proportion of schools with full coverage of wireless networks in schools digital resources 7. proportion of schools with digital resources supporting disciplines 8. proportion of schools with a school-based resource database 9. proportion of schools with online space 10. percentage of students who have opened a student online learning space 11. percentage of teachers who have opened teacher online learning space 12. proportion of schools connected to the public service platform of provincial education resources teaching application 13. proportion of schools with normalized application of school cyberspace 14. proportion of schools with all classes able to use digital education resources 15. proportion of schools that can use information technology to teach and achieve daily routines 16. the proportion of teachers who frequently use multimedia teaching resources in teaching 17. average utilization rate of multimedia classrooms 18. the average number of lessons per teacher in the past year management informatization 19. proportion of schools with normalized application of management information system 20. proportion of schools carrying out the application of basic data of management information 21. proportion of schools that use school-level public service platforms to release information 22. proportion of schools with cyber security systems 23. proportion of schools with full coverage of the campus by the security monitoring system 24. have a school proportion cartoon 25. school informatization funds accounted for the proportion of education funds in the same period guarantee mechanism 26. proportion of schools with school-level leaders in charge of informatization construction 27. the proportion of teachers who participated in school-based information training in the past year 28. proportion of schools where school leaders participate in informatization training at or above the provincial level 29. percentage of schools with full-time teachers of information technology courses 30. proportion of schools with full-time informatization personnel 31. proportion of schools implementing measures to improve teachers’ information technology application capabilities the ict development level is mainly characterized by the dimension index and the comprehensive index. the eap indicator method is used to measure and calculate the index value. it is derived based on the upper limit, lower limit, the critical value of each indicator, and the relationship between them, so that horizontal or vertical comparison between indexes can be realized. for the multi-dimensional, multi-level, and relatively complex systematic assessment of the development level of ict, the eap indicator method can be used to realize the assessment object’s mapping from high-dimensional xing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 993 table 3. evaluation results of ict in education development level and its classification. city code ict dimension index (level) ict comprehensive index (level) infrastructure digital education resources teaching application management information guarantee mechanism w1 0.74 (ii) 0.85 (i) 0.64 (ii) 0.56 (ii) 0.74 (ii) 0.74 (ii) w2 0.45 (iii) 0.24 (iv) 0.49 (iii) 0.74 (ii) 0.26 (iii) 0.43 (iii) w3 0.73 (ii) 0.42 (iii) 0.80 (i) 0.37 (iii) 0.33 (iii) 0.54 (ii) w4 0.67 (ii) 0.61 (ii) 0.65 (ii) 0.82 (i) 0.74 (ii) 0.72 (ii) w5 0.55 (ii) 0.81 (i) 0.64 (ii) 0.77 (i) 0.96 (i) 0.74 (ii) w6 0.30 (iii) 0.58 (ii) 0.42 (iii) 0.23 (iv) 0.16 (iv) 0.34 (iii) w7 0.44 (iii) 0.20 (iv) 0.32 (iii) 0.46 (iii) 0.72 (ii) 0.46 (iii) w8 0.15 (iv) 0.80 (i) 0.56 (ii) 0.17 (iv) 0.30 (iii) 0.36 (iii) w9 0.19 (iv) 0.37 (iii) 0.39 (iii) 0.23 (iv) 0.46 (iii) 0.34 (iii) w10 0.23 (iv) 0.28 (iii) 0.30 (iii) 0.27 (iii) 0.21 (iv) 0.27 (iii) w11 0.66 (ii) 0.59 (ii) 0.50 (ii) 0.81 (i) 0.68 (ii) 0.67 (ii) w12 0.63 (ii) 0.59 (ii) 0.47 (iii) 0.65 (ii) 0.64 (ii) 0.61 (ii) w13 0.47 (iii) 0.43 (iii) 0.36 (iii) 0.86 (i) 0.33 (iii) 0.49 (iii) average 0.48 (iii) 0.52 (ii) 0.50 (ii) 0.53 (ii) 0.50 (ii) 0.52 (ii) to low-dimensional space. map 31 second-level indicators to 5 first-level indicators, map from 5 first-level indicators to a comprehensive index, and obtain the classification and ranking information of the evaluation object in the low-dimensional space. in the entire development level evaluation process, there was no need to subjectively determine the weights of the 31 secondary indicators to make the evaluation results more objective, scientific, and reasonable. this study used the questionnaire survey data of 13 cities in province w as an example, using the eap indicator method to evaluate its development level of province w comprehensively. by comparing and analyzing its development level and classification of 13 cities in province w, it is possible to fully grasp the ict development status of province w. this provides a reference for the formulation and implementation of ict policy plans in the next phase. data sources this research has compiled the “elementary and middle school ict development status survey questionnaire based on this index system.” the content includes necessary information, ict infrastructure, digital resources, ict teaching application, ict management informatization, and guarantee mechanism. to objectively reflect the development status of elementary and middle school ict construction and application, each item is set as an objective question, and the question types are fill-in-the-blank, singlexing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 994 answer, and multi-answer multiple-choice. in october 2019, this study adopted the stratified random sampling method and carried out a one-month questionnaire survey through the online questionnaire. the questionnaire was filled out by the person in charge of the elementary and middle school ict work in 13 cities in province w (such as principals, directors of ict centers). after the survey, the study received 5,968 questionnaires, of which 5,285 were valid, and the effective rate was 88.56%. evaluation results and analysis this study’s operation process to evaluate its development level of province w was as follows: (i) according to the related evaluation indicator system, the original values of 31 secondary indicators were calculated using excel. (ii) regarding the maximum, minimum, and average values of each secondary indicator as to the upper limit, lower limit, and critical value, respectively, using the r software, standardize each secondary indicator according to formula (3), and calculate each secondary indicator’s standardized value. (iii) calculate the ict dimension index value and the comprehensive index value of 13 cities in province w according to the standardized value of each secondary indicator, using the r software and formula (4); and according to the value range of s in table 1, the ict development level of 13 cities in province w was classified. the specific development level assessment results and their classification are shown in table 3. it shows that the ict development level of the 13 cities in province w is generally average or above. among them, w1 has the highest level of ict development. the main reason is that w1 is a provincial capital city with a relatively good level of economic development. chen et al. showed that the regional economy is the necessary foundation for its development (chen & zhi, 2018). therefore, the right economic conditions provide adequate support for w1’s development. among the five first-level indicators, the dimension index of ict infrastructure was relatively low. it is the supporting condition for the development and provides a fundamental guarantee for schools to carry out ict teaching and management. the development of infrastructure in province w is relatively low, with mobile terminals accounting for only 7.34% of students’ ict terminals, and the average number of terminals per 100 students is only 6.77. this can only meet some students’ needs to use ict to carry out learning activities, and to a certain extent, hinder the school’s ict application level. in terms of digital resources, province w has developed well. among them, w1 has the highest level of development of digital resources. the main reason is that w1 is a national education cloud pilot city, and its convenient education cloud services provide support for the construction and application of digital resources. ict usage is the focus of ict construction and a necessary means to improve teachers’ and students’ information literacy. province w has developed well in terms of teaching application. at present, 90.21% of elementary and middle schools in province w can realize the normalized application of ict to assist teaching of chinese, mathematics, and english in classroom some cities have even reached 98.89%. xing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 995 ict management is a crucial way to promote the modernization of the school governance system and governance capabilities. the average value of the ict management index of 13 cities in province w is the highest (up to 0.53), indicating that province w has developed well in school ict management such as management data applications, campus all-in-one cards, and network security systems. the survey data also shows that 7.29% of elementary and middle schools in province w use campus allin-one cards, and 77.04% of elementary and middle schools have achieved full coverage of the campus network through the application of security monitoring systems (such as school gates, teaching buildings, and office areas). the guarantee mechanism is the foundation of its development and the key to the implementation of ict-related plans. province w has developed well in terms of guarantee mechanisms. over 92.86% of elementary and middle schools are supervised by school-level leaders in the construction of ict in schools, which has promoted ict in teaching and management to a certain extent. in turn, the overall level of ict in schools development has been improved. conclusions this study introduced the eap indicator method into the evaluation of its development level. based on the questionnaire survey data of the ict development status of and middle schools in 13 cities in province w, the ict development level of province w was comprehensively evaluated. furthermore, each city’s evaluation results were graded, and the development status of ict in each city was compared and analyzed. the main conclusions obtained are as follows: the eap indicator method can objectively assess the development level of ict. the eap indicator method is a quantitative comprehensive evaluation method whose evaluation results are less affected by subjective factors. when using this method to evaluate the development level of ict, experts are not needed to determine the weights of indicators; only the upper limit, lower limit, and critical value related to decisionmaking should be determined. this reduces the subjectivity in the evaluation process to a certain extent to reflect the current development of ict more objectively. simultaneously, the eap indicator method presents the evaluation results of the ict development level only and intuitively. it has both a single indicator value and a total indicator value, which provides convenience for problem diagnosis and policy guidance. meanwhile, the eap indicator method is simple and easy to understand, and the calculation process is simple. the eap indicator method is also convenient to use a computer for programming to realize the participating factors’ quantitative processing. the overall development level of ict in 13 cities in province w is average and above, and most of them are at level ii. among them, the digital resources dimension and the ict management dimension have developed well, the ict usage dimension and the guarantee mechanism dimension have developed generally, and the ict infrastructure dimension has developed relatively weakly. to further improve ict development, an elementary and middle school in province w should focus on constructing school ict infrastructure. this ensures that the school has a good ict teaching and managexing & lu. development level of information and communications technology in education. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 996 ment environment and supports teachers and students to use ict to carry out teaching and management activities. simultaneously, it is also necessary to carry out certain targeted and practical teacher ict training activities to comprehensively improve the elementary primary and middle school teachers’ ability to use ict to carry out teaching. besides, various forms of ict training activities such as “school-based training” and “short-term concentrated training” can also be carried out to focus on improving elementary and middle school teachers’ ict teaching design and curriculum resource integration capabilities. the above conclusions show that the use of the eap indicator method can objectively and comprehensively evaluate the development of ict in province w and can achieve the purpose of horizontal and vertical comparison of the ict development level of 13 cities in province w. besides, the eap indicator method also reduces the subjectivity in the evaluation process to a certain extent, making the evaluation results concise and intuitive. however, due to the limited survey time, the questionnaire survey data was discontinuous in time. this study did not research time series, so the dynamic assessment of ict development level from a time perspective will focus on subsequent research. references becta. 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(2020). 基于全排列多边形图示指标法的教育信息化发展水平评估—以 w 省 13 个 地市的问卷调研数据为例. 现代教育技术, 30(11):70-76. https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/texas_campus_star_chart.pdf https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/texas_campus_star_chart.pdf https://doi.org/10.13811/j.cnki.eer.2020.01.007 https://doi.org/10.13811/j.cnki.eer.2020.01.007 https://doi.org/10.13811/j.cnki.eer.2017.09.001 https://doi.org/10.13811/j.cnki.eer.2017.09.001 https://doi.org/10.13966/j.cnki.kfjyyj.2014.01.006 https://doi.org/10.13966/j.cnki.kfjyyj.2014.01.006 https://doi.org/10.3321/j.issn:1000-0933.2005.08.037 https://doi.org/10.3321/j.issn:1000-0933.2005.08.037 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1009-8097.2018.02.018 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1009-8097.2018.02.018 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1009-8097.2020.03.012 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1009-8097.2020.03.012 originalarticle-danxiaxing-bece_title_march2021 originalarticlearticle-danxiaxing-bece_maintextmarch2021 bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 1003 can vocational education improve the income gap between urban and rural areas? by tian, y., xiang, x., & pan, x. correspondence to: xiaolin pan, associate professor, school of mathematical sciences, chongqing normal university, china. email: pxl_1999@163.com ue to the rapid growth of china's economy, the problem of the excessive income gap between urban and rural residents gradually emerged, and it has become the principal element that hinders the further development of china's economy and society. in order to effectively prevent the further expansion of the urban-rural income gap, lots of scholars have conducted relevant research. recently, an article published in education & economy deeply explored the impact of vocational education on the urban-rural income gap. based on the human capital theory and the provincial panel data from 2007 to 2018, this paper estimated the theil index of the urban-rural income gap, using the system gmm model to evaluate the impact of the development of vocational education on the urban-rural income gap. for further analysis, the researchers established the regression model and the results are as follows:  after controlling a series of factors that affect the income gap between urban and rural areas, it is noticeable that the scale expansion and quality improvement of vocational education are helpful to narrow the income gap.  cross-comparing data of the eastern, central, and western regions, the analysis shows that the impact of vocational education development on the urban-rural income gap in the eastern region is relatively small, while the impact in the western region is far greater than that in the eastern region.  to bridge the income gap in the eastern region consists in expanding the scale of vocational education, while in the central region mainly relies on improving the quality of vocational education, however, both the scale and quality of vocational education in the western region can narrow the income gap between urban and rural areas. according to the research results, the author put forward some suggestions for the development of vocational education in china:  the development of vocational education in the western region is the most efficient way to bridge the income gap between urban and d vol.7, no.2, 2021 1004 rural areas, therefore, it is helpful for the policy effects if political decision-making properly inclines to the western region.  as for the eastern and central regions, the effects of the scale and quality of vocational education is different. the eastern region should pay attention to the investment of educational finance, expanding the scale of vocational education, and providing vocational training for more people. and the central region should concentrate on the innovation of educational methods and management, for instance strengthening management or teaching students in accordance with their aptitude to improve students' vocational ability. source: education & economy, 2020; 36 (6): 51-58. bece. newsletter vol.8, no.2, 2021 1152 a stratified study of the sports participation of migrant students by liu, m. correspondence to: liu, m., nanjing university of science and technology, nanjing, jiangsu, china, 210094. email: liumina@njust.edu.cn n the basis of the china education panel survey (ceps), a study published in china sport science analyzed the sports participation situation of migrant children in urban and rural areas. a total of 1602 migrant children’s samples were collected and the results are as follows:  according to the descriptive statistics, the average time of migrant students’ daily physical exercise in junior middle school just reached 24.41 minutes, which was seriously insufficient. the internal differentiation of migrant children is serious, to be specific, the difference between urban areas and rural areas, family classes are extremely significant.  the regression analysis found that, in terms of demographic characteristics, gender inequality exists, and boys participate in physical exercises more than girls, but whether the individual is the only child in his or her family did not have an impact. as for the urban and rural areas, the difference in physical exercise participation was determined by the living communities, school attended, and family status. compared with traditional and village-mixing communities, students living in commercial residential buildings with better community environments participate more in sports. in terms of family effect, family cultural capital plays a significant role. the longer education years of the mothers, the more collection of books within the family, the better the situation of migrant children’s sports participation will be.  considering the differences between urban and rural students, the researchers conducted a sample regression for the two, and the results show that there exists a significant difference in the stratification mechanism of the two groups. the stratification tendency of urban migrant children only relates to schools, while rural migrant children’s tendency diversified in schools, families, and communities, which indicates that both the stratification and ineo mailto:liumina@njust.edu.cn vol.8, no.2, 2021 1153 quality degree rural migrant children are higher than the urban migrant children. broadly speaking, the researchers suggest that to promote the sports participation of migrant children in junior high schools, on the one hand, it is necessary to jointly formulate a balanced development of sports policies, as well as supporting education and urban planning policies. on the other hand, it is also important to increase the cultural capital of migrant children’s families in order to improve the inequality of sports participation caused by social transformation and social structural division. source: china sport science, 2020; 40(12):39-53. does the salary of elementary and middle school teachers affect students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring? § haiping xue, 1 xiang gao, 1 aiai fan 2 1. capital normal university, beijing 100048, china 2. peking university, beijing 100871, china abstract. based on the data of china family panel studies 2016 (cfps 2016), this study analyzed the effect of teacher wage index on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring through a two-layer linear model. we found that the wage index of elementary and middle schools teachers in china is generally low, and this index had a significant negative impact on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring, i.e., the lower the teacher’s wage index, the higher the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring. governments at all levels should increase financial investment in elementary and middle schools teachers’ salaries. efforts to improve the salary of elementary and middle schools teachers upon the teacher’s wage index as a reference will help to reduce the supply and demand of extracurricular tutoring in the basic education in china, and will also facilitate the implementation of the policy of prohibiting in-service teachers from participating in extracurricular tutoring. best evid chin edu 2020; 6(1):769-787. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar065. how to cite: xue, h., gao, x., & fan, a. (2020). does the salary of elementary and middle school teachers affect students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring? best evidence in chinese education, 6(1):769-787. keywords: extracurricular tutoring; teacher salary; wage index §: the original chinese version has been abridged due to the limited printing layout. in this article, the original content that has been deleted is also published. xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no.1, 2020 770 about the author: xiang gao, doctorate candidate, school of education, capital normal university, beijing 100048, china. email: 2180401008@cnu.edu.cn. correspondence to: haiping xue, director, professor, institute of educational economics and management, school of education, capital normal university, beijing 100048, china. email: xuehaiping_416@163.com; or aiai fan, associate editor, school of education, peking university, beijing 100871, china. email: fanaa@pku.edu.cn funding: this study was supported by the national science foundation of china (nsfc) main project “family capital, shadow education and social reproduction” (project #: 71774112) and beijing social science fund research base key project: from school education to shadow education: educational competition and social reproduction (project #: 15jdjya007). conflict of interests: none. © 2020 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 771 n recent years, extracurricular tutoring has become a hot social issue that concerns the government, students and parents. among them, paid tutoring by in-service teachers is a focus problem that the government, society and schools have been paying close attention to and trying to solve. some studies have found that teacher salary was closely related to students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring (brehm et al., 2012; sujatha & rani, 2011). investigation of the relationship between teachers’ salary level and students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring will help to understand the phenomenon of in-service teacher’s paid tutoring, and it will provide a reference for the chinese government to handle effectively the extracurricular tutoring and paid tutoring for in-service teachers. studies found that low salary is a major reason for teachers to participate in extracurricular tutoring. researchers found that some in-service school teachers in countries such as cambodia, mauritius and romania got paid tutoring for students, and the official salary of teachers in these countries was very low (bray et al., 2013; foondun, 2002; popa & acedo, 2003). studies by brehm, sujatha, and rani found that in cambodia and india, many teachers provide extracurricular tutoring to supplement their income (brehm et al., 2012; sujatha & rani, 2011). in shanghai of china, zhang and bray discovered through questionnaires and interviews that urban teachers are facing increasing economic pressure, and many of them got additional income through shadow education. the survey included 548 students in shanghai, of them 35.8% had received tutoring in their teachers’ homes, and 26.1% had received tutoring at schools. during the interview, they found that some of the teachers’ colleagues participated in paid tutoring outside the classroom, and all the school principals interviewed expressed sympathy for their teachers’ participation in the tutoring even they got the so-called medium salary (zhang & bray, 2017). the in-service teachers will gain income through direct participation in tutoring and referral to counseling agencies for getting commission. bray et al. (2018) found that in siem reap province, central cambodia, almost all extracurricular tutoring is provided by school teachers rather than commerce, and teachers are usually responsible for the same group of students in the school. in addition to direct participation, some school teachers play an intermediary role. zhang and bray’s survey in shanghai showed that nearly one-third of the students surveyed said that their tutoring information was from their teachers, through which some teachers got commission by introducing students to counseling agencies (zhang & bray, 2017). in-service teacher is the classroom leader of school education, so if they directly or indirectly participate in paid tutoring, they will encourage students and parents to participate in tutoring. in-service teacher’s paid tutoring will bring “benefits” to participating students, and it will be “unfavorable” to those who do not participate in teachers’ tutoring. in a survey conducted in bangladesh in 2017, some students mentioned that receiving tutoring from school teachers would receive extra benefits, including answering skills set by these teachers (mahmud et al., 2017). gok’s investigation report in turkey highlighted a teacher’s case, in which the teacher clearly told the students: “you didn’t take my private class, so i don’t talk to you anymore” (gök, 2010). kodakos and i xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 772 fragiskos pointed out that the paid tutoring of in-service teacher has the risk of concealing the content of the classroom to promote their tutoring needs. they emphasized that when in-service teachers are also extracurricular tutors, they would use the “margin management model”, that is, when teachers tutor their students privately, there is a danger of favoring the students who receive tutoring. it is easy for these teachers to deliberately conceal content in regular class teaching to promote the need for their private classrooms, so margin management is necessary (kodakos & kalavasis, 2015). in sum, some empirical studies showed that in countries with low teacher salaries, teachers are more likely to participate in paid tutoring, and teachers who get paid tutoring will encourage their students to participate in extracurricular tutoring in turn, so the in-service teacher salary level will affect students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. teacher’s wage index is an objective quantitative index to measure the relative level of teachers’ wages (organization for economic cooperation and development, 2011). a low teacher’s wage index indicates that the level of teachers’ wages is low compared to the level of local economic development. therefore, teachers’ life pressure and their income imbalance increase, which may reduce work effort and engage in paid tutoring to supplement income. both of these aspects all may encourage students to participate in extracurricular tutoring. therefore, we hypothesized that the salary level of elementary and middle schools teachers has a significant negative impact on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring, i.e., the lower the teachers’ salary, the higher the students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring is affected by two factors: supply and demand. at present, there have been studies explored the influence of individual and family characteristics of students on extracurricular tutoring from the perspective of extracurricular tutoring demand, but no study has explored the impact of features such as in-service teacher on student participation in extracurricular tutoring from the perspective of extracurricular tutoring supply. this study will comprehensively consider the impact of extracurricular tutoring supply and demand on student participation in extracurricular tutoring. after controlling the individual and family characteristics of students in the econometric model, we will observe the effect of teacher salary level on students’ extracurricular tutoring participation. data source and variable description the data of the extracurricular tutoring, individual factors, family factors, and school factors in this study come from the 2016 data of china family panel studies (cfps) of the china social science survey center of peking university. according to the variable description of extracurricular tutoring in the data set, extracurricular tutoring mainly refers to supplementary educational activities other than formal school education to improve students’ academic performance, including both academic and talent courses. the study objects were elementary and middle school students and a total of 3,109 effective samples were obtained, including 2,332 from elementary school and 777 from middle school. xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 773 from the perspective of economics, teachers’ wages are the remuneration of teachers for their labor in the organization. when analyzing teacher salaries, we usually use the teacher income index (du, 2015). education at a glance 2011: oecd indicators pointed out that when discussing teacher wages, comparing legal wages with gdp per capita is easy to analyze, and provides a way to examine teacher wages in the context of national wealth (organization for economic cooperation and development, 2011). du compared the salary level of teachers with the gdp per capita of various provinces and the discretionary income of urban residents, and examined the changes in the average salary level of teachers in china from 2000 to 2011 (du, 2014). an suggested that the relative level of teacher wages was a way of judging the comparison between teacher wages and gross national product, i.e., the proportion of teacher average wages to gdp per capita can be called wage index (an, 2014). xue and shen used the teacher wage index (shen, 2018; xue & tang, 2017) when measuring the salary of elementary and middle schools. because teachers’ perception of their wages stems from the overall wages paid in the previous year, so the wage index of teachers in 2015 is selected here. the description of the variables is shown in table 1. teacher salary and student extracurricular tutoring participation rate in elementary and middle schools by province participation rate of extracurricular tutoring of elementary and middle students by province table 2 shows that the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring of elementary school students in each province was uneven. the top three provinces with extracurricular tutoring participation rate for elementary school students were: jiangsu, heilongjiang and shanghai. their rate all exceeded 32%, and the number of participants account for more than one third of the sample population in the province. the provinces with lower participation rates were: guangxi, guizhou, and jiangxi. their participation rates were 1.1%, 1.8%, and 2.9%, respectively, and the number of participants was less than one-third of the number in the province. the participation rate in the eastern china was high, the central region was uneven, and the western region was low. the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring of middle school students in different provinces was also mixed. the provinces with high participation rates of extracurricular tutoring for middle school students were: jiangsu, anhui and liaoning, with participation rates of 55.6%, 42.1%, and 35.9%, respectively; the provinces with lower participation rates were guangxi and guizhou, with 4.2% and 4.4%, respectively. the participation rate of middle school students in the eastern region except guangdong and the northeast region was relatively high. the participation rate in the central region except jiangxi was more than 20%, and the participation rate in the western region was uneven. in short, the par xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 774 table 1. description of variables in statistical analysis. variable type variable name variable description extracurricular tutoring whether to participate in extracurricular tutoring 0=no, 1=yes personal factors gender 0=female, 1=male household registration (hukou) 0=agricultural, 1=non-agricultural math scores 1=poor, 2=medium, 3=good, 4=excellent chinese performance 1=poor, 2=medium, 3=good, 4=excellent family factors parent’s highest education 1=illiterate, 2=elementary school, 3=middle school, 4=high school, 5=junior college, 6=undergraduate and above parental education expectations 1=middle school and below, 2= high school, 3=junior college, 4=university undergraduate, 5=master’s degree and above annual household income per capita continuous variable, unit: cny school factors demonstration/key school 0=no, 1=yes class size continuous variable, unit: person 2015 teacher wage index average salary of elementary school teachers in the province in 2015 / gdp per capita in 2015 continuous variable average salary of middle school teachers in the province in 2015 / gdp per capita in 2015 continuous variable ticipation rate of elementary and middle students in the eastern region is mostly higher than that in the western region, and the central region is high, and the rate of elementary school students is uneven. relative salary of teachers in elementary and middle schools by province teacher wage index refers to the proportion of teachers’ average salary to gdp per capita. this is a way of judging the comparison of teachers’ wages with gross national product, which indicates the relative level of teachers’ wages (an, 2014). regarding the reasonable level of wages, it is believed that the teacher wage index should be reasonably between 1.8:1 and 2:1 in developed countries and 2.5:1 and 3.5:1 in developing countries (qu, 1995). chinese elementary and middle schools teacher wage index is shown in table 3. the wage index of elementary school teachers in the table is the average salary of elementary school teachers in 2015/gdp per capita in 2015, and the wage index of middle school teachers in 2015 is the average salary of middle school teachers in 2015/gdp per capita in 2015. table 3 shows that the average value of the middle school teachers’ wage index was higher than that of elementary school teachers. the provinces with elementary school teachers whose wage index was less than 1 were jiangsu, liaoning and shanghai, all of which are provinces in the eastern region where the economies are relatively de xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 775 table 2. participation rate of extracurricular tutoring in elementary and middle schools. province participation rate of extracurricular tutoring elementary school students (%) middle school students (%) hebei 16.1 15.9 shanxi 18.9 22.2 liaoning 22.5 35.9 jilin 16.1 33.3 heilongjiang 37.0 33.3 shanghai 32.7 31.6 jiangsu 39.0 55.6 zhejiang 27.6 28.6 anhui 22.4 42.1 jiangxi 2.90 12.5 shandong 21.1 16.0 henan 20.8 27.4 hunan 14.5 27.3 guangdong 10.6 8.80 guangxi 1.10 4.20 chongqing 7.40 25.0 sichuan 12.8 17.2 guizhou 1.80 4.40 yunnan 6.80 11.8 shaanxi 18.4 25.0 gansu 7.10 15.6 nationwide 14.3 20.1 veloped. the provinces with elementary school teachers whose wage index was higher than 2 were gansu, guizhou and yunnan, all of which are western provinces, indicates that the teachers’ wage level and economic level are relatively commensurate. the wage index of elementary school teachers in the eastern region was lower than the average level, and the central region was uneven, but the western region, except chongqing and shaanxi, other provinces were higher than the average. the provinces with middle school teachers whose wage index was lower than 1 were jiangsu and liaoning, and those higher than 2 were gansu, yunnan and guizhou. therefore, the wage index of middle school teachers in the eastern region was lower than the average, the central region was at the middle level, and the western regions except chongqing and shaanxi were all above the average. it can be seen that the relative salary of elementary and middle schools teachers in the eastern region is not commensurate with the level of economic development, but the relative salary of teachers in some western provinces matches the level of economic development. overall, the relative salary of teachers in china is relatively low. xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 776 table 3. the wage index of elementary and middle school teachers in each province in 2015. province elementary school teacher wage index middle school teacher wage index hebei 1.35 1.42 shanxi 1.62 1.7 liaoning 0.88 0.90 jilin 1.07 1.11 heilongjiang 1.47 1.54 shanghai 0.93 1.03 jiangsu 0.85 0.91 zhejiang 1.14 1.26 anhui 1.55 1.64 jiangxi 1.45 1.47 shandong 1.05 1.15 henan 1.17 1.26 hunan 1.12 1.21 guangdong 1.02 1.08 guangxi 1.47 1.58 chongqing 1.25 1.41 sichuan 1.59 1.76 guizhou 2.13 2.21 yunnan 2.1 2.27 shaanxi 1.14 1.17 gansu 2.26 2.32 mean value 1.36 1.45 the wage index of elementary and middle schools teachers and the student participation rate of extracurricular tutoring in 2015, the average value of the elementary school teachers’ wage index was 1.42, and the average value of the middle school teachers’ wage index was 1.51. figure 1 shows the relationship between the elementary school teachers’ wage index and the students’ extracurricular tutoring participation rate. the provinces with lower wage index among elementary school teachers have relatively higher participation rate; on the contrary, the province with higher wage index among elementary school teachers have relatively lower participation rate. for example, the provinces with elementary school teachers whose wage index was less than 1 were jiangsu, liaoning, and shanghai, all of which are in the eastern china. the participation rates of these three provinces in extracurricular tutoring were very high, at 39%, 22.5%, and 32.7%, respectively. the provinces with elementary school teachers whose wage index was xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 777 figure 1. elementary school teacher wage index and students’ extracurricular tutoring rate. higher than 2 were gansu, guizhou and yunnan, all of which are in the western china, and the participation rates of extracurricular tutoring in these three provinces were relatively low, at 7.1%, 1.8% and 6.8%, respectively. figure 2 shows that between the wage index of middle school teachers and the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring are also reversely related. in the provinces with high wage index of middle school teachers, the participation rate of students in extracurricular tutoring was relatively low; on the contrary, in the province with low wage index of middle school teachers, the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring students was also relatively high. for example, the provinces with middle school teachers whose wage index was less than 1 were liaoning and jiangsu. the participation rates of students in these two provinces were very high, at 35.9% and 55.6%, respectively. the provinces with middle school teachers whose wage index was higher than 2 were gansu, yunnan and guizhou. the rate of students participating in extracurricular tutoring in these three provinces was 15.6%, 11.8% and 4.4%, respectively. the effect of elementary and middle schools teachers’ wage index on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 778 figure 2. middle school teacher wage index and students’ extracurricular tutoring rate. the hierarchical linear model is proposed to address the limitations of traditional statistical techniques when processing multi-layer structure data and the possible misinterpretation of the analysis results. it is suitable for proper and in-depth analysis and interpretation of widely existing multi-layer nested data (osborne & neupert, 2013). when the hierarchical linear model is analyzed at different levels, it can make full use of the information of each layer to decompose the factors influencing students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring at all levels, so it is more accurate and more reasonable. when analyzing the elementary and middle schools teacher wage index affecting students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring, we introduced the hierarchical linear model, because the sample of students in this study is nested in different provinces and regions, and teacher salaries are different in different provinces. for this kind of data with nested structure, hlm2 can be used to examine the effect of student-level variables and provincial-level teachers’ wage index variables on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. at the beginning of the model construction, the zero model was first estimated to explain the percentage and significance of the total variance of the dependent variable that could be explained by the differences between groups. then, hlm2 was built. xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 779 lay1: tutor=0+1gender +2parentedu +3parentexpectation +4salary +5language+6math +7key school +8classsize + (1) lay2: 0=00+01teachers’salary +0 (2) among them, the dependent variable tutor represents whether students participate in extracurricular tutoring. the independent variables are divided into two levels: the first level is individual level variables, including student gender, parental education level, parental education expectations, family per capita income, whether it is a key school, class size, language performance, and math performance; the second level is provincial level variables, including teachers’ salary index. a hierarchical linear model analysis of the effect of elementary school teachers’ wage index on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring construct a zero model in the sample of elementary school students. the zero model refers to a model that has no predictor variables at the individual level and the provincial level. this is mainly used to observe whether the dependent variable is statistically significant at the provincial level. this study conducted a zero-model analysis of whether students participated in extracurricular tutoring in the past 12 months. the results are shown in table 4. the zero model showed that with student participation in extracurricular tutoring as the dependent variable, its p value was < 0.01, which means that the predictor variables of the second layer have a significant impact on the variation of the dependent variable. in table 4, the variance between groups was 0.009, the variance within the group was 0.117, and the intra-group correlation coefficient (icc) = 0.071 was further calculated. icc is to test whether the dependent variable is different between different groups. according to cohen’s definition, 0.071 is a moderate intra-group correlation (less than 0.059 indicates low-level intra-group correlation, 0.059-0.138 is moderate intra-group correlation, and greater than 0.138 is high-level intra-group correlation). the data in this study were moderately related within the group, so the differences within the group cannot be ignored. this means that the degree of variability caused by the difference from the provincial level in students participating in extracurricular tutoring was 0.009, which was about 7.1% of the variance. on the one hand, the predictor variables of the second layer have a significant impact on the variation of the dependent variable; on the other hand, according to the estimation results of icc (cross-level correlation coefficient), the dependent variable has obvious differences between groups, and the characteristics of the differences between groups must be considered. therefore, it is suitable to use a hlm2 for analysis. xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 780 table 4. elementary school sample zero model parameter estimation. parameter variance estimation standard error intra-group correlation coefficient chi-square value pvalue intercept term (variation between groups u0 ) 0.009 0.004 0.071 52.043 0.000 level 1 (variation residual within the group r) 0.117 0.003 model 1 and model 2 (table 5) were the influencing factors of extracurricular tutoring participation of elementary school students. model 1 was the basic model, which estimated the influence of control variables on extracurricular tutoring participation in the elementary school samples. the data showed that in elementary school, the higher the annual per capita income of the family, the more non-agricultural students were less likely to participate in extracurricular tutoring. the larger the class size, the higher the likelihood of students participating in extracurricular tutoring. the higher the parent’s education level, the higher the likelihood of students participating in extracurricular tutoring. model 2 adds the variable of 2015 average salary of elementary school teachers/2015 gdp per capita (2015 elementary school teachers’ wage index) to the control variable. after the addition, the logarithm likelihood drops from 1,378.003 to 1,376.780, and the values of aic and bic also decrease. . this showed that the addition of this variable had statistical significance, which made the model fit better. the data shows that the agricultural household in model 2 is negatively significant, that is, the more agricultural household students, the lower the possibility of participating in extracurricular tutoring. parents’ education level, family per capita income and class size were positively significant, i.e., the higher the parent’s education level, the higher the family’s per capita income and the larger the class size, the greater the possibility of students participating in extracurricular tutoring. the coefficient of elementary school teachers’ wage index was -0.096 (p < 0.05). the results of the data showed that the greater the ratio of the average salary of elementary school teachers to the annual per capita gdp, the less likely students was to participate in extracurricular tutoring. for each additional unit of elementary school teacher wage index, the possibility of students participating in extracurricular tutoring decreases by 0.096 units, i.e., the higher the elementary school teacher wage index, the lower the possibility of students participating in extracurricular tutoring. mixed model analysis of middle school teacher salary to students participating in extracurricular tutoring xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 781 table 5. multi-layer linear model analysis results of the impact of elementary school teacher wage index on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. variable model 1 model 2 individual level variable gender: female (male=1) 0.022 (0.015) 0.023 (0.015) agricultural household registration (non-agricultural household registration=1) -0.096 *** (0.025) -0.094*** (0.025 ) chinese performance 0.008 (0.010) 0.008 (0.010) math scores -0.016 (0.010) -0.016 (0.010 ) annual household income per capita 1.726*** (5.862) 1.650 *** (5.856) parent’s highest education 0.015* (0.008) 0 .014* (0.008) parents’ educational expectations for their children 0.008 (0.007) 0 .009 (0.007) non-key school (key school=1) -0.014 (0.019) 0.015 (0.019 ) class size 0.001** (0.000) 0 .001** ( 0.000) provincial level variable average salary of elementary school teachers in 2015 / gdp per capita in 2015 0.096** ( 0.036 ) intercept term 0.094 (0.067) 0.229*** (0.084) sample size 2,332 2,332 random effect sd (intercept) 0.004 (0.002) 0.003 (0.001) sd (residual error) 0.110 (0.003) 0.110 (0.004) goodness of fit -2 restricted log likelihood 1,378.003 1,376.780 akaike’s information criterion (aic) 1,382.003 1,380.780 schwarz’s bayesian criterion (bic) 1,393.119 1,391.972 note: 1. ***, **, * represent significant at the 1%, 5% and 10% levels, respectively. 2. standard errors are in parentheses. table 6. middle school sample zero model parameter estimation. parameter variance estimation standard error intra-group correlation coefficient chi-square value pvalue intercept term (variation between groups u0 ) 0 .008 0 .005 0 .049 73.537 0.000 level 1 (variation residual within the group r) 0 .154 0 .008 xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 782 table 7 : multi-layer linear model analysis results of the influence of middle school teacher wage index on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. variable model 3 model 4 individual level variables gender: female (male=1) 0.022 (0.031) 0.024 (0.031) agricultural household registration (non-agricultural household registration=1) -0.126*** (0.046) -0.108** (0.046) chinese performance -0.016 (0.020) -0.012 (0.020) math scores -0.015 (0.018) -0.021 ( 0.015) annual household income per capita 4.429 (5.192) 3.633 (5.184) parent’s highest education 0.052*** (0.015) 0 .052*** (0.015) parents’ educational expectations for their children 0.011 (0.015) 0 .008 (0.015) non-key school (key school=1) -0.035 (0.036) 0.040 ( 0.035) class size 0.002 (0.001) 0 .002 (0.001) provincial level variables average of secondary education teachers in 2015 wages/2015 gdp per capita 0.089* (0.048) intercept term 0.105 (0.150) 0.233 (0.167) sample size 777 777 random effect sd (intercept) 0.004 (0.003) 0.004 (0.003) sd (residual error) 0.144 (0.008) 0.143 (0.008) goodness of fit -2 restricted log likelihood 682.061 677.424 akaike’s information criterion (aic) 686.061 681.424 schwarz’s bayesian criterion (bic) 695.027 690.378 note: 1. ***, **, * represent significant at the 1%, 5% and 10% levels, respectively. 2. standard errors are in parentheses. by constructing a zero model in the middle school samples, the results were shown in table 6. in this zero model, whether the student participated in extracurricular tutoring was the dependent variable, the inter-group variance was 0.008, the intra-group variance was 0.154, and the significance level was p < 0.001. further calculation of the intra-group correlation coefficient (icc) = 0.049, its p value was < 0.01, i.e., the second-level predictor variables have a significant impact on the variation of the dependent variable, and the impact of the provincial-level variables on the dependent variable needs to be considered. therefore, it was suitable to use hierarchical linear model for analysis. models 3 and 4 were the influencing factors of extracurricular tutoring participation of middle school students. model 3 was the basic model, which estimated the influence of control variables on extracurricular tutoring participation in the middle school samples. it can be seen from table 7 that in the basic model, middle school parxue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 783 ents’ educational background and household have a significant impact on students participating in extracurricular tutoring. model 4 added the variable of 2015 middle school teachers’ wage index to model 3, the logarithm likelihood dropped from 682.061 to 677.424, and the values of aic and bic also decreased, indicating that the addition of this variable had statistically significance, and the model fitting was better. the data showed that the highest educational level of parents was significant at 0.01 and household was significant at 0.05, i.e., non-agricultural household students were more likely to participate in extracurricular tutoring than agricultural household students. the coefficient of the variable of wage index for middle school teachers was -0.089 (p < 0.1). the data showed that the greater the ratio of the average salary of middle school teachers to the annual per capita gdp, the less likely students was to participate in extracurricular tutoring. for every additional unit of middle school teacher wage index, the possibility of students participating in extracurricular tutoring decreased by 0.090 units, i.e., the higher the secondary school teacher wage index, the lower the possibility of students participating in extracurricular tutoring. discussion and conclusion through the above analysis, it is found that the relative salary of elementary and middle schools in china is relatively low. in 2015, the wage index of elementary school teachers in all provinces of china was between 0.87-2.26, and the wage index of middle school teachers was between 0.9-2.32. none of them has reached the level of 2.5-3.5 for the wage index of teachers in developing countries. this study showed that the wage index of elementary and middle schools teachers in china had a significant negative effect on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. the province with the lower elementary school teacher wage index has the higher participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. elementary school teachers with the lowest wage index in jiangsu (0.85) had the highest extracurricular tutoring participation rate (39%), accounting for more than one-third of the province’s elementary school samples. the same was true for middle school teachers. in liaoning (0.9) and jiangsu (0.91), where the middle school teachers’ wage index was lower than 1, and their students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring was high, at 35.9% and 55.6%, respectively. this showed that the relative level of teachers’ salary had a significant impact on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. our findings corroborate the findings of foondun et al. in cambodia and other countries (foondun, 2002), the lower the teacher’s salary, the more students’ tutoring; this also was agreement with zhang and bray’s survey in shanghai, china from the perspective of teacher salary (zhang &bray, 2017). adams’s equity theory believes that the enthusiasm of employees depends on the degree of fairness in distribution (i.e., sense of fairness); and this sense of employees depends on a process of social comparison, that is, a person not only cares about his absolute income, but also cares about his relative income (chen & gao, 2008). when teachers in elementary and middle schools in china compare their income horizontally with other professionals in the society, if they feel that their income is lower, they will xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 784 feel unfair, so they will seek to increase their income or reduce their work to obtain a sense of fairness. on the one hand, some in-service teachers will participate in paid tutoring in an attempt to increase their income. on the other hand, some in-service teachers who do not participate in paid tutoring will reduce the work effort in their daily school teaching. meanwhile, some in-service teachers not only participate in paid tutoring but also reduce the teaching effort, and they will intentionally teach less important content in the classroom, deliberately guide or encourage students to participate in extracurricular tutoring activities they organized or involved in. this had pushed up the scale of students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring, impacted the order of school education and disrupted the normal school education ecology, and also harmed the equity of education and increased the burden of student learning. in 2015, the ministry of education of china issued the regulations on prohibiting elementary and middle schools and in-service teachers from participating paid tutoring (ministry of education of china, 2015), which prohibits in-service teachers from participating in paid tutoring. since the document was issued, some provinces and cities had also issued relevant policy documents. on the basis of “6 prohibitions”, henan province put forward “prohibition on elementary and middle schools in-service teachers from deliberately failing to complete education and teaching tasks in the classroom” and “prohibition on elementary and middle schools teachers from teaching after school for being paid” (henan provincial department of education, 2015); beijing also issued policy document stating “whether the in-service teacher organizes or participates in paid tutoring will be regarded as an important basis for annual assessment, job title evaluation, promotion, rewards, and punishments” (liang, 2017). on the basis of prohibition, the relevant documents also proposed to “educate and guide the teachers to practice the core values of education, stand up for morality, and consciously refuse paid tutoring; select and promote outstanding teacher models, and fully demonstrate the spirit of dedication and kindness of teachers” (ministry of education of china, 2015). the guidance of correct values is conducive to weakening teachers’ sense of injustice and reducing motivation to go out for tutoring. given that chinese elementary and middle schools teachers’ wage index has a significant negative impact on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring, and the current chinese elementary and middle schools teachers’ wage index is generally low, governments at all levels should increase financial invest to teachers’ salaries. with the teacher’s wage index as the reference standard, strive to increase the relative salary of elementary and middle school teachers. for provinces with stronger financial strength and lower teacher wage indexes, governments at and below the provincial level should increase the financial input, and focus on raising the teacher wage index and improving the relative level of teacher wages. for provinces with weaker financial strength and lower teacher wage index, central and provincial governments should increase fiscal transfer payments to help local governments at all levels of the province increase the input and strive to improve the teacher wage index. the efforts of governments at all levels to increase the salary of elementary and middle schools teachers will help reduce the supply and demand of extracurricular tutoring in the basic education in china, and xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 785 also provide a basis for prohibiting in-service teacher from participation in extracurricular tutoring. references an, x. 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[chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.12 19769 received: 11 may 2020 revised: 27 june 2020 accepted: 10 july2020 https://schlr.cnki.net/detail/doi/stjdlast/stjdbd878065bbb6214d4b9392b5b4f483ad https://schlr.cnki.net/detail/doi/stjdlast/stjdbd878065bbb6214d4b9392b5b4f483ad xue et al. interrelationship between teacher salary students’ extracurricular tutoring. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 787 the chinese version of this article has been published in education science, 2019; 35(5):36-45. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 薛海平,高翔,范皑皑. (2019). 中小学教师工资水平对学生参与课外补习的影响研究. 教育科学, 35(5):36-45. article-haipingxue-bece_title_18sep2020 article-haipingxue-bece_maintext18sep2020 educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea sooyeon byun, robert e. slavin johns hopkins university, baltimore, md 21286, usa abstract. this paper investigates south korean educational responses to school closures amid the covid-19 pandemic, viewed with a risk and resilience framework. the covid-19 crisis emerged and worsened right before the beginning of the new school year (march 2) in south korea, and immediately led to students’ limited access to educational facilities. well-established it infrastructure and national curriculum facilitated the adoption of distance learning in south korean schools. however, educational inequality due to family influences, and financial instabilities in early care and education settings disrupted students’ optimal learning during the changes. the situation brought both benefits and challenges to south korean education system. the adoption of distance learning potentially downgraded overall educational quality, but it also provided opportunities to improve educational content and professional development for teachers, and to promote individualized learning for students. despite some challenges, distance learning was an effective alternative for south korean schools during the covid-19 crisis. more practical and research efforts are needed in order to reduce educational inequality and maximize the effectiveness of distance learning. best evid chin edu 2020; 5(2):665-680. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.or030. how to cite: byun, s., slavin, r.e. (2020) educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. best evid chin edu, 5(2):665-680. keywords: covid-19; distance learning; school closure; educational responses; online schooling; resilience. about the author: robert e. slavin, professor, school of education, johns hopkins university, 300 east joppa road 5th fl., baltimore, md 21286, usa. email: rslavin@successforall.org. correspondence to: sooyeon byun, school of education, johns hopkins university, 300 east joppa road 5th fl., baltimore, md 21286, usa. email: sbyun10@jhu.edu. conflict of interests: none. byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 666 he covid-19 crisis emerged during the winter break in south korea. it was just before the beginning of the new school year, which is typically march 2. the official first covid-19 case in south korea was identified on january 20. the situation rapidly worsened after february 18, which was the beginning of the community-level mass infection, involving approximately 10,000 additional cases over the following month. in the initial stage, most schools did not experience any serious learning disruption. only a few schools that had scheduled graduation ceremonies in late february had to modify their plans. all early care and education (ece) centers were operating fulltime. as the beginning of the new school year approached, however, south korean educational authorities had to make a series of difficult decisions to deal with the increasing health crisis. the winter break became longer for primary and secondary schoolers. young children were suddenly taken out of ece centers where they used to spend most of the day. the covid-19 pandemic brought an unprecedented educational challenge to schools and ece centers in south korea. this paper investigates south korean educational responses to school closure amid the covid-19 pandemic, viewed within a resilience framework. in the face of adversity, organizations should demonstrate resilience for survival, not only to rebound from the negative influences of the adversity, but also to use the situation as an opportunity for advancement and transformation (lengnick-hall et al., 2011). this study reviews the detailed process of educational responses to school closure in south korea, assessing risk and protective factors associated with the educational challenge. then we analyze positive and negative consequences of the educational responses, and provide practical and research implications for south korean schools and ece centers based on the findings. school closure and reopening in south korea the increased health risks associated with the covid-19 pandemic immediately led to students’ limited access to educational facilities. due to the strong contagiousness, high fatality rate, and the lack of a vaccine for the new coronavirus, school buildings were closed to prevent school-based mass infections. the ministry of education (moe; 2020a) delayed the beginning of the school year for 5 weeks. students were offered online self-directive learning materials during the period. teachers provided individualized social and emotional support to students and parents via electronic methods such as online learning platforms, phone calls, or sms messages. meanwhile, moe prepared for full-scale online schooling, collaborating with wireless service providers to expand web server capacity and traffic capacity of government-operated online learning platforms (park, 2020). starting on april 9 and gradually increasing until april 20, fullscale online schooling officially began for primary and secondary schools, starting late for the first time in south korean education history (moe, 2020a). during the period of school closure and online schooling, elementary schools offered emergency care services to children of working parents. t byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 667 moe had suggested that schools would physically open when daily new cases were maintained under 50 for more than 7 consecutive days (oh, 2020). however, moe waited until early may, when there were fewer than 50 new cases per day for almost a month, to officially announce a plan for physical reopening of schools. this initial plan was postponed for an additional week because small-sized community-level infections emerged locally right after a long holiday weekend in early may, involving more than 250 new cases. the official reopening of school buildings, although it was a partial opening, was phased in grade by grade from may 20 to june 8 (moe, 2020b). moe (2020d) only recommended 12th graders to come to school daily, and suggested reduced services to all other grades. only small schools with enough space could accommodate all students to come to school every day. each school surveyed parents to make decisions about how many days and hours students would physically come to school. in most schools, students were divided into multiple groups and each group alternately came to school for one to three days per week, or bi-weekly. distance learning was continued for the rest of the days. elementary schools seemed to be efficiently managing social distancing. schools implemented multiple preventive measures to keep children away from each other, from the school gate to the classroom. “we don’t let them go to the restroom together. we only give them a 5minute break, and even for the 5 minutes, we provide them individual activities to prevent them from playing with each other. we have partitions between each seat, and have foot stickers to keep the distance when children are lining up. we have thermal imaging cameras, hand sanitizers, and wet tissues in school, and encourage students to bring personal water bottles.” (a personal conversation with an elementary school teacher, june 15, 2020) similar efforts were going on in secondary schools, but older students who spent longer time in school reported difficulties in keeping the social distancing (e.g. lee, 2020). “…during the break, students walk arm in arm, chat without wearing masks, and fool around with each other, and teachers gave up on discipline.” (a newspaper column of a teacher; choi, 2020)” unlike primary and secondary schools, most ece centers in south korea were operating full-time when they encountered the covid-19 outbreak, because most centers only have a 1-week winter break at the end of december. south korean ece centers can be categorized into daycare centers and kindergartens. daycare centers serve children of ages 0 to 5, and are under the administration of the ministry of health and welfare (mhw). kindergartens serve children of ages 3 to 5, equivalent to preschools in the united states, and are under moe’s administration. beginning in march 2020, byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 668 both daycare centers and kindergartens are following a unified national ece curriculum emphasizing play-based learning. however, because daycare centers and kindergarten are governed by different governmental institutions, their responses toward the covid19 crisis varied slightly as well. following moe’s guidelines, kindergartens were closed on march 2, and reopened on may 27. daycare centers were officially closed on february 23 by mhw’s order (mhw, 2020a). the closure officially continued until the end of may, when mhw gave autonomy for local governments to decide whether they would extend the closure or reopen daycare centers. both kindergartens and daycare centers, however, provided emergency care services during the period of closure, and were not permitted to refuse children who requested the services. no distance learning contents were offered to preschool aged children at the national level. some kindergartens shared educational videos and learning packages with children, but many young children had to either stay at home without any official educational support, or attend ece centers using emergency care services with increased risks of infection. the attendance rate for ece centers’ emergency care services were 10% right after the closure, but it gradually increased and reached close to 70% in mid-may (choi, 2020; mhw, 2020b). social distancing is almost impossible in ece settings. there are not enough physical spaces to keep 1-meter distances in most ece centers in south korea, and more fundamentally, young children are not developmentally mature enough to follow instructions for social distancing (weber, 2020). during the emergency care services, ece centers in south korea could only utilize limited options to prevent infections, such as making children wear masks all day, and not accepting children with respiratory symptoms. “my daughters have to wear masks for the entire period that they stay in the center, from the moment that they step in until i pick them up. i feel sorry about this.” (a personal conversation with a parent of young children, april 20, 2020) “my son’s ece center is very sensitive about coughing or sneezing. when kids are coughing, the center refuses them even though they don’t have a fever. once, i went to the center to drop off my son in the morning, and the teacher refused to take him right in front of the door because he was coughing. i had to take him back home.” (a personal conversation with a parent of a young child, june 30, 2020) educational responses associated with risk and protective factors assets for distance learning byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 669 distance learning was in the center of educational responses to the covid-19 crisis in south korean primary and secondary schools. relying on distance learning, schools in south korea were expected to prevent school-based mass infection without compromising students’ academic learning. two key assets enabled the relatively smooth implementation of full-scale online schooling in south korea. first, the country benefited from its well-established it infrastructure. most regions in south korea are accessible to a highspeed wi-fi network, and devices for digital learning are widely utilized (e.g., silver, 2019). the digital learning platform used for online schooling was based on cloud servers. therefore, capacity could be rapidly scaled up just in nine days by increasing the number of cloud servers, so that they could handle the sudden surge of users (lee, 2020). access to smart devices was also not a problem for most schools. during the covid-19 crisis, only 0.2 million among 5.5 million students in primary and secondary schools reported that they needed to get devices for distance learning, and schools and local governments could easily rent their own devices to those students because they were equipped with more devices than they needed (lee, 2020). “for students, most already have electronic equipment such as a smartphone, laptop, desktop, or tablet. in my school, all 1,000 students have an electronic device for online learning and teaching.” (a blog post of a high school english teacher; hwang, 2020) second, having a national common core curriculum allowed the entire student population to easily transfer to online schooling. under a centralized education system, south korean schools have used a national curriculum for almost 70 years, since the end of the korean war (seth, 2002). as all schools are following the same curriculum, distance learning contents had already been developed and provided by the korea educational broadcasting system (ebs) for many years, based on the national curriculum. schools and students have been encouraged to actively engage with these distance learning contents, and to facilitate the engagement, korean college admission tests have intentionally incorporated those contents. based on the high-quality digital learning contents and know-how that have been accumulated for decades, south korean schools could deliver timely distance learning lessons despite the unprecedented covid-19 health challenges (shin, 2020). televising services and contents of ebs even enabled varying educational approaches depending on the ages of children to provide developmentally appropriate instruction. first and second graders were believed to be too immature to effectively engage in virtual communications, and were recommended not to be exposed to digital devices for long periods. most schools allowed these young children to take distance learning classes through ebs, without interacting with computers or smart devices (moe, 2020c), although some schools provided virtual learning opportunities to these children as well (lee, 2020). first and second graders also received physical learning packages to enable them to learn without accessing digital learning platform (lee, 2020). byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 670 “teachers shared the broadcasting schedule of ebs with parents so that they could turn on the television and show relevant lessons to children. parents of first and second graders could either access the ebs contents online or show them on television.” (a personal conversation with an elementary school teacher, june 15, 2020) challenges from family influences and financial instability although the assets and resources in education system and the society enabled quick implementation of large-scale online learning, schools and ece centers went through diverse risks for successful adjustment to the changes due to the covid-19 crisis, such as variabilities in family influences and financial instability in ece centers. variabilities in family influences south korean educational responses to the covid-19 crisis inevitably brought fundamental problems associated with family backgrounds. in south korea, the culture of ‘work from home’ is not settled yet, thus, only about 60% of workers could at least partially work from home even in the peak of the pandemic (shin, 2020). therefore, when schools were closed, working parents who were financially unable to hire a nanny, or find a family member who could take care of children, had to use emergency care services offered by schools or ece centers, potentially increasing the risk of covid-19 infection for their children (kim, 2020). moving toward partial school reopening, working parents had to worry about not being able to use emergency care services during distance learning days (lee & shin, 2020). “children go to school once a week and continue online schooling for the rest of the days, so if there are no emergency care services, working parents have to quit their jobs. emergency care services need to continue even after school reopening.” (an interview with a parent in a newspaper article; lee & shin, 2020) on the other hand, some stay-at-home parents complained about opening schools too early, and a few of them even chose to keep their children at home after school reopening to avoid possibilities of infection (kim, may 27 2020; yoo, 2020). “can you understand that, among two children living in the same place, one goes to school every day while another goes to school once in a couple of days? how can we keep children healthy amid school reopening determined by majority rule? why do you enforce school reopening in this ridiculous way while covid-19 is ongoing and there’s no remedy for it? please don’t forget what the most important thing is. school reopening should be postponed until either a vaccine or a remedy bebyun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 671 comes available for public.” (a petition for the blue house by a parent, may 26, 2020, https://www1.president.go.kr/petitions/589251) the covid-19 crisis uncovered a stark contrast of experiences between students from different family backgrounds. some were kept safe from every possible source of infection while some were forced to go to schools for emergency care services, dealing with increased health risks, during the period that they were not allowed to go to school. online schooling itself also created environments that magnified the function of families in students’ care and education, which enlarged the educational gap between highand low-income students (hwang, 2020). for instance, for distance learning, students had to follow a series of processes requiring strong it literacies, such as setting up computers, installing relevant software programs, accessing course websites, downloading resources, and submitting assignments. students with stay-at-home parents who were familiar with technology could easily follow these steps and adjust to the transition to distance learning. however, low-income students with limited access to digital technology, or students raised by grandparents who were more likely to be it-illiterate, experienced challenges in each of these processes (ju & lee, 2020). “as schools are reopening, i requested for a computer at the community center and received one to install at home. but the community center said that they can’t set it up, and i also couldn’t do that. so, it’s just sitting there (without being set up). … i can’t help her (=granddaughter) (because i don’t know anything). she’s sitting in front of the computer all day long, but i have no idea whether she’s studying or just surfing the web.” (an interview with a grandparent raising a sixth grader in a newspaper article; ju & lee, 2020) once students and families overcame all the initial barriers, they still had to be self-directive to efficiently manage time and schedules. taking classes per se only took several hours per day, but students then had to deal with long assignments (kang, 2020). without the physical presence of teachers, primary caregivers who can stay at home, or families who have financial capability to hire tutors to manage students’ efficient online learning, provide higher quality education to students (hwang, 2020). according to a recent survey, the average daily learning hours during online schooling was reduced to half of those in the regular school years (kang, 2020). however, many students, particularly those from middle class homes, individually received private education to make up the educational gap (kang et al., 2020). like many countries, south korea has long suffered from income-based educational gaps (byun & kim, 2010). in particular, widespread private education has functioned to worsen the educational inequality due to differential family influences. according to the korea national statistical office (2020), about 75% of students participated in private education in 2019, and the gap in receiving and expending on private https://www1.president.go.kr/petitions/589251 byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 672 education between lowand high-income families has been growing for the past several years. while at least some types of private education are found to have positive associations with improved academic achievement (e.g. byun, 2014), differential access to private education depending on family socioeconomic status already has been a critical contributor to educational inequality in south korea (choi & park, 2016). dealing with increased family responsibilities for care and education due to the covid-19 crisis, and with families’ greater reliance on private education using differential financial and social resources, the current situation is exacerbating this chronic challenge. financial instability in ece centers south korea provides universal preschool education to all children. primary caregivers can decide whether they will keep their children home and receive childcare subsidies, or send children to ece centers and let the government pay the base tuition. ece centers can charge additional costs from parents but the maximum amount is limited by the government. public ece centers tend to be financially stable under this financial structure because they receive government support to cover key expenses including teacher salary and facility repairs. private ece centers, however, have to take care of the key expenses by themselves, while the maximum costs that they can charge from parents are limited. therefore, without financial flexibility, losing children immediately results in financial burdens in private ece centers (lee & chung, 2016). for the first one or two months after the covid-19 outbreak, most parents chose to keep children at home. some parents cancelled the enrollment of their children at ece centers so that they could receive the childcare subsidies from the government (choi, 2020; kim, 2020). this caused a severe financial crisis in private ece centers, particularly in home-based childcare centers (small-sized daycare centers operating in an apartment unit or in a single home, usually having a maximum capacity of 21 children) which have the least financial flexibility among private ece centers. “home-based childcare centers are facing the most difficulties. as many children cancelled enrolment, classes were dissolved, and teachers lost jobs.” (from a discussion among educational professionals; p.243, kang et al., 2020) even though parents kept children enrolled in ece programs, many complained that the government was paying ece centers instead of families, while families were taking care of children. some refused to pay the monthly costs that they had to pay in addition to the base tuition paid by the government (choi, 2020). meanwhile, ece centers had to pay teacher salaries and rent because they were operating as usual to serve children using emergency care services. as a result, ece centers, particularly private kindergartens whose additional monthly costs are the greatest in general, encountered severe financial challenges due to the covid-19 crisis (kim, 2020). byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 673 “there really can be a riot among parents in april. they complain, ‘how can i pay anything when i never sent my child to your facility? my child never set foot in your classes.’” (an interview with an ece program director on television news; han, 2020) consequences of the educational responses dealing with school closure due to the covid-19 crisis, south korean schools and ece centers utilized assets and resources in the education system and the society to quickly adjust to the sudden changes in educational environment. however, some of the educational responses in south korea produced undesirable consequences in schools. one of the most prominent challenges was differential and downgraded educational quality. adopting distance learning, primary and secondary schools could choose whether to offer live classes, recorded classes, or assignment-based classes for distance learning. some teachers offered at least partial live classes while some only provided recorded classes. even with the recorded classes, teachers who have relevant it skills and knowledge recorded their own lectures, while many only shared the ebs learning contents (shin, 2020). teachers expressed concerns about the quality of contents and instruction because of the short period of preparation and limitations in the means of instruction. “teachers couldn’t be prepared enough because we were told to provide online learning classes in only one week.” (from a discussion among educational professionals; p.68, kang et al., 2020) “most teachers don’t have experiences in online classes. … (authorities) say that we can easily offer live classes using a smartphone, but if we do it without enough infrastructure or experience, and fail to meet students’ expectations, it can generate distrust in education in general.” (an interview with a high school teacher in a newspaper article; shin, j., 2020) “there was a tendency for downward leveling to keep everyone on the same pace in online classes.” (from a discussion among educational professionals; p.23, kang et al., 2020) students also expressed negative impressions about online classes. according to oh (april 23, 2020), in a survey of high school students, almost 70% of 12th graders and more than 55% of 10th and 11th graders reported that they felt negatively about online learning classes. about 40% of them said that the quality of education was much lower in online classes, and they were more difficult to focus on. more than 25% said that they experienced technological difficulties, and more than 15% said that there were limitations in assignments and evaluations (oh, april 23, 2020). byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 674 “if i only watch 60% of ebs contents, i’m marked as attended. … actually, i sometimes take a nap or do other things while ebs videos are being played. some of my friends studied for the college entrance tests during classes.” (an interview with a 12th grader in a newspaper article; shin, y., 2020) parents were concerned about the varying quality of learning depending on teachers. some parents were disappointed about the low quality of classes recorded by teachers, and some complained about teachers who only shared ebs contents, saying that those teachers were not doing their jobs (jeon, 2020; news1, 2020). because many students attended classes at home, parents who have multiple children could easily observe the classes and compare classes offered by different teachers and schools. “my younger child’s school has live classes, and shares videos recorded by teachers. but my older child’s school only plays ebs videos. as a parent, i naturally compare the two schools and teachers.” (an interview with a parent in a newspaper article; news1, 2020) despite the challenges, schools and ece centers in south korea also identified positive aspects of the changes associated with the covid-19 crisis, which can provide practical and research implications for potential advancement and transformation of the field of education in the future. first, some teachers felt that the new educational setting due to the covid-19 crisis provided increased opportunities for teachers to utilize more diverse resources in classes, and to spend more time for the improvement of learning contents and instructional quality, because of the flexibilities in time and schedule (lee, 2020). “there were improvements in preparation for classes and the quality of classes due to online schooling.” (an email communication with a teacher, may 30, 2020) in particular, teachers in ece settings felt that they benefited from the changes due to the covid-19 crisis. both kindergartens and daycare centers were transferring to a newly implemented play-based curriculum since march 2020, and the reduced classroom capacity provided opportunities for teachers to test and practice the new curriculum in more comfortable settings. “(daycare) teachers actually liked the situation that less children came to the center. they’d been worried about the transition to a play-based curriculum, and this situation allowed them to practice the new curriculum in the smaller classroom that they could handle more easily.” (a personal conversation with an early childhood researcher, may 18, 2020) byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 675 second, distance learning also enabled more effective individualized learning for students. students had increased flexibility because they could choose the best time to take the recorded classes and to work on assignments. teachers also had more flexibility time-wise so they could provide more individualized feedback to promote children’s learning. “online classes are good for students’ individualized learning. it is good that students can adjust the pace of the lecture, or take the same class repeatedly.” (an email communication with a teacher, may 30, 2020) “i feel that i never have given one-on-one feedback as deeply as what i’m doing these days. … i can see each of 27 children’s notebooks in detail, and can provide individualized responses. for the first time, the individualized learning became possible. when we were in the classroom altogether, this was impossible.” (from a discussion among educational professionals; p.21, kang et al., 2020) implications school closure and full-scale online schooling provided unexpected natural experiments in the field of education in south korea. it is too early to evaluate the effects of the educational responses to the covid-19 crisis in south korea. however, initial statistics show that at least online schooling was successful in providing learning opportunities to a broader range of students than was typical in normal schooling settings, even though it also increased family-based learning gap. online attendance rates reached up to 98.8%, which is higher than 93%, the usual attendance rates in the beginning of regular school years (nam, 2020; oh, april 22, 2020). jeon (2020) suggests that easy access to classes and increased flexibility in timing and format could have encouraged more students to attend classes. or, it could also be the case that teachers utilized more channels to encourage students’ participation in classes (jeon, 2020; oh, april 22, 2020). “students are marked as ‘attended’ if they cover more than 60% of the content. but many students do not take online classes on time, so their academic progress rates in the distance learning system often appear to be much lower than where they should be. teachers pester parents by texting, messaging, and calling, to make children take the classes so that they can be marked as attended. i think there are more difficulties among children to participate in distance learning classes, and more disruptions in learning.” (a personal conversation with an elementary school teacher, june 15, 2020) byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 676 the reliance on distance learning probably will continue for a while. even after the reopening, many schools are being closed daily due to new covid-19 cases rising in the neighborhood or within the school. whenever schools feel that the health of students and teachers are threatened due to the novel coronavirus, they can easily transfer back to full-time online schooling until the situation is relieved. the pandemic is expected to come back (wan & johnson, 2020), and it is not clear when the partial school reopening will be scaled up to full-scale physical schooling. the distance learning infrastructure that south korean schools has established this time will continuously enable schools to prioritize students’ health without compromising academic learning. moreover, as the quality of online learning classes rapidly improved over time, and after students and teachers experienced unexpected challenges in face-to-face schooling, public opinion is leaning toward online schooling. according to s. kim (2020), a recent survey showed that approximately 55% of students who experienced face-to-face schooling after online schooling expressed a preference for online schooling. “although i ask questions, students don’t answer that much. … since we’re all wearing masks, students sitting far from the teacher can’t hear the teacher’s voice well, and the teachers are affected because they have to speak loudly. … i’m not sure whether face-to-face classes are offering higher quality learning experiences to students than online classes.” (an interview with an elementary school teacher in a newspaper article; kim, 2020) “after children came back to school, we are actually controlling children more. … to be honest, school reopening is causing high stress for schools. however, we’re not sure whether having children in the school building with all these efforts will be more effective than online schooling. children who are coming to school only come once a week. even when they are in the school, they are not allowed to work together. parents who don’t want to send kids to school are still keeping children at home.” (a personal conversation with an elementary school teacher, june 15, 2020) with the mixed messages about online schooling and physical school reopening in the midst of the covid-19 crisis, and without scientific evidence on the effectiveness of both schooling methods, it is hard to make decisions on the best strategy to provide the most optimal education for children. however, based on some of the positive consequences of online schooling in the midst of the health crisis, distance learning can become an alternative strategy to increase access to high-quality education. rather than merely pointing out negative outcomes of online schooling, it may be the time to welcome the new era of education, and to concentrate research efforts to counteract educational inequality. byun & slavin. educational responses to the covid-19 outbreak in south korea. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 677 references byun, s. 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and lacks the exploration of elementary student autonomous learning outside the normal teaching scene. during the covid-19 epidemic, the second elementary school in daxie, ningbo city, zhejiang province adopted an online education model to carry out distance education activities and student academic counseling, and actively developed teaching practices for students’ independent learning at home. we discuss the teaching practice of home study for students during the school epidemic. best evid chin edu 2020; 4(2):535-541. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.rp009. keywords: covid-19 epidemic; the whole family; autonomous learning; online education; elementary school about the author: zhuodan xie, the second elementary school of daxie, ningbo 315812, zhejiang, china. email: 55479177@qq.com. correspondence to: jiani yang, jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 210013, jiangsu, china. email: 575751641@qq.com. conflict of interests: none. xie & yang. autonomous learning of elementary students during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 536 utonomous learning refers to the ability of learners to set learning goals, determine learning content and progress, choose learning techniques, monitor self-learning processes, and conduct self-assessments (holec, 1981). it helps students adjust their learning methods and coping strategies in a timely and proactive manner based on learning effects. studies have shown that students’ autonomous learning can effectively improve student learning performance (zhou & li, 2020), improve the effectiveness of student learning, and promote the cultivation of lifelong learning abilities cheng (guo, 2020). affected by the covid-19 epidemic, schools were unable to carry out teaching activities normally. on february 12, 2020, the ministry of education and the ministry of industry and information technology jointly issued the “notice on the work arrangement of” school’s out, but class’s on “during the extension of chinese elementary school”, advocating that “localities combine local learning resources and coordinate arrangements” to use the internet to achieve “school’s out, but class’s on”, i.e., “school is closed, but student learning is continuing online” or “online home study” (this refers to the official website of the chinese ministry of education: http://en.moe.gov.cn/), to provide services and support for students’ home study (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2020). in order to implement the requirements of the ministry of education and the provinces and cities for the “school’s out, but class’s on” during the prevention and control of the covid-19 epidemic, the second elementary school in daxie, ningbo city, zhejiang province made full use of the online education model to guide students to learn independently. in order to carry out distance education teaching activities and student academic counseling, strive to improve the quality of school students at home, cultivate students’ ability to learn at home, minimize the impact of epidemic prevention and control on teaching work in the new semester, and ensure the “school’s out, but class’s on” effectively. the basis of elementary student home-based selflearning practice during the covid-19 epidemic the school’s online education activities require a complete guidance system and welldesigned guidance materials as a guarantee. without a complete guidance system and well-designed guidance protocol and materials, the school’s online teaching activities cannot be carried out. in recent years, the school has actively explored a classroom guidance system based on protocol-guided learning and has achieved a series of results, which has provided basic guarantees for the homeschooling practice of elementary students during the covid-19 epidemic. schools independently develop learning protocol for students’ independent learning a xie & yang. autonomous learning of elementary students during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 537 protocol-guided learning is based on curriculum standards and teaching materials for middle and elementary school teachers, combining students’ academic situation and cognitive status, taking learning goals as the guidance, and questions as the core, and guiding students’ learning before, during, and after class (xia, 2020). since 2010, the school has independently developed task lists and protocolguided learning suitable for students’ learning. after years of accumulation, it has a relatively complete set of task lists and protocol-guided learning templates, and formed a more comprehensive protocol-guided learning task, writing and guidance process. during the epidemic, for the students to study at home independently, the school gave full play to the autonomy and school-based nature of the protocol-guided task list, and organized teachers to study the textbooks, syllabuses, and browse through various materials on the basis of students’ actual learning. break down the key and difficult knowledge, ask different types of questions, and equip them with a certain number of targeted practice questions to form a guided protocol and send them to students, allowing students to form autonomous learning through protocol-guided learning habit. exploring the teaching model of students’ autonomous learning the “student-centered” teaching model is based on teaching materials as a carrier, closely connecting practical problems with student learning, and focusing on cultivating students’ ability to collect information, analyze and solve problems, and then cultivate students’ innovative and practical abilities (lv & lv, 2019). through years of practice and research, our school has established a relatively complete classroom guidance system. this system changes students’ “passive learning” into active learning. implement two prerequisites: the learning prerequisite and the problem prerequisite. under the guidance of protocol-guided learning, students can reduce the difficulty of learning through self-directed learning, classroom practice, and consolidation after class. with the strategy of “taking students as the mainstay”, teachers can organically integrate and carefully design textbooks, and rationally control “learning” and “teaching” in classroom teaching. the purpose is to improve the learning style of students, expand the study time and space of students, and advocate students’ independent inquiry. through self-directed, cooperative, inquiry, exchange, display, feedback and other learning activities, students make students truly masters of learning. in ordinary classroom learning, by emphasizing learning prerequisites and problem prerequisites, the habit of students’ autonomous learning has gradually developed. therefore, in the face of the epidemic, students in our school can achieve nonclassroom teaching and teacher guidance use protocol-guided learning to complete autonomous learning. problems encountered by students in autonomous learning during the covid-19 epidemic xie & yang. autonomous learning of elementary students during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 538 due to the impact of the epidemic, schools could not carry out teaching activities normally. in order not to affect the normal teaching progress, the school actively responds to national policies, advocates students to learn at home independently, and uses the internet to achieve “school’s out, but class’s on”. however, in the specific implementation process, students often fail to learn autonomously due to various factors. the main issues are as follows: due to the different family conditions of students, it is impossible to achieve online learning that all students can participate in through a questionnaire survey across the school, it was found that 18.7% of the students in this school do not have mobile phones, ipads, computers and other electronic products; the mobile phone signal is too poor to account for 38.79%; the signal data is not enough to account for 22.41%; there are conflicts in time, only at night studying accounted for 31.03%; those who would not operate mobile computers accounted for 37.07%; and no city or district digital tv accounted for 39.66%. these factors have prevented the school from fully implementing live webcasting. lack of targeted autonomous learning materials in normal classroom teaching, teachers carefully design the teaching process according to the learning objectives of each lesson. by pinpointing the inherent connection between new and old knowledge, we can break through and break down the most difficult points of teaching. use the students’ existing knowledge and experience to guide students from known to unknown and reveal contradictions. students’ ability to cooperate and explore was developed through group discussions. in the network teaching, due to the limitation of conditions, teaching interaction cannot be realized, and students’ autonomous learning is more important. in the true sense of self-study, students should independently think through new self-study textbooks and reference books, relying on existing knowledge, experience, and methods, and learn to explore new knowledge independently. in this process, targeted selflearning materials are of great significance to promote students’ autonomous learning. most of the existing educational materials on the internet that can be used by students for independent learning are mechanically copying the textbooks, without scientifically deleting, adjusting, integrating, and supplementing the textbooks appropriately to suit the students’ actual situation. therefore, in the specific implementation of online teaching, due to the lack of targeted self-learning materials, students lack the goals and specific learning steps of self-study. they often simply watch instructional videos and complete uniform assignments, which cannot guarantee the learning effect. measures taken by students to study independently during the covid-19 epidemic xie & yang. autonomous learning of elementary students during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 539 aiming at the problems of students’ autonomous study at home during the epidemic, according to the actual situation of the school and referring to the accumulated experience in the past, the following measures were finally determined. strengthen the construction of online learning platforms to provide the basis for students’ autonomous learning due to the heterogeneous family conditions of school students, students cannot fully participate in online platform learning. the school builds an elementary student online learning platform according to local conditions. for the poor mobile phone signal, insufficient traffic, conflicts in time, can only learn at night, do not operate mobile computers, no problems with digital tv in ningbo or daxie, the school carried out through existing public communication platforms, such as qq group, wechat group online learning activities. the school mobilized subject teachers to record teaching microlecture videos in advance, and forwarded the corresponding videos to each class group the next day. parents can adjust the time by themselves and let the children watch anytime, anywhere to ensure that more children can learn online. teachers, students and parents are closely linked through qq group and wechat group. for a small number of students who do not have electronic products such as mobile phones, ipads, computers, the school arranges class teachers to contact students in real time to appease anxiety. it is required to submit a home study plan based on the school’s study plan and its own learning conditions, and to strengthen home-school communication during this time to ensure students’ physical and mental health. prepare targeted learning materials to promote students’ autonomous learning in response to the lack of students’ self-learning materials, the school organizes teachers in various disciplines to write and design a guided learning protocol. and make full use of this protocol in the online learning process, to help students clarify learning goals, grasp learning points, lead students to explore laws, improve practical ability, consolidate what they have learned, let students learn to think about problems, learn to summarize and reflect, and promote autonomous learning. school work is arranged as follows: 1. each class teacher designs a protocol-guided learning list according to the learning objectives of the teaching materials and the academic situation of the students, to make the knowledge organized and systematic. teachers of all disciplines set up lesson preparation groups, and the instructor uploads the designed protocol-guided learning list to the lesson preparation group. teachers of each lesson preparation member discuss and revise them. after the approval of the lesson preparation group leader, the final protocol-guided learning list is determined. 2. before the lesson, the teacher uploads the protocol-guided learning list to the class group, and asks the students to preview according to the protocol-guided learning list, and requires that they upload to the class group after completing xie & yang. autonomous learning of elementary students during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 540 the pre-reading part of the study plan, and the teacher corrects it. the protocolguided learning list presents learning goals in the form of questions or tasks, enabling students to clarify their learning goals in the preview process, while stimulating students ‘interest in autonomous learning, and promoting the improvement of students’ autonomous inquiry capabilities. 3. the teacher designs or adjusts the teaching micro-lectures according to the prereading assignments submitted by the students. after the students pre-learn through the protocol-guided learning list, they learn independently according to the high-quality micro-lectures uploaded by the teachers, and complete the classroom training in the process. the teacher explains the exercises in this part in the instructional micro-video. 4. the teacher arranges a small amount of homework according to the academic situation. the students complete the exercises and upload the homework to the class group. the teacher judges the student’s learning results and gives appropriate guidance. elementary student autonomous learning outside the normal teaching scale is a new topic. although the school has made corresponding attempts, due to the limitations of the school’s running conditions, especially the use of students’ information technology, many of the school’s practices are still very superficial, and need to be continuously researched in the future to promote the better development of elementary student autonomous learning activities. references china education daily (2020) there is no need to generally require teachers to record and broadcast courses-relevant persons in charge of the ministry 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(2020) can student selfdirected learning improve their academic performance? experimental evidence from the instruction of protocol-guided learning in china’s elementary and middle schools. sci insigt edu front, 5(1):469 -480. received: 05 march 2020 revised: 09 march 2020 accepted: 13 march 2020 report-jianiyang-bece_title_15mar2020 report-jianiyang-bece_maintext15mar2020 the non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning and its grade evaluation standard: taking tianjin as an example guangming wang, 1 jian li, 2 jingxian jian 3 1. tianjin normal university, tianjin 300387, china 2. people’s education press, beijing 100081, china 3. nankai elementary school, tianjin eco-city, tianjin 300467, china abstract. using the “middle school student mathematics learning nonintellectual questionnaire,” a total of 1,400 middle school students in 11 districts and counties of tianjin were surveyed. according to the data, using the raw score normalization method and the formula “t = 50+10×z”, the non-intellectual overall and sub-dimension norm table of middle school student math learning were established, and the corresponding grade evaluation standard was determined. using the results of this study, two types of application case analysis of class and individual were carried out, and corresponding suggestions were put forward based on the analysis results. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 7(1):907-922. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.ar007. how to cite: wang, g., li, j. & jian, j. (2021). the non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning and its grade evaluation standard: taking tianjin as an example. best evidence in chinese education, 7(1):907-922. keywords: middle school student; mathematics; non-intellectual; norm; grade evaluation standard about the authors: jian li, postdoctoral research station researcher, institute of curriculum and textbooks, people’s education press, beijing 100081, china. email: 471460647@qq.com; wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no.1, 2021 908 about the authors: jingxian jian, math teacher, nankai elementary school, tianjin eco-city, tianjin 300467, china. email: 541151139@qq.com. correspondence to: guangming wang, professor, chief, faculty of education, tianjin normal university, tianjin 300387, china. email: bd690310@163.com. funding: this study was supported by the tianjin teaching achievement cultivation project “development and practical application of mathematics learning evaluation tools” (project #: pyjj-036). conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 909 on-intellectual factors, as an essential part of influencing students’ learning and development, have received extensive attention in the fields of education and psychology. studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between non-intellectual factors of mathematics learning and mathematics academic performance (lv et al., 1995; wang, 2004; zhang, 2012). besides, non-intellectual factors are important influencing factors of mathematics learning efficiency (wang et al., 2014; wang et al., 2015; wang et al., 2017; wang & yang, 2015). although there are many non-intellectual evaluations of middle school students’ mathematics learning in previous studies (cao et al., 2015; yang et al., 2015), they lacked a unified evaluation basis and reference, and the measurement results cannot be analyzed under the same reference standard. therefore, it is indispensable to study the non-intellectual norm of middle school students in mathematics. based on the “middle school student mathematics learning non-intellectual questionnaire,” this study established the middle school student math learning non-intellectual norm and its grade evaluation standard and conducted a case analysis of this result. methods research tools this study chose the “middle school student math learning non-intellectual questionnaire” as the survey tool. the questionnaire is a five-level likert scale, consisting of five main dimensions (motivation, emotion, attitude, willpower, personality) and polygraph questions, all of which have good reliability and validity (wang & li, 2020). sample selection the study selected 1,400 6thand 7th-grade students in 11 districts and counties of tianjin to conduct a survey, and a total of 1,400 questionnaires were returned. first, through manual inspection, 56 questionnaires with regular and identical answers were deleted; then, 58 invalid questionnaires were deleted with the help of polygraph questions, and finally, 1,286 valid questionnaires were obtained, with an effective rate of 91.86%. data processing when entering data, the a-e options were counted as 5-1 point, and the reverse questions were counted as 1-5 points. after data entry was completed, use spss software for data processing. calculating the sufficient sample’s percentile rank determined the correspondence between the original score and the percentile rank. and then checked the normal distribution table with the help of percentile rank to get its corresponding standard score. to ensure the convenience of reading the score, the standard score was converted using the formula “t=50+10×z” to establish a non-intellectual norm table. n wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 910 table 1. non-intellectual level evaluation standards for mathematics learning. grade t score raw score x percentile rank pr low-level t < 32 x < 128 pr < 3.27 middle and lower 32 ≤ t < 44 128 ≤ x < 157 3.27 ≤ pr < 26.83 middle 44 ≤ t < 56 157 ≤ x < 181 26.83 ≤ pr < 70.53 middle and upper 56 ≤ t < 68 181 ≤ x < 201 70.53 ≤ pr < 95.80 excellent t ≥ 68 x ≥ 201 pr ≥ 95.80 table 2. “motivation” dimension grade evaluation standards. grade t score raw score x percentile rank pr low-level t < 32 x < 31 pr < 3.27 middle and lower 32 ≤ t < 44 31 ≤ x < 40 3.27 ≤ pr < 25.74 middle 44 ≤ t < 56 40 ≤ x < 47 25.74 ≤ pr < 69.52 middle and upper 56 ≤ t < 68 47 ≤ x < 54 69.52 ≤ pr < 96.19 excellent t ≥ 68 x ≥ 54 pr ≥ 96.19 figure 1. the t-score chart of the sub-dimension of the “motivation”. wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 911 according to the normal distribution theory, 99.74% of the values under the standard normal distribution fall within the interval [-3, 3], so first divided [-3, 3] into five equal intervals, and then used the formula “t=50+ 10×z” to get the corresponding t score interval, and then divided it into five different levels. finally, the t score interval was converted into a percentile grade interval to complete the grade evaluation standard’s establishment. results mathematics learning non-intellectual norm and its grade evaluation standard a middle school student’s mathematics learning non-intellectual norm (table omitted) and its corresponding grade evaluation standard (see table 1) are established according to the norm’s construction method through data sorting and analysis. the research was carried out from five main dimensions to diagnose the non-intellectual influence of students’ mathematics learning more precisely. “motivation” dimension norm and its grade evaluation standard according to the norm construction method, we established the “motivation” dimension norm (table omitted). second, divided the “motivation” dimension horizontally, and then formulated the corresponding grade evaluation standard (see table 2). finally, we calculated the average scores of students of different levels in the sub-dimensions of “cognitive motivation,” “extrinsic motivation,” and “achievement need” under the “motivation” dimension (see figure 1). based on figure 1, combined with the definition of the concepts and questions of the sub-dimensions of mathematics learning motivation (wang & li, 2020), students of different levels have the following characteristics: “excellent” students are curious about mathematics and like to study and explore; they have a vital purpose in learning mathematics and are eager to highlight their talents in mathematics learning. “middle and upper” students are interested in exploring mathematics knowledge, are motivated to learn, and like to participate in activities that can show their mathematics learning ability. “middle” students have specific goals and motivation to learn mathematics and show interest in learning mathematics and a desire to succeed. “middle and lower” students do not like to participate in math learning activities, show less desire for performance, do not like inquiry, and are more inclined to accept learning. “low-level” students lack interest in mathematics learning, hardly participate in math learning activities, and are unwilling to show their mathematics learning ability. wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 912 table 3. “emotion” dimension grade evaluation standard. grade t score raw score x percentile rank pr low-level t < 32 x < 25 pr < 3.03 middle and lower 32 ≤ t < 44 25 ≤ x < 33 3.03 ≤ pr < 23.59 middle 44 ≤ t < 56 33 ≤ x < 41 23.59 ≤ pr < 72.08 middle and upper 56 ≤ t < 68 41 ≤ x < 48 72.08 ≤ pr < 96.35 excellent t ≥ 68 x ≥ 48 pr ≥ 96.35 figure 2. the t-score chart of the sub-dimension of the “emotion”. table 4.”attitude” dimension grade evaluation standard. grade t score raw score x percentile rank pr low-level t < 32 x < 32 pr < 3.19 middle and lower 32 ≤ t < 44 32 ≤ x < 39 3.19 ≤ pr < 24.57 middle 44 ≤ t < 56 39 ≤ x < 45 24.57 ≤ pr < 69.75 middle and upper 56 ≤ t < 68 45 ≤ x < 49 69.75 ≤ pr < 93.39 excellent t ≥ 68 x ≥ 49 pr ≥ 93.39 wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 913 figure 3. the t-score chart of the sub-dimension of the “attitude”. table 5. “willpower” dimension grade evaluation standards. grade t score raw score x percentile rank pr low-level t < 32 x < 17 pr < 2.72 middle and lower 32 ≤ t < 44 17 ≤ x < 23 2.72 ≤ pr < 25.27 middle 44 ≤ t < 56 23 ≤ x < 28 25.27 ≤ pr < 72.38 middle and upper 56 ≤ t < 68 28 ≤ x < 32 72.38 ≤ pr < 96.35 excellent t ≥ 68 x ≥ 32 pr ≥ 96.35 table 6. “personality” dimension grade evaluation standards. grade t score raw score x percentile rank pr low-level t < 32 x < 15 pr < 3.27 middle and lower 32 ≤ t < 44 15 ≤ x < 20 3.27 ≤ pr < 26.59 middle 44 ≤ t < 56 20 ≤ x < 24 26.59 ≤ pr < 71.23 middle and upper 56 ≤ t < 68 24 ≤ x < 27 71.23 ≤ pr < 92.22 excellent t ≥ 68 x ≥ 27 pr ≥ 92.22 wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 914 figure 4. the t-score chart of the sub-dimension of the “willpower”. figure 5. the t-score chart of the sub-dimension of the “personality”. wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 915 “emotion” dimension norm and its grade evaluation standard first, establish the “emotion” dimension norm according to the norm construction method (table omitted). secondly, divide the “emotion” dimension horizontally, and then formulate the corresponding grade evaluation standard (see table 3). finally, calculate the average scores of students of different levels in the sub-dimensions of “emotional stability,” “learning anxiety,” and “learning efficacy” under the “emotion” dimension (see figure 2). based on figure 2, combined with the conceptual definition and questions of each sub-dimension of emotion (wang & li, 2020), it was found that students of different levels have the following characteristics: “excellent” students have reasonable control over their emotions and can effectively control and regulate their emotions; they like to learn mathematics, basically do not have negative emotions, and have a high sense of learning efficiency. “middle and upper” level students understand themselves and occasionally produce destructive emotions but can control and adjust them in time; they have less negative emotions when learning mathematics, they recognize their ability to learn mathematics, and have the confidence to learn math well. “middle” students can be aware of their destructive emotions and control them, but will not adjust them; they will become anxious because they are worried about not being able to learn mathematics and are optimistic about their ability to learn mathematics, but think they need to work hard. “middle and lower” students can perceive their own deficient or excessive emotions, but they cannot control and regulate them well and need help from others. they will have negative emotions such as fear and tension when they study mathematics, and they lack confidence in their math level. “low-level” students will have deficient or excessive emotions due to learning mathematics, but they can hardly perceive and control their emotions and need guidance from others; they have repulsive emotions toward math learning and lack positive emotional experience. “attitude” dimension norm and its grade evaluation standard according to the norm construction method, establish the “attitude” dimension norm (table omitted). secondly, divide the “attitude” dimension horizontally, and then formulate the corresponding grade evaluation standard (see table 4). finally, calculate the average scores of students of different levels in the sub-dimensions of “view of mathematics,” “belief in learning,” and “sense of learning responsibility” under the “attitude” dimension (see figure 3). based on figure 3, combined with the concept definition and questions of each sub-dimension of attitude (wang & li, 2020), it is found that students of different levels have the following characteristics: “excellent” students believe that mathematics is a valuable subject; mathematics learning should be systematic and comprehensive, and rules and skills need to be summarized in time; learning mathematics must emphasize wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 916 methods, strive to avoid errors, and always actively complete mathematics tasks with quality and quantity. the “middle and upper” level students have a more objective understanding of mathematics knowledge and value; they believe that learning mathematics must know how to summarize the methods that suit them and actively complete math learning tasks. “middle” students can correctly understand mathematics and the meaning of learning mathematics, but their learning enthusiasm is average; they think that learning mathematics does not require too many skills, and students can complete learning tasks but lack initiative. “middle and lower” students have a somewhat subjective and one-sided understanding of mathematics knowledge and value; they believe that they can learn mathematics by rote and can complete their learning tasks under supervision. “low-level” students have some deviations in their understanding of mathematics; they think that learning mathematics is meaningless and cannot understand mathematics more profoundly, and they think that mathematics learning does not need to be methodological and hardly complete the learning tasks actively. “willpower” dimension norm and its grade evaluation standard according to the norm construction method, establish the dimension norm of “willpower” (table omitted). secondly, divide the dimension of “willpower” horizontally, and then formulate the corresponding grade evaluation standard (see table 5). finally, calculate the average scores of students of different levels in the sub-dimensions of “selfdiscipline” and “persistence” under the “willpower” dimension (see figure 4). based on figure 4, combined with the definition of the concepts and questions of the sub-dimensions of willpower (wang & li, 2020), it is found that students of different levels have the following characteristics: “excellent” students can formulate corresponding math learning plans and review plans based on their own and can complete learning tasks in strict accordance with the plan and review them in time, never give up quickly, and have a persevering learning spirit. “middle and upper” level students are able to complete their self-made study plan more seriously, remind themselves to concentrate when studying mathematics, maintain a state of listening carefully, and be able to persist in studying mathematics. “middle” students can basically implement their mathematics learning plan, and sometimes the plan will fail or appear without conscientiousness; when learning mathematics, they cannot maintain the learning state for a long time and occasionally need teacher reminders. “middle and lower” students will occasionally implement mathematics study plans carefully; they cannot guarantee full energy, comfortable slack, and lack of perseverance when studying mathematics. “lowlevel” students seldom study and review as planned and hardly make a study plan; they tend to get distracted when studying mathematics and tend to give up or escape when they encounter learning difficulties. “personality” dimension norm and its grade evaluation standard wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 917 figure 6. the t-score chart of five main dimensions of non-intellectual mathematics learning of the tested class. according to the norm construction method, establish the “personality” dimension norm (table omitted). secondly, divide the “personality” dimension horizontally, and then formulate the corresponding grade evaluation standard (see table 6). finally, calculate the average scores of students of different levels in the sub-dimensions of “questioning spirit” and “competitive spirit” under the “personality” dimension (see figure 5). based on figure 5, combined with the definition of the concept of each subdimension of personality and the questions (wang & li, 2020), it is found that students of different levels have the following characteristics: “excellent” students are good at asking questions; when they are inconsistent with others or books, they dare to question teachers or authorities; they are not to be left behind in mathematics learning, strive to show themselves, be aggressive, and eager to surpass others. “middle and upper” students, when they are inconsistent with others or books, often have questions, ask questions, like competition, and hope to surpass other students. “middle” students can show a psychological tendency to surpass others, and occasionally ask questions when their views are inconsistent with those of others or books. “middle and lower” students occasionally have questions when studying mathematics, but they rarely raise doubts; although they want to surpass others in mathematics learning, they are not good at expressing themselves. “low-level” grade students are not good at expressing their opinions, basically do not ask questions, have no willingness to show, surpass others, and do not care about math scores. wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 918 application cases of norm and grade evaluation standard class application case non-intellectual diagnosis of mathematics in the subject’s class in this study, a total of 44 7th-grade students from tianjin of china were selected as subjects, and 40 valid questionnaires were returned, with an effective rate of 90.9%. the 40 students in the class were regarded as a whole, and a comparative analysis with the students in the city was carried out to understand the group’s general level of nonintellectual mathematics learning. the original non-intellectual average score of mathematics learning among the subjects was 166.10, which exceeded 42.15% of middle school students in tianjin of china. comparing it with table 1, the subjects’ nonintellectual mathematics learning was at the middle level in tianjin. the nonintellectual dimension t scores of the subjects in mathematics learning were: 49.70 (motivation), 48.67 (emotion), 55.04 (attitude), 49.03 (willpower), 49.80 (personality). starting from the five main dimensions, further diagnosis and analysis of the subject class were made. from figure 6, in the dimension of motivation, the subject’s class was equivalent to the “middle” level of middle school students in tianjin; it was slightly lower than the “middle” level of middle school students in the city in terms of emotion, willpower, and personality; the class of the subjects was significantly higher than the “middle” level of the city’s middle school students. suggestions for improvement of non-intellectual mathematics learning in the tested class the analysis shows that the subjects’ non-intellectual math learning is at the “middle” level in tianjin as a whole, and the five main dimensions of motivation, emotion, attitude, willpower, and personality are all at the “middle” level in tianjin. overall, the students in this class have a strong sense of responsibility for learning and are competitive; their learning anxiety, persistence, and questioning spirit are slightly lower than tianjin’s “middle” level. in mathematics teaching, teachers should enhance students’ perception of the intrinsic value and fun of mathematics learning and guide students to effectively regulate and monitor their learning activities through positive learning attitudes and emotional experience (du & liu, 2017). it is also suggested that the teacher make full use of the students’ strong sense of responsibility and competitive spirit. studying mathematics often encounters difficult problems, and some students tend to be afraid of difficulties and give up. in response to this kind of phenomenon, on the one hand, teachers can provide students with “scaffolding” to reduce the difficulty of the problem; on the other hand, they can help students improve their ability to learn math wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 919 figure 7. the t-score chart of the 13 sub-dimensions of non-intellectual mathematics learning of individual subjects. ematics to achieve the purpose of solving problems. besides, teachers should also pay attention to encouraging students to speak positively, question boldly, and always pay attention to students’ psychological state to help students with learning difficulties deal with destructive emotions in time. individual application cases non-intellectual diagnosis of subject’s individual mathematics learning after understanding the situation with the tested class’s mathematics teacher and obtaining the students’ consent, a tested class student who had studied hard but had not satisfactory results was selected as the research object. the non-intellectual dimension t scores of the student’s mathematics were: 55.10 (cognitive motivation), 47.60 (external motivation), 50.30 (achievement need), 61.60 (emotional stability), 55.60 (learning anxiety), 56.90 (sense of learning efficacy), 52.80 (view of mathematics), 59.30 (learning belief), 58.80 (learning responsibility), 49.80 (self-discipline), 44.70 (persistence), 54.30 (competitive spirit), 51.60 (questioning spirit). the overall original average score of the student’s non-intellectual math learning was 176. according to table 1, he was wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 920 at the “middle” level of tianjin middle school student, and further diagnosis and analysis of each sub-dimension would be continued. figure 7 shows the t scores of the thirteen sub-dimensions of non-intellectual mathematics learning. simultaneously, combined with the data analysis in table 2 to table 6, this student’s cognitive motivation was significantly higher than the city’s “middle” students’ level. the external motivation was slightly lower than the level of the city’s “middle” students. achievement needs to be comparable to the average level of the city’s “intermediate” students. the students’ emotional stability, learning anxiety, and sense of learning efficacy were significantly higher than the city’s “middle” level students but slightly lower than the city’s “middle and upper” level students. the students’ learning beliefs and responsibility was slightly lower than the city’s “middle and upper” students and significantly higher than the city’s “middle” level students. the student’s view of mathematics was slightly higher than the level of the city’s “middle” students and lower than the city’s “middle and upper” students. the student’s selfdiscipline was slightly lower than the city’s “middle” level students, and its persistence was lower than the city’s “middle” level students. the students’ questioning spirit and competitive spirit were slightly higher than those of the city’s “middle” level students. suggestions for non-intellectual improvement of subject’ individual mathematics learning the non-intellectual level of the student’s mathematics learning is at the “middle” level in tianjin, and the dimensions of motivation, willpower, and personality are all at the “middle” level in tianjin, while the two dimensions of emotion and attitude are at the “middle” level in tianjin. the analysis shows that this student’s external motivation sub-dimensions and persistence sub-dimensions need to be further improved. studies have shown that learning motivation can directly affect academic achievement and indirectly affect academic achievement by transforming motivations and learning behavior (gao & chen, 2017). therefore, learning motivation can directly or indirectly affect students’ mathematics learning performance. so it is necessary to strengthen students’ learning motivation for students’ math learning. the external motivations of students’ math learning mainly come from schools, teachers, and parents. many schools will commend students with outstanding performance or progress, which is an effective way to strengthen students’ external motivation. in addition, because students’ persistence in learning is affected by many factors, teachers and parents can also stimulate their motivation through spiritual rewards. when students learn mathematics, teachers and parents should be good at discovering students’ progress and shining points and giving timely praise and encouragement to be spiritually encouraged and affirmed and then more motivated to learn mathematics. simultaneously, teachers are the guides and collaborators of students, and they have a significant influence on students (gao & chen, 2017). in the process of mathematics learning, teachers should consciously cultivate students’ perseverance character; pay attention to the differences between individuals and teach students per their aptitude; wang et al. non-intellectual norm of middle school students’ mathematics learning. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 921 encourage students to find role models in the class and learn from the students with strong willpower around them; thereby creating a good class learning atmosphere. establish a non-intellectual norm for middle school students' math learning, so as to facilitate the comparison between different dimensions of non-intellectual factors of students’ math learning. after the subjects were tested, some studies only performed descriptive statistics and level comparisons of questionnaire scores. it is difficult to use the scores of subjects to explain their objective performance level on non-intellectual. this research makes up for this deficiency. however, norm research results have certain regional and time-sensitive limitations. these research results are based on middle school students in tianjin of china, so they can only be used for reference in tianjin and other areas with similar education levels. with the rapid development of the times, the non-intellectual factors of students’ mathematics learning in different periods may also undergo group changes. therefore, the norm and grade evaluation standard established by our study need to be updated regularly. references cao, r., yu, c., & yu, y. 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(2020). 初中生数学学习非智力水平常模及其等级评价标准研究: 以天津市 为例 . 教育理论与实践, 40(20):44-48. https://doi.org/10.16826/j.cnki.1009-7228.2017.03.011 https://doi.org/10.16826/j.cnki.1009-7228.2017.03.011 http://www.cqvip.com/qk/87994x/201401/48585961.html http://www.cqvip.com/qk/87994x/201401/48585961.html https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=sxjyxb201503004 https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=sxjyxb201503004 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1000-5757.2004.12.041 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1000-5757.2004.12.041 http://www.cqvip.com/qk/83877x/201510/666377515.html http://www.cqvip.com/qk/83877x/201510/666377515.html https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1002-0845.2012.04.027 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1002-0845.2012.04.027 article-guangmingwang-bece_title_29jan2021 article-guangmingwang-bece_maintext29jan2021 bece. newsletter vol.6, no.1, 2020 791 the benefits to students of helping others by lu, c., jiang, y., zhao, x., & fang, p. correspondence to: fang, p. email: pingf2007@126.com eachers would be grateful if students adopted the positive social custom of “one for all, all for one”. however, would helping others be beneficial to the students themselves? a recent study published in journal of happiness studies examined whether the altruistic personality trait of chinese students contributed to their life satisfaction. the study conducted a survey of 428 students from schools in east china, of which 148, 139, and 141 were drawn from, respectively, primary schools, junior high schools, and senior high schools. students were assessed for their altruism, life satisfaction, positive and negative emotions. altruism was measured in terms of sociability, empathy, social responsibility, and interpersonal trust. the findings were as follows:  adolescents who have higher levels of altruism were found to have more positive emotions, fewer negative emotions. their life satisfaction was also higher.  empathy, social responsibility, and interpersonal trust positively predicted life satisfaction.  on the other hand, no direct relationships were found between sociability and life satisfaction. the authors suggested that the results revealed insights for educating adolescents. they recommended providing students with empathy training, cultivation of social responsibility, and education on interpersonal trust. source: journal of happiness studies, 2020; 21(4):1407-1425. t bece. newsletter bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1348 differences in instruction efficacy between oncampus and online teaching by yang, c., cheng, b. d., & zheng, y. correspondence to: cheng, b. d., beijing forestry university, china. e-mail： baodongcheng@163.com he study, published in china higher education research, takes 1,630 undergraduates enrolled in 2019 and 2020 in university x as analysis sample. it conducts an empirical analysis of differences in instruction efficacy between on-campus and online teaching from the perspectives of class interaction, teaching atmosphere and student characteristics, and examines the influencing mechanism of online teaching efficacy. the propensity score matching method (psm) is employed to analyze the differences in instruction efficacy and the degree of difference. in addition, the poisson regression model is used to examine the factors influencing online teaching efficacy. the findings are as follows.  there is a significant difference in instruction efficacy between on-campus and online teaching. the teaching patterns have a moderately strong influence on the test scores. other interfering factors controlled, the online group score an average of 3.84 points lower than the on-campus group.  class interaction is an important factor affecting the instruction efficacy, and the intensity of interaction has a significant positive impact on grades. teachers can significantly improve the efficacy of online teaching by adopting various interactive methods such as audio and video live broadcasting and increasing the frequency of interaction with students.  the characteristics of teaching soft environment have certain influence on instruction efficacy. it is found that the efficacy of online teaching in experimental class is stronger than that in ordinary classes. moreover, the relevance of the courses to students’ majors has a significant impact on their academic performance. in other words, students are more likely to have better academic performance in courses with higher relevance to their majors than in those with lower relevance to their majors. t mailto:baodongcheng@163.com bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1349  instruction efficacy is also affected by the individual characteristics. for instance, the efficacy of online teaching is lower for students in remote areas than for average peers, limited by the underdeveloped network infrastructure; it is also weaker for foreign students than for the average.  statistically, teaching software, teachers' experience, students' genders and the ways of enrollment (whether enrolled by uniform exams) and other factors have no significant impact on students’ academic achievements. based on the research findings, the study suggests that at the undergraduate education level, online teaching should be applied cautiously rather than replacing on-campus teaching completely; try not to select students in remote areas as subjects for online teaching experiment as they may have difficulty in adapting themselves to comprehensively electronized teaching; in online teaching, teacher-student interaction should be attached more importance to form a decentralized two-way communication pattern and the relatively equal teacher-student relationship typical in network teaching be fully utilized to promote students' exploration ability in their pro-active pursuit of knowledge. source: china higher education research, 2021(12):23-29. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1197 task performance report on the study of social and emotional skills of chinese adolescents (i) xingyuan gao, hongyan chen, jie wu, & jingzhong huang east china normal university, shanghai 200241, china ask performance is greatly significant in the field of education. the oecd defines task performance as the ability to function based on conscientiousness in the “big five” personality domains. people with high task performance tend to also have significant conscientiousness. in other words, they are more self-controlled, more responsible, and more persistent. as a result, they focus well on tasks and earn better grades. task performance includes self-control, responsibility, and perseverance. the study surveyed 3,647 10-year-old students and 3,621 15-year-old students in suzhou (china) on their task performance by using selfassessment questionnaires, parent surveys, and teacher evaluation. the main results of the study are as follows: the overall status of task performance in general, suzhou (china) students’ self-assessment of task performance is higher on average than their international peers (and significantly higher than the international average of 500 points). the 10-year-olds also rated their task performance higher than the 15-year-olds. after calculating the pearson correlation coefficients among self-control, responsibility, perseverance, and 12 sub-abilities of other four abilities under task ability, it became clear that responsibility was the most correlated with perseverance (the 10-year-olds r = 0.72; the 15-year-olds = 0.72), followed by self-control and perseverance (the 10-year-olds r = 0.66; the 15-year-olds r = 0.60). in relation to other abilities, perseverance, and empathy (the 10 © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. t bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1198 year-olds r = 0.67), sense of responsibility, perseverance and cooperation (r = 0.67; r = 0.69), perseverance was highly correlated with curiosity (the 10year-olds r = 0.69). to further explore whether students with high task performance also perform well in other abilities, this study further explores whether high-level students in the top 25% of self-control, responsibility, and perseverance can also become the top 25% of high-level students with other abilities. the results showed that, in the 10-year-old group, the proportion of the students with high self-control in the four items of trust, happiness, courage, and vitality was less than 50%. in the 15-year-old group, the proportion of students with high self-control in 10 items of high ability, such as resistance to pressure, optimism, empathy, trust, cooperation, tolerance, creativity, teamwork, determination, and vitality, is less than 50%. in the 10-year-old group, the proportion of students with a high sense of responsibility in the three high abilities (trust, happy group, and courage) is less than 50%. in the 15-yearold group, the proportion of students with a high sense of responsibility scoring high in resistance to pressure, optimism, emotion control, trust, tolerance, creativity, cheerfulness, determination, and vitality, is less than 50%. in the 10-year-old group, the proportion of the students with a high perseverance in trust, teamwork and determination was less than 50%. in the 15-year-old group, the proportion of students with a high perseverance in resisting pressure, tolerance, fun, and determination was less than 50%. overall, the proportion of students scoring high in different abilities was higher in the 10year-old group than in the 15-year-old group. the only exception was that the high-grit 15-year-olds had a higher proportion of high conscientiousness than the 10-year-olds. in terms of the age difference, according to the self-assessment results, the 10-year-olds were more competent than the 15-year-olds in all task performances, especially the sense of responsibility. teacher evaluations showed that 10-year-olds outperformed 15-year-olds in both conscientiousness and perseverance. parents’ evaluations showed that the 15-year-olds outperformed the 10-year-olds in all task performances. in terms of gender difference, the 10-year-old girls were significantly more than boys in self-control (p = 0.01), sense of responsibility (p < 0.01) and perseverance (p = 0.01). among the 15-year-olds, boys’ self-control (p < 0.01) and perseverance (p < 0.01) were significantly higher than girls’. as for effect size, the differences were low, to the extent that even in the 15year-old group with the highest effect size, the cohen’s sd was only 0.22. in terms of the difference between urban and rural areas, all students in the central urban schools are significantly more than the rural students in self-control (p < 0.01), sense of responsibility (p < 0.01), and perseverance (p < 0.01). from the perspective of effect size, differences in ability were low, and the highest effect size derived from the sense of responsibility and perseverance in the 10-year-old group (cohen’s sd = 0.23). the research in the educational environments themselves mainly explores the differences between general high school and vocational high bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1199 school among 15-year-old students. the results show that the boys in ordinary high school have higher self-control than those in vocational high school. in other indicators, there was no significant difference between boys and girls, ordinary high school students, and vocational high school students. predictive variable analysis of task performance this study selected variables related to student questionnaires and teacher questionnaires so as to form background variables, individual factors, family upbringing, teacher factors, and school factors. it adopted multiple linear regressions to explore five major factors affecting students’ task performance. in terms of background variables, the study found that at age 10, gender (female) (p < 0.01, β = 0.02, 0.05, 0.02), family possession (p < 0.01, β = 0.27, 0.22, 0.27) and family book collection (p < 0.01, β = 0.08, 0.12, 0.10) were all positive and significant effects on students’ self-control, sense of responsibility and perseverance. month age had a positive and significant effect on self-control (p < 0.01, r = 0.02). home equipment had a negative and significant effect on perseverance (p < 0.01, β = -0.01). in the 15-year-old group, monthly age (p < 0.01, β = 0.03, 0.03, 0.02), parental education (p < 0.01, β = 0.05, 0.03, 0.03), family ownership (p < 0.01, β = 0.17, 0.14, 0.20), and family book collection (p < 0.01, β = 0.07, 0.08, 0.08) positively and significantly affected students’ self-control, sense of responsibility and perseverance. gender (female) (p < 0.01, β = -0.14, -0.04, -0.12) for all subabilities and home devices (p < 0.01, β = -0.03, -0.03) had a negative and significant effect on self-control and perseverance. in terms of the student variable, the study found that in the 10-year-old group, the individual factors of students included security (p < 0.01, β = 0.23, 0.23, 0.29), friendship (p < 0.01, β = 0.13, 0.17, 0.16), friends with good habits (p < 0.01, β = 0.19, 0.20, 0.21), and indoor activity time (p < 0.01, β = 0.02, 0.03, 0.02), outdoor activity time (p < 0.01, β=0.03, 0.07, 0.06) and growth thinking (p < 0.01, β = 0.03, 0.05, 0.05) had positive and significant effects on students’ self-control, responsibility and perseverance. at the same time, high expectations of friends (p < 0.01, β = -0.01, -0.01) had a negative and significant effects on sense of responsibility and perseverance, friendly classmates on perseverance (p < 0.01, β = -0.01), and extensive social relations (p < 0.01, β = -0.02) had negative and significant effects on self-control. time spent online (p < 0.01, β = -0.04, -0.07, -0.05) had a negative and significant effect on self-control, responsibility and perseverance. in the 15-year-olds group, the individual factors of students included security (p < 0.01, β = 0.11, 0.20, 0.28), friendship (p < 0.01, β=0.10, 0.14, 0.12), good habit friends (p < 0.01, β = 0.14, 0.13), classmate friendliness (p < 0.01, β = 0.05, 0.05, 0.02), extensive social relationships (p < 0.01, β = 0.04, 0.02, 0.04), indoor activity time (p < 0.01, β = 0.03, 0.05, 0.07), outdoor activity time (p < 0.01, β = 0.05, 0.06, 0.07) and growth thinking (p < 0.01, β = 0.09, 0.11, 0.12) had positive and significant effects on students’ self-control, re bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1200 sponsibility and perseverance. comparatively, high expectations of friends (p < 0.01, β =-0.02) had a negative and significant effect on sense of responsibility. time spent online (p < 0.01, β = -0.08, -0.10, -0.13) also had a negative and significant effect on self-control, responsibility and perseverance. for the teacher variable, in the 10-year-old group, age of teaching (p < 0.01, β = 0.04, 0.01, 0.01), educational background (p < 0.01, β = 0.01, 0.02, 0.03), frequency of participation in social and emotional ability training (p < 0.01,β=0.05, 0.02, 0.04), and teacher-student relationship (p < .01, β = 0.18, 0.19, 0.20) had positive and significant effects on students’ task ability. among them, the teacher-student relationship had the most positive influence. teachers’ high expectations (p < 0.01, β = 0.04, 0.01) had a positive and significant effect on self-control and responsibility, though it did not have a positive effect on perseverance. the chance to participate in training related to social and emotional competence (p < 0.01, β = -0.02, -0.02, -0.02) had a negative and significant effect. in the 15-year-old group, the teacher-student relationship (p < 0.01, β = 0.15, 0.20, 0.20) had the largest positive and significant influence, while the teacher’s teaching age and their training opportunities had no significant influence on any of the sub-abilities. teacher training frequency (p < 0.01, β = -0.02, -0.01, -0.01) had a negative and significant effect on all sub-abilities. in terms of the school variables, in the 10-year-old group, school belonging (p < 0.01, β = 0.26, 0.32, 0.33), school cooperation atmosphere (p < 0.01, β = 0.15, 0.17, 0.17) and off-campus activities (p < 0.01, β = 0.07, 0.08, 0.11) had positive and significant effects on students’ task ability. school belonging had the greatest positive impact. bullying (p < 0.01, β = -0.03, -0.01) had a negative and significant effect on self-control and perseverance. results among 15-year-olds were similar to those for the 10-year-olds. among them, school belonging (p < 0.01, β = 0.13, 0.27, 0.29) and school cooperation atmosphere (p < 0.01, β = 0.12, 0.11, 0.13) had the most positive and significant influences. additionally, school bullying (p < 0.01, β = -0.09, 0.05, -0.05) had a negative and significant effect. in terms of family variables, in the 10-year-old group, considerate mother (p < 0.01, β = 0.08, 0.12, 0.13), punishment mother (p < 0.01, β = 0.05, 0.05, 0.05), considerate father (p < 0.01, β = 0.12, 0.11, 0.14), and high parental expectations (p < 0.01, β = 0.15, 0.13, 0.13) positively and significantly affected students’ self-control, sense of responsibility and perseverance. paternity problems (p < 0.01, β = -0.15, -0.13, -0.15) had a negative and significant effect on all child abilities, while punitive fathers (p < 0.01, β = -0.02, -0.02) had a negative and significant effect on conscientiousness and perseverance. in the 15-year-old group, considerate mothers (p < 0.01, β = 0.09, 0.10, 0.09), considerate (p < 0.01, β = 0.10, 0.13, 0.14), punishment fathers (p < 0.01, β = 0.03, 0.07, 0.07), and high parental expectations (p < 0.01, β = 0.09, 0.11, 0.12) positively and significantly affected students’ selfcontrol, as well as their sense of responsibility and perseverance. parent-child problems (p < 0.01, β = -0.12, -0.16, -0.22) had a certain negative and significant impact on self-control, sense of responsibility, and perseverance, while bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1201 punitive mothers (p < 0.01, β = -0.03, -0.02, 0.02) had a negative and significant impact on self-control and sense of responsibility, but they positively and significantly affected perseverance. task performance and life this study further used multiple linear regression to explore how students’ task performance affects students’ academic achievement and educational expectations, global consciousness, social relationships (whether they are close to family, close to others), health, quality of life (happiness, satisfaction, test anxiety) and other life outcomes. in the categories of achievement and educational expectations, in the 10-year-old group, self-control and sense of responsibility positively and significantly affect students’ expectations of chinese, mathematics, art, and education. perseverance also has a positive and significant effect on mathematics, art, and educational expectations, but the positive effect on chinese achievement is insignificant. the results for the 15-year-olds were inconsistent with those for the 10-year-olds. self-control has a positive and significant effect on achievement in chinese and educational expectation but has an insignificant negative effect on one’s achievement in mathematics. it also has a negative and significant effect on art. responsibility had a positive and significant effect on a student’s achievement in art, but an insignificant negative effect on math and language achievement. it had an insignificant though positive effect on educational expectations. in terms of global consciousness, the three sub-abilities of task performance had positive and significant effects on global consciousness in both 10-year-old and 15-year-old groups. among them, self-control has the greatest influence. in terms of test anxiety, in the 10-year-old group, self-control, sense of responsibility and perseverance has positive and significant effects on students’ happiness and satisfaction. they have negative and significant effects on test anxiety. in other words, it seems that high task ability improves students’ satisfaction and happiness but also relieves their test anxiety. there is a difference in the influence of self-control between the 15-year-old and 10year-old groups. self-control has a negative and significant effect on the happiness of the 15-year-old group, and a positive and significant effect on test anxiety, but no significant effect on satisfaction. in terms of social relationships, in the 10-year-old group, task performance has a positive and significant impact on closeness to family members and others. of these, perseverance has the greatest influence. the situation differed somewhat in the 15-year-olds group. although the sense of responsibility, and perseverance had a positive and significant effect on closeness to family and other people, self-control had a negative and significant effect. encouraging adolescents to develop good task performance, according to the evidence, plays an extremely important role in the formation and development of students’ self-control, sense of responsibility and perseverance. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1202 school educators must realize that task performance is at least as important as cognitive ability for academic achievement and long-term quality development among students. educational policymakers should consider how to provide resources for social and emotional skills education to parents of all classes, as well as encourage them to participate in improving students’ task performances. educational researchers should strive to make breakthroughs in social and emotional competence in education research going forward and thereby establish the most suitable way for the development of the task competence of chinese teenagers. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2021, 39(09):33-46. correspondence to: jingzhong huang east china normal university shanghai 200241 china email: zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.rp031 mailto:zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn family income and its relation to preschool education in china: empirical research based on cfps survey data pengcheng wang & xin gong central china normal university, wuhan 430079, china abstract. based on the data from the china family panel survey, this study uses the logit model to estimate the household income effect on the chance of children's preschool attendance and their choice of preschools. the results showed that a 100% increase in household income per capital is associated with an increase of 2.6% in the probability of a child’s preschool attending. following the classification of preschools with different characteristics, we found that household income has a large impact on children’s public preschool attending. the age of children, household registration status, and the family size show statistically significant effect on the preschool attendance and a significant difference exist between urban and rural areas on this issue. compared with those living in urban areas, rural children are more significantly influenced by family income in respect of the preschool education chance. best evid chin edu 2019; 1(2):67-86. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1017 keywords: family income; preschool attendance; the choice of preschools about the author: pengcheng wang, college of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, china correspondence to: xin gong, college of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, china. email: gongxin@mail.ccnu.edu.cn. conflict of interests: none. wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 68 research background and problem n recent years, preschool education, as the starting point and foundation of education, has achieved remarkable progress in china. by the end of 2016, the gross enrollment rate of preschool education had reached 77.4%, about 20% higher than 2010. in spite of this, there is still a significant imbalance between regional and urban-rural in the development of preschool education (liu & gao, 2013; hong & luo, 2012). first, government spending in preschool education has shown a central concave pattern, whereby the middle region spends the least compared to the eastern and western regions, the family cost sharing is comparatively higher in the central region, and the cost sharing structure is quite different among provinces. secondly, there are disparities between urban and rural areas in terms of school buildings, material and teachers, and the gaps between urban and rural areas are greater than the regional differences (wan, 2011). moreover, opportunities for preschool education are unevenly distributed among different classes. because the cost of preschool education is mainly shared by public finance and the families, and it has not been identified as compulsory education, the contradiction between low family income and high education cost may lead low-income families only being able to choose private kindergartens of an ordinary quality or even choosing not to send their children to kindergartens (song & liu, 2013). many reasons have been explored to explain the unequal distribution of preschool educational opportunities. due to the disintegration of the planned economy in china, the supply system of preschool education units adapted to the planned economy in the early stage gradually collapsed, whereas the public finance system of preschool education was not improved simultaneously (cui et al., 2011). since the reform of the education system in the mid-1980s, a new system is gradually taken shape in china under the centralized political system and actively mobilizes social forces to participate in running schools. one of the obvious changes is to encourage social forces to be involved in partial educational services. for a long time, due to the unclear nature of educational investment shared by the government, society and family, the ambiguous responsibility of the government and the imperfect budget system of preschool education, governmental financial investments in preschool education have been relatively lower (xia et. al., 2014). at present, the financial responsibility of preschool education in china is mainly undertaken by the district, county, township, and village. the limited financial investment in china has sharply decreased in the number of public kindergartens (bai et. al., 2012). consequently, households need to invest more capital to compete for scarce public resources. at the same time, the market sector has gradually become an important supplier of preschool education services, which has made preschool education services become a i wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 69 purchasable product. the non-compulsory characteristic of preschool education requires families to pay for a large portion of the cost of preschool education. although the difficulties of entering the kindergarten have been alleviated in recent years, the expensive payment for admission is still a serious problem. using the cumulative cpi growth index and taking inflation into account, preschool tuition fees increased 55.62 times between 1996 and 2013. recent data showed that preschool tuition fees have reached 100,000 cny for a year in some cities, such as beijing, tianjin, nanjing, and kindergartens, with a monthly fee of more than 5,000 cny being common in these cities. moreover, according to a survey in some rural areas in 2011, 40.3% of parents argue that preschool education costs are too high. as a result, low-income families cannot afford to send their children to enter these high-fee kindergartens, better quality and strict admission conditions. in conclusion, high tuition fees and low family income have built obstacles for many low-income children to receive preschool education. gaps between income and tuition fees will not only decrease the possibility of preschool education, but also exacerbate educational inequality. one of the important functions of foundation education is to fulfill equalization, that is, to help disadvantaged people achieve upward mobility through education. in order to explore the relationship between family income and choice of preschool education based on cfps data, this study attempts to answer the following questions: (1) does family income affect the access to preschool education opportunities? (2) does family income affect children’s access to different types of kindergartens? the rest of this study is structured as follows. the second part is the literature review, while the third part presents data, variables and analysis methods. the fourth part summarizes empirical results, and the fifth part includes the conclusion, implications and research limitations. literature review foreign researchers have conducted extensive studies on this issue. chiswick and debburman found that increasing household income can increase the likelihood of entering kindergartens for school-age children after controlling for other factors (chiswick & debburman, 2004), while davis and connely examined that children with better family background are more likely to enter high quality public kindergartens (connelly, 2005). according to the u.s. census bureau, 67% of children who receive early childhood education come from a family with an annual household income of more than $150,000, while only 35% of children earning less than $10,000 will have access to preschool education through governmental financial aid (bennett, 2008). fuller et al. also explained why wealthier families send their children to kindergarten earlier (fuller, holloway & liang, 1996). wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 70 by comparing the data from different countries, the results indicate that the relationship between family income and preschool educational opportunities may show some pattern. bassok et al. (2011) established that the relationship between household income and formal preschool education shows a “u” line, namely that children from middle-income families may have less opportunities for preschool education because families below the poverty line will receive federal government subsidies (bassok, fitzpatrick, & loeb, 2011). in many european countries, by contrast, there is no direct correlation between the enrolment of school-age children and household income. most european countries, with the exception of ireland and the netherlands, provide all children aged 3-6 with at least two years of free education, which is recognized as the legal right of children from the age of three, while belgium and france provide free preschool education from an earlier age. according to the oecd family database in 2005, 100% of the children aged 3-6 attend school in italy and france (bai et al., 2012). however, the relationship between family in-come and children enrollment opportunity is linearly dependent in most developing countries. for example, foguel and veloso concluded that the average enrollment rate for children aged 4-6 in brazil is 73%, and the correlation between family background and enrollment rate reached 90% (foguel & veloso, 2014). in china, research has mainly concentrated in partial provinces or groups of children. based on mixed panel data from nine provinces included in the china health and nutrition survey (chns), gong et al.’s study found that the chance of preschool enrollment of rural children is increased by 7.8% and that of urban children by 7.6% for a 100% increase in household income (gong, xu, & han, 2015). a study about chinese migrant children found that those who have agricultural household registration (in chinese pronunciation “hukou (户口)”) status and cross-province migration are less likely to enter preschools, while those children with household educational savings have a higher chance of preschool education (xing & hu, 2015). the family will face the decision of which kindergarten to choose when they have already chosen preschool education. studies focusing on family income and kindergarten type have found a significant correlation. a survey from nanjing province revealed that children with high-income families and parents working for governmental institutions are more likely to enter public kindergartens. liu et al. studied 3456 children in shenzhen, concluding that children from high-income families have the attendance opportunities of 1.82 times of that for children from middle and lowlevel families (liu et. al., 2016). empirical studies of preschool education choices have shown that public kindergartens tend to be more accessible to children from highly educated families. although the literature has not formed a unified evaluation standard for different kindergartens, some scholars still carried out research on kindergarten evaluation. liu et al. (2008), comparing the differences of 26 kindergartens in shanxi, found that wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 71 public kindergartens have more obvious advantages than non-governmental kindergartens and village kindergartens, due to the financial educational funds from the state, teachers’ salaries, and kindergarten management (liu et al., 2008). for nongovernmental kindergartens, there is a positive correlation between the quality of kindergarten and entry fee, because the running cost is all shared by the market. according to the discussion above, families should pay for the cost of preschool education whether in government kindergartens or non-government kindergartens. the question is thus: what is the relationship between household income and preschool choice? to summarize, foreign studies analyzing the relationship between family income and preschool education opportunities have revealed the relationship in detail, while the studies from china are usually constricted to partial regions, provinces, and cities. furthermore, most of the conclusions mainly come from simple statistical description, and there is scant empirical research. based on a national sample, this study aims to utilize the logit model to conduct an empirical estimation on the relationship between preschool attendance and household income. data data in this study are from the micro survey of china family panel studies (cfps) conducted by the china social science research center at peking university. the cfps sample covers 25 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, with a target sample size of 16,000 households 1 . the cfps database conducted a baseline survey in 2010 and tracked all baseline family members, their offspring and adopted children as cfps genetic members in 2012, 2014 and 2016. the questionnaires are divided into four types: community questionnaire, family questionnaire, adult questionnaire and children questionnaire, among which the children questionnaire is divided into two: parents answered for those under 10 and self-answered for those aged 10-15. since the areas cover about 95% of total population, cfps can be regarded as a nationally representative sample. the sample used in this study is the tracking data of 2012 and 2014. 2 this study selected children aged 3-6 years in the cfps2012 as the main research object, and the main variables came from the children’s questionnaire and its corresponding family questionnaire. by matching the cfps2012 children’s questionnaire with its corresponding family questionnaire, 1,195 children were successfully matched. in order to analyze and compare across different years, we successfully matched 1,015 children by using cfps2014 data. variables wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 72 dependent variable: preschool attendance and types. according to the children’s questionnaire, “is the child currently attending school/kindergarten/nursery? the research objects can be divided into two categories, namely entering the kindergarten and not entering the kindergarten. independent variable: household income. the measurement indicator in this study is per capita annual incomes reported by parents in the family questionnaire. in order to avoid the influence of extremum, this study truncated the extreme value of 5% of income. finally, the natural logarithm of income was added into the regression model. controlling variable: family background variables and demographic variables. previous studies have shown that the influence of family background on educational attainment can be realized by the choice of educational resources, and families with superior capital can make choices in favor of children’s educational attainment depending on their superior resources (fang, 2011). according to bourdieu’s family capital theory, we will control for other family background factors besides household income in order to observe the independent effect of family income on preschool education admission. therefore, other influential variables controlled in this study basically include parents’ education level, occupational category, political identity, frequency of family purchasing cultural products, number of families, and whether the mother lives at home. parents’ education level is mainly coded by current education system, mainly reflecting the household cultural capital. at the same time, cultural capital can also be “expressed in the form of enduring mental and physical dispositions” (liu et al., 2016); we will treat “whether children often go out to play with their parents” and “do your family often buy books for children?” from the children questionnaire as measurable indicators of family cultural capital. we believe that the frequency of parent-children interaction can reflect parental education philosophy to some extent, and the low-income family’s spending on parenting time and educational materials are limited (brown, 2006). the occupational category of parents is converted according to the standard occupation code of china. in the labor market, parents’ income is related to their occupation to some extent. political identity is mainly divided into party members and non-party members. demographic variables mainly include gender, age, and household registration status. in addition, considering that the regional gaps in economy may have an impact on the access to preschool education, this study also adds the provinces of the research objects as dummy variables to control for provincial differences. table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of main variables. wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 73 table 1. descriptive statistics for analysis variables. classification variable subsample mean sd the dependent variable preschool attendance yes =1, no =0 0.644 0.478 individual variables per capita household income the logarithm 8.593 1.280 gender women =1, men =0 0.459 0.498 age age of units: 3.968 0.821 household registration status non-agricultural =1, others=0 0.226 0.418 mother doesn't live at home yes =1, no =0 0.826 0.378 the eastern region yes =1, no =0 0.345 0.475 the central region yes =1, no =0 0.342 0.476 the western region yes =1, no =0 0.309 0.462 the number of households units: number 5.305 1.743 cultural background father’s years of schooling years 4.136 4.361 mother’s years of schooling years 1.789 3.332 times of family trips for a month ≥ 2 yes =1, no =0 0.503 0.500 times of buying books for a month ≥ 2 yes =1, no =0 0.791 0.406 social background occupational classification of fathers class level 9 and above =1, others = 0 9.282 3.360 political background is father a member of the party? yes =1, no =0 0.121 0.326 note： parents’ years of education are coded according to the chinese current school system, specifically as follows: primary school =6, junior high school =9, senior high school/technical secondary school =12, junior college =15, undergraduate =16, master =19, doctor =22; in the regression analysis, the number of years of education was used as a continuous variable. 2. the occupational classification of fathers in this study was converted according to the gold thorpe scale (egp). model and method preliminary statistical analysis revealed that the per capita household income is divided into four levels from low to high, with 25% as a unit. the overall picture of household income and preschool opportunities is shown in figure 1. compared with the stable increase of household income, the percentage of preschool attendance increases gradually; meanwhile, the proportion of children not entering the kindergarten gradually decreases. wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 74 figure 1. income level and attendance. we conducted a t-test on the per capita income and preschool opportunities (table 2), and found that the income level of the families with different choices was significantly different at the statistical level of 1%. specifically, the average per capita income of the families who chose to enter the kindergarten was 1,0543.2 cny, while the average per capita income of the families who did not enter the kindergarten was 7,903.21 cny. the average difference between the two groups was nearly 2,000 cny. table 2. family income gap of different choices (unit: cny). variable group m t value preschool attendance yes 10543.2 -4.403 *** no 7903.21 preschool type public kindergarten 11661.7 -3.188 *** private kindergarten 9485.95 note. *** stands for significant at the 1% statistical level. wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 75 by comparison between the two groups of public and private kindergarten, the results reveal that the average per capita income is still significantly different at the statistical level of 1%. this confirms that there are some correlations between household income and preschool choice. in addition, we want to know more about the extent to which family income influences the access to preschool education. furthermore, we seek to confirm if there are other factors that also play a role in family educational choices. therefore, we propose to test the above hypothesis through further empirical analysis. since the dependent variable y is a binary variable, the multivariate logit model is adopted for analysis. the model is set as follows: where y* is the potential variable, which represents the tendency of children to enter kindergarten, and it is the continuous variable. income is the per capita income of a family. xi presents other factors affecting children’s tendency to enrollment including gender, age, household registration status, and family size. u is a random distributed variable, subjecting to logistic distribution. the relationship between y and y*, the binary variable of whether children are enrolled in kindergarten, is as follows: where c presents a certain critical value, p(y=1) = p (y* ≥ c) is the probability of entering the kindergarten, and p(y=0) = p (y* ≤ c) is the probability of not entering the kindergarten. the logit expression of the probability ratio of entering the kindergarten or not entering the kindergarten is as follows: the coefficients can be obtained by using the maximum likelihood estimation method. we used the cfps2012 database to measure the impact of per capita household income on children’s enrollment. from the perspective of consumer demand theory, the utility of commodities not only comes from the inherent quality of commodities, but also depends on the consumption of other consumers and the price of commodities (liu et al., 2008). when controlling for other family background factors, household income is the foundation of family buying education services, especially for the kindergarten fees varying in the competitive market, and preschool education wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 76 service price directly affects the ability to buy and the category of education services required, so the estimated coefficient of the core explanatory variable is expected to be positive. there are three choices that can be explained in terms of types of kindergarten entry (public kindergarten, high-fee private kindergarten, and low-fee private kindergarten), and multiple logit models are required (mlogit). the private low-fee kindergarten is taken as the reference group. suppose the probability of entering a public kindergarten, private high-fee kindergarten, and private low-fee kindergarten is pp= p(y=public|x), ph=p(y=high|x) and pl=p(y=low|x), then the logit expression of their probability ratio is: similarly, two sets of coefficients in the above model can be obtained by using the maximum likelihood estimation method. results the relationship between household income and kindergarten opportunities stepwise regression was used to analyze the sensitivity of the model. as shown in table 3, model (1) is the benchmark model, demographic variables and regional stratification are added in model (2), and model (3) and model (4) control the cultural background and social political background of the family respectively. it is estimated from model (1) that the influence of family income on children’s preschool education opportunity presents statistical significance with a positive coefficient when no variables are controlled for. by examining the marginal impact of family income, the results indicate that a 100% increase in family income will increase the chance of children entering kindergarten by 4.8%. at the same time, after controlling for individual variables and regional dummy variables, the marginal impact of children entering the kindergarten will increase by 3.2% for every 100% increase in family income. after controlling for family cultural background, social background and political background successively in model (3) to model (4), the influence of household income on children’s admission to kindergarwang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 77 table 3. regression results of family income and enrollment opportunity. variable (1) (2) (3) (4) key explanatory variable household income 0.214*** 0.207*** 0.167** 0.174** (0.049) (0.062) (0.067) (0.075) marginal effect 0.048*** 0.032*** 0.025** 0.026** other individual variables women 0.131 0.103 -0.030 (0.161) (0.172) (0.190) age 1.562*** 1.583*** 1.670*** (0.114) (0.121) (0.133) non-agricultural household registration status 0.718*** 0.565** 0.572** (0.226) (0.251) (0.286) household number -0.119*** -0.160*** 0.151*** (0.046) (0.049) (0.052) mother doesn’t live at home 0.292 0.298 0.498* (0.219) (0.225) (0.259) region ease 1.070*** 1.048*** 1.134*** (0.201) (0.211) (0.232) middle 1.497*** 1.645*** 1.835*** (0.207) (0.224) (0.251) cultural background father’s years of schooling -0.020 -0.026 (0.023) (0.027) mother’s years of schooling 0.020 0.027 (0.031) (0.037) communication frequency 0.079 0.091 (0.066) (0.072) buying books 0.235** 0.121 (0.099) (0.110) social background father’s occupational class 0.019 (0.032) political background father is a party member 0.359 (0.278) constant term -1.264*** -7.823*** -7.885*** -8.584** (0.427) (0.848) (0.913) (1.135) n 1069 999 910 779 pseudo r 2 0.013 0.267 0.282 0.301 note. the brackets are robust standard errors, as shown in the following table; *, **, and *** are respectively significant at the statistical level of 10%, 5%, and 1%, as shown in the following table. wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 78 ten continued to be significant, and the marginal influence value remained continuous at about 2.6%. it can be seen from model (2) that children’s age has a significant influence on children’s admission to kindergarten, and the coefficient is significantly positive. this may reflect that family is more likely to send their children to kindergarten when children are readier to be adapted to the kindergarten environment. the gender difference does not show a significant difference in the opportunity to enter the kindergartens, which is inconsistent with the results of some previous studies, which show that boys are more likely to enter the kindergarten (gong et al., 2015; hannum, werum, fuller, & baker, 2003). it can be inferred from this that, with the development of society, people may gradually abandon the traditional “son preference” in the concept of education. family size has a significantly negative impact on children’s enrollment, indicating that the larger the number of families, the greater the expenditure pressure that the family income has to bear. only when the survival needs of the whole family are met can the family consider its educational needs. fuller and liang (1996) also showed that the family size was negatively correlated with the availability of county kindergarten centers in the county and district in the united states. regional factors also show significant differences in the opportunity for children to enter the kindergarten. compared with the western region, the enrollment rate of children in the eastern and central regions is higher, which is basically consistent with the regional imbalance in the development of preschool education. when model (3) controlled for parents’ education background, it was found that parents’ years of education had no statistically significant influence on children’s chances of entering the kindergarten. the frequency of families purchasing books for their children has a significant impact on their access to preschool education, indicating that the higher the investment of families in cultural products for their children, the more likely they are to send their children to kindergartens. in model (4) and model (5), we added the family social background and political background respectively and concluded that the occupational background of their father had no significant influence on preschool attendance, but the coefficient was positive. family political capital has no significant influence on children’s preschool education, which is similar to ye’s preliminary conclusion (ye, 2012), but he then examined the influence of grandparents’ political resources and found that the capital advantage of intergenerational effect was significant. however, due to the limit of relevant indicators, it was impossible to further test the capital advantage of grandparents. finally, we considered the robustness check through filling the missing value, and found that the results have no changes, still presenting statistical significance at the 1% level and the standard errors are reduced. this shows that the relationship between household income and preschool opportunity is stable and significant. wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 79 differential relationships between household income and kindergarten opportunities in order to further estimate the influence of different family income starting points on the enrollment opportunity, we selected 25%, 50%, and 75% as the starting points of four different levels of family income. the results are shown in table 4. it is evident from table 4 that there are significant differences in the marginal effects of income for families with different income levels. the marginal effect of household income at the 50% percentile presents statistical significance, while the marginal effect on the remaining percentiles is not significant. the regression coefficient of each income locus was positive, and the basic conclusion was consistent with the logit regression results, indicating that the results were robust. from the perspective of marginal effect value, the overall change shows a trend of increasing first and then decreasing. the maximum marginal effect appears at the income sub-point of 50%, which shows that if the income is doubled, the children’s opportunities of entering the kindergarten will increase by 8.3%. for the sample in this study, this means that the per capita household income increases from 3,000 cny to 6,000 cny, and the child enrollment rate increases by 8.3%. once the median income level is exceeded, the marginal impact of household income gradually decreases with the increase of income level. figure 2 visually depicts the change of marginal contribution of family income to the opportunity to enter the kindergarten. as is evident from the changing trend in figure 2, the marginal impact of per capita household income on the preschool opportunity basically presents an inverted u-shaped changing trend, which goes up first and then goes down. disparity in kindergarten opportunities between rural and urban children since the reform and opening up, the increasing disparities in household income may result in the inequality of educational opportunities between urban and rural areas. under the background of the dual economic structure in urban and rural areas, there are significant differences between urban and rural families in terms of income, wealth, parents’ education level, and other aspects (sun & yan, 2015). in order to further examine the effect of family income on children’s school opportunities by region, we also conducted a sample regression for children with different household registration status. the results are shown in table 5. controlling for other factors, children’s preschool education in urban areas is not significantly influenced by household income, but the coefficient value is still positive. for rural families, household income has statistical significance for children’s chances of enrolling in kindergartens, which illustrates that every 100% increase in family income will increase the chance of children’s enrolling in schools by 3%. the results indicate that the influence of family income level on the opportunity wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 80 table 4. estimation results based on different income quartiles. family income point p25 p50 p75 preschool attendance 0.047 0.558*** 0.283 (0.258) (0.277) (0.276) marginal effect 0.007 0.083*** 0.042 other control variables yes yes yes note. n=779, pseudo r2= 0.032. figure 2. the marginal effect of family income quartile on preschool attendance. table 5. sample regression in urban and rural areas. household income whole samples urban sample rural samples preschool attendance 0.174** 0.089 0.196** (0.075) (0.243) (0.085) marginal effect 0.026** 0.010 0.030** control for other variables yes yes yes n 1195 271 924 the pseudo r 2 0.301 0.268 0.032 wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 81 table 6. mlogit regression results of family income and kindergarten choice. reference group (private low fee kindergarten) public kindergarten private high fee kindergarten household income 0.227** 0.691 (0.101) (0.486) marginal effect 0.041** 0.010 other control variables yes yes n 227 230 the pseudo r 2 0.126 0.126 note. only key independent variables are reported here, and the control variables here are consistent with the benchmark model. of children with different household registration is different. compared with children in urban areas, the opportunities of rural children are more susceptible to the influence of family income. because the expenditure of preschool education accounts for a small proportion in the high level of urban consumption expenditure, family income has little influence on the opportunity of preschool education. for rural families, the education investment is a burden almost entirely on the family, low family income and high education cost being the main obstacles for their children to receive preschool education. the household income also affects the opportunities of university education of rural and urban children. one study found that the effect of household income on university education opportunities is more significant for children in rural areas than that of students in urban areas, which is similar to the above estimated results (xu & zong, 2016). the relationship between household income and kindergarten types according to the children’s questionnaire item, “what kind of kindergarten/preschool does the child attend?”, the children are divided into two categories: public kindergarten and private kindergarten. at the same time, according to the item “what is the fee for the latest month of kindergarten/preschool?”, children entering private kindergartens are further divided into two categories: high fee and low fee 3 . specific results are shown in table 6. all the selected children were taken as samples to be examined and analyzed by taking private low-fee kindergartens as the reference group. the results indicate that the attendance to public kindergarten was significantly affected by the household wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 82 income at the statistical level of 5%. every 100% increase in family income increases the probability of children’s access to public kindergartens by 4.3%. compared with entering private low fee kindergartens, the access to private high fee kindergartens does not significantly correlate with household income, even the marginal effect value is positive. it is evident from the regression results that the families with higher family income prefer public kindergartens to private kindergartens. comparison of results by follow-up rounds considering the comparability of the results, we used cfps2014 data to conduct an empirical test on the children’s admission to the kindergarten in that year by the reference of cfps2012, and analyzed the relevant differences between the regression results in 2012 and 2014, so as to investigate the development trend of admission in different years. the comparison results indicate that: first, the significant influence of household income on preschool education still exists at the statistical level of 10%. specifically, every 100% increase in family income will increase children’s chances of enrolling in kindergartens by 2.2%. second, compared with the entry into private low-fee kindergartens, the marginal effect of family income on children’s choice to enter public kindergarten is no longer significant, but the coefficient is positive. third, compared with the results in 2012, the influence of family income on the preschool opportunity in 2014 was significantly decreased at the statistical level, which was reflected in the significant reduction of the marginal influence of income. at the same time, household income has no significant influence on the kindergarten type. to some extent, this conclusion highlights the remarkable achievements of the first phase of the three-year action plan for preschool education (2011-2013). since 2011, the three-year action plan for preschool education has been put into effect. preschool education investments have increased rapidly nationwide. from the perspective of the average investment in preschool education, the total investment increased from 921.02 cny in 2009 to 4,513.98 cny in 2013, an increase of 3.90 times. the steady growth of per pupil expenditure provides an important guarantee for the educational improvement, and also drives the enthusiasm of local governments to invest in preschool education. by the beginning of 2012, the number of public kindergartens and private kindergartens in gansu province had increased to 1,280 and 1,445 respectively, which was significantly higher than that of 2010, and the number of private kindergartens was slightly higher than that of public kindergartens (shen & li, 2013). by the end of 2013, the number of kindergartens runs by enterprises and institutions in heilongjiang province increased by 1,177 compared with 2010, with a growth rate of 35.27%. wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 83 in conclusion, in terms of both the quantity and quality of preschool education resources, the public has a wider selection of kindergartens. furthermore, under the trend of the rapid development of inclusive kindergartens, the influence of family income on children’s access to preschool education has been gradually weakened. conclusions and implications equal preschool education is the starting point of educational equity, and access to preschool education at this stage has a positive impact on individuals, families, and even the society. there has been research confirming that family economic background has a significant positive effect on educational attainment, but there are few similar studies in the field of early childhood education. aiming to estimate the influence of family income on preschool education opportunity, we utilized the cfps database to investigate the influence of family income on children’s enrollment opportunity and choice, based on the logit model and multinomial logit model. the specific conclusions are as follows: (i) family income has a significant impact on preschool education en-rollment. every 100% increase in household income increases a child’s chances of entering preschool education by 2.6% according to 2012 cfps data. based on the above results, we tested the heterogeneity of children’s choice in kindergartens, and found that: compared with entering private kindergartens with low fees, family income can significantly increase the opportunities for entering public kindergarten, while it has no effect on entering private kindergartens. the cfps2014 database showed a similar marginal effect (2.2%). (ii) compared with the central and eastern regions, the enrollment rate of children in the western regions is significantly lower. at the same time, family size significantly affects children’s preschool opportunities; that is, the larger the number of families, the lower the children’s kindergarten attendance opportunities. (iii) the findings indicate that the preschool opportunities of rural children are significantly affected by their household income which has no impact for urban children comparably. it is evident that the family income is an important factor for rural children to consider whether they can receive preschool education. if the family cannot afford the full amount of preschool education funds, children may not have the opportunity to enter kindergartens. the conclusions of this study provide the following implications: (1) children in low-income families can achieve a better performance than children from middle class families through preschool education, which wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 84 has a larger marginal effect (bai and xiong, 2012). in order to better reflect the public welfare of preschool education and ensure the fairness and efficiency of the preschool education market, many countries directly or indirectly distribute financial funds to the families of young children. the australian government stopped providing subsidies to preschool education institutions and began to provide subsidies to parents of young children. denmark, the netherlands, france, and other countries have also adopted the mode of co-supply of education service providers and demanders to reduce family expenditures on preschool education. at the same time, compared with urban families, rural families’ income has a greater impact on children’s preschool chances. due to the differences in educational development between urban and rural areas, the rational allocation of educational resources and improvement of resource utilization efficiency will be the focus of early childhood education development in the future. from the experience of field research on rural kindergartens, it is evident that the facilities of kindergartens in rural areas have been gradually supplemented and improved, and the infrastructure construction of township central kindergartens has been heavily invested in. however, the weak teaching staff, extremely limited financial aid, and the lack of effective supervision still limit the improvement of rural preschool education. the principal problem faced by the development of rural kindergartens is that it is difficult to purchase high quality services, even if the same amount of money is spent. (2) according to the empirical analysis results, an increase of family income will increase the preschool education possibility, which means that children from low-income families, especially those from rural low-income families, are more likely to enter private kindergartens. therefore, the administrative department should actively guide and supervise the development level and quality of private kindergartens, so that quality and quantity go hand in hand. local government needs to build systematic indicators for educational investment and supervision based on the supply capacity and output quality of private kindergartens. although this study makes an objective estimation of family income and preschool education opportunities with national samples, it still possesses the following limitations: first, whether it is reasonable or not to divide kindergartens into public kindergartens, private high fee kindergartens, and private low fee kindergartens may still need discussion. furthermore, there are no comprehensive databases to estimate the relationship of household income and preschool quality. if the relationship between family income and children’s selection needs to be understood more accurately, wang & gong. family income and preschool education in china vol. 1, no. 2, 2019 85 then information collection and the evaluation of kindergarten quality should be strengthened. second, due to limited data, in addition to controlling for family background factors, this study fails to further control the individual development differences of school-age children, which may affect whether they can receive preschool education. notes 1 excluding xinjiang uygur autonomous region, tibet autonomous region, qinghai province, inner mongolia autonomous region, ningxia hui autonomous region, hainan province, and hong kong, macao and taiwan regions. 2 the cfps2010 data were not used in this study because it lacked key indicators of the kindergarten category for children aged 3-6 years, such as whether they attended public or private kindergartens. 3 according to the latest monthly fee of the institute, the monthly fee is higher than 1200 cny. acknowledgement this study is the periodical research result of the youth fund project of humanities and social science research of the ministry of education “research on the source and turnover of preschool teachers in poor rural areas of hubei province” (16yjczh022). thanks must go to the professional feedback from dr. renjun chen, drs. hongmei ma, xu wang, zhenyi li, and jiali zhang. references bai, t., xiong, x. y., & wang, s. j. 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(in chinese). received: 20 february 2019 revised: 07 march 2019 accepted: 19 march 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in research in educational development 2018; 38(z2):18-26. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 王鹏程, 龚欣. 家庭收入与学前教育机会—基于 cfps 数据的实证研究. 教育发展研究 2018; 38(z2):18-26. article-xingong-title_30march2019 article-xin gong_main text_30mar2019 bece. newsletter vol.7, no.1, 2021 929 does book-borrowing or early-rising benefit for college students’ academic performance? by du, s., fei, y.q., he, m., & hu, h. correspondence to: hu, h., associate professor, college of teacher education, southwest university, china. email: ethuhang@swu.edu.cn ehaviors like book-borrowing and early-rising relatively reflect the process of thinking development of college students’ self-efficacy consciousness and self-cognition adjustment. a study published in distance education in china collected the log data of library book-borrowing and smart card consumption of 833 university students, constructing characteristic index for learning performance, book-borrowing, and early-rising. clustering and correlational analysis were administered to investigate the impact of book-borrowing and early-rising on learning performance as well as their relationship. together with findings from the metacognition questionnaire survey, the correlation between collective learning behavior and overall learning performance and metacognition was established. findings from the study show that:  the two behaviors all correlate with learning performance through the mediating effect of metacognition.  moreover, early-rising (the time and frequency of getting up early) reflects college students’ metacognitive experience and planning competence; also, early-rising is more correlated comparing to the rising pattern (the stability of getting up early).  as for book-borrowing, it reveals disparities in college students’ metacognitive thinking activities monitor and self-reflection; while reading speed shows greatest impact on learning performance, and the amount of book-borrowing and in-depth reading are conducive to knowledge and skill acquisition. based on the analysis results, this article puts forward suggestions to improve learning activities and the learning environment:  create a deep learning environment to stimulate college students’ self-learning initiative;  optimize the way of knowledge dissemination to meet the individual reading needs of college students; b vol.7, no.1, 2021 930  change the role of the library and provide high-quality services for the development of discipline and specialty. source: distance education in china, 2020; 2020(11): 47-58+77. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy: a two-level mediation model qishan chen, yaying lei, zhonglin wen, shutong li jieying li, yurou kong south china normal university, guangzhou, 510631, china abstract. the purpose of this study was to use the data consisted of 5,115 fifteen-year-old shanghai students in 152 schools from the pisa 2009, by building cross-level mediation model, to explore how the influence on students’ reading literacy from teachers’ support through learning strategy. the results revealed that teacher support is positively directly related to students’ reading literacy. students’ learning strategy (such as elaboration strategy and control strategy) and metacognition strategy were cross-level mediators between teachers’ support and their students’ reading literacy. but memory strategy in the learning strategy does not play a cross-level mediation effect. best evid chin edu 2019; 2(1):157-170. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1036 keywords: teacher support; learning strategy; reading literacy; hierarchical liner modeling; pisa correspondence to: qishan chen, associate professor, center for studies of psychological application, school of psychology, south china normal university, guangzhou, 510631, china. email: kaisanchan@163.com about the author: qishan chen, associate professor, center for studies of psychological application, school of psychology, south china normal university, guangzhou, 510631, china. email: kaisanchan@163.com yaying lei, master’s degree candidate, center for studies of psychological application, school of psychology, south china normal university, guangzhou, 510631, china, email: 248274641@qq.com zhonglin wen, professor, center for studies of psychological application, school of psychology, south china normal university, guangzhou, 510631, china, email: 115035333@qq.com shutong li, undergraduate, center for studies of psychological application, school of psychology, south china normal university, guangzhou, 510631, china, email: 401048116@qq.com (continued) chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 158 introduction eading comprehension is the process by which readers obtain meaning from literal symbols and is one of the most unique cognitive activities of human beings. reading ability has great significance to students’ academic success and personal development. through reading, people can understand, use, reflect on and participate in texts in order to achieve personal goals, develop personal knowledge and potential, and participate effectively in social activities. in the program for international student assessment (pisa), reading ability is also known as reading literacy. the program for international student assessment is a worldwide study by the organization for economic co-operation and development in member and nonmember nations intended to evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance on reading literacy, mathematical literacy, scientific literacy and financial literacy (oecd, 2013). the test sampling of pisa is scientific, and the sample have a wide coverage and high representativeness; and it has high quality control in questions design, data collection and cleaning process, so pisa has high reliability and reputation. as a result, data and results from pisa have been widely concerned by governments, educational management institutions and academic researchers (martin, liem, mok, & xu, 2012; rogers, 2014; zhang & xin, 2012). this study intends to use the data of pisa2009 to explore the influencing factors of students’ reading literacy. reading literacy is influenced by the external factors of students (such as school atmosphere, teacher support, family socioeconomic status, etc.) and internal factors (such as learning strategies, learning motivations, etc.) (kigel, mcelvany, & becker, 2015; netten, et al, 2014). this study focuses on the influence of teacher support and learning strategies on students’ reading literacy, proposes and verifies a cross-level mediating effect model: teacher support on students’ reading learning not only can directly affect students’ reading literacy, but also can influence reading literacy indirectly by influencing students’ learning strategies. in this hypothesis model (figure 1), teacher support is a level 2 organizational variable, learning strategy and reading literacy are the level 1 individual variables, so this is a cross-level mediation model of 2-1-1 structure. (continued) jieying li, master’s degree candidate, center for studies of psychological application, school of psychology, south china normal university, guangzhou, 510631, china, email: 13349834657@163.com yurou kong, master’s degree candidate, center for studies of psychological application, school of psychology, south china normal university, guangzhou, 510631, china, email: 846748468@qq.com funding: this work was supported by the national social science foundation of china (the ideas and results of pisa and its implications for china’s education examination, cba130127), 13th five-year plan research project of philosophy and social science in guangdong, china (gd17xxl02), and innovation project of educational science in guangdong, china (2016gxjk032). conflict of interests: none. r chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 159 figure 1. hypothesis model. the influence of teacher support on students’ reading literacy reading comprehension includes two aspects: vocabulary recognition and text comprehension, the former refers to the processing of vocabulary sound, font and meaning during reading, which is closely related to the reader’s vocabulary knowledge and decoding ability; the latter refers to the process of encoding chapter information into memory to form a coherent representation, influenced by internal factors such as reader’s prior knowledge, learning strategies, meta-cognition, and external factors such as the nature of the article and reading scenarios. alvermann, unrau, and ruddell pointed out that if a part of the reading fails to function properly, the reader cannot understand the meaning of the article (alvermann, et al, 2013). it can be seen that reading tasks have high requirements for students’ cognitive processing ability and learning strategies. the improvement of students’ cognitive processing ability and the use of learning strategies not only cannot be separated from school education, and also cannot be separated from the teacher support. school education is an educational activity with a clear purpose and undertaken by professional teachers. the teacher support is considered to be an important factor affecting students’ reading ability and reading comprehension (law, 2011). it has been confirmed by a lot of research on reading teaching and teacher support. the national reading panel and the national institute of child health and human development (2000) reviewed the empirical research on reading instruction for decades, and summarized 16 reading teaching methods from more than 200 studies. according to reports from various institutes, they found that monitoring comprehension, asking questions, organizing images, analyzing story structures and abstracting can effectively improve readers’ reading literacy. a series of studies by ling-po shiu and qishan chen showed that students’ self-regulated reading is not as effective as external feedback and support for students’ reading comprehension (chen & shiu, 2007, 2008; shiu & chen, 2013). according to a survey conducted by weihua qian, the extracurricular reading of middle school students is most affected by teachers, because teachers are the people who have the most contact with students except parents and society, and can give students the most support. this is true for extracurricular reading outside the classroom, especially chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 160 for the development of reading literacy in the classroom (qian, 2013). cong yu pointed out that language teachers should be the motivators of students’ reading interest, the trainer of reading method, the evaluators of reading effects and the creators of reading atmosphere (yu, 2016). it can be seen that for reading teaching, teacher support is crucial to students’ reading literacy, teachers can use systematic, clear and direct methods to train students’ basic reading ability and develop their reading literacy. therefore, we proposed that the hypothesis h1: teacher support has a direct positive effect on students’ reading literacy the influence of teacher support on students’ learning strategies teachers are not only the professors’ instructors of students’ reading knowledge and reading ability, but also the promoters of their reading learning strategies. in pisa2009, the learning strategy has two aspects of contents investigated. one is the examination of the meta-cognitive strategy of reading, that is, the student’s level of awareness to which is an effective reading strategy, it. it is divided into the understanding and remembering information strategies, and the generalizing information strategies; the second is the investigation of the application of three learning strategies: control strategy, memory strategy and accurate processing elaboration strategy. reading comprehension understanding and remembering information strategies in metacognitive strategies refers to which strategies students consider to be effective in understanding and memorizing chapter content and how effective they are; the summary generalizing information strategy refers to which strategies students consider to be effective of summarizing the content of the chapter and how effective they are. among the three strategies used in learning strategies, memory strategies and accurate processing elaboration strategies are cognitive strategies, while control strategies which are monitoring their own learning activities and are meta-cognitive strategies. teaching research has always emphasized the influence of teacher support on the use of students’ reading strategies, emphasizing that teacher support should stimulate students’ background knowledge and use various schemas to help understanding. at the same time, they should pay attention to teaching students to use various strategies to monitor their reading process and learn to use strategies accordingly to help understanding (yuan, et al., 2015). teacher support is an important factor influencing students’ learning strategies. by presenting challenging assignments to students, teachers can motivate student’s ability of exploring, interpreting, and sharing ideas and concepts, as well as the use of memory and accurate processing elaboration strategy. teachers set cognitive cognition confliction in reading teaching, allowing students to experience different ideas, explanations and solutions, to improve their metacognitive strategies such as reading monitoring and reading control regulating. even the communication and interaction between teachchen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 161 ers and students, and the way teachers deal with students’ mistakes will affect the use of students’ learning strategies (dietrich, et al., 2015). therefore, this study proposes hypothesis h2: teacher support has a positive effect on students’ learning strategies. mediating role of student’s learning strategies the learning strategies of reading can have a direct impact on the production of reading literacy. readers with high cognitive and metacognitive strategies can link the information they read with existing knowledge, monitor the understanding process, and constantly adjust their cognition to improve reading literacy (de naeghel, et al, 2012). the learning strategy of reading has strong plasticity and can be cultivated through effective teaching support. teaching models such as reciprocal teaching (rt) (palinscar & brown, 2012), transactional strategies instruction model (tsi) (hilden & pressley, 2007), interactive strategy training for active reading and thinking (istart) (jackson, et al, 2015), concept-oriented reading instruction (cori) (guthrie, et al, 2012) emphasize the promoting effect of the teacher support on the students’ use of various reading cognitive and metacognitive strategies, which is supported by a large amount of empirical evidence. therefore, it can be inferred that teacher support can improve students’ reading engagement by helping students adjust their learning strategies, answering students’ questions and providing positive feedback, thus affecting reading literacy. of course, for different dimensions of learning strategies, student’s response for the usefulness of teacher support is different. for example, studies have shown that asking students to read aloud and recite are generally considered by students to be incapable of arousing interest, and answering questions and discussing their own opinions on text content is the best way to let the student engage in reading (finn & zimmer, 2012). that is to say, teacher support affects reading literacy through learning strategies has different mechanisms. reading comprehension can be carried out at multiple levels, either as a surface coding of reading materials or as a deep understanding of reading materials by reasoning based on surface coding. in reading teaching, the teacher support mainly focuses on how to better construct the meaning of reading materials. teachers will use clarification, contact, summary and other methods in teaching to guide students to understand and process reading materials. students who under teacher support will also monitor their own comprehension and control their reading process in a timely manner. in this process, memory strategies, elaboration strategies, control strategies, understanding and remembering information strategies, and generalizing information strategies may play different roles between teacher support and student reading. the more easily the strategies are influenced by the teacher support, such as elaboration and control strategies, the more obvious the cross-level mediation effect is. in summary, this study proposes the following assumptions, h3: the student’s learning strategy can positively predict reading literacy; h4: learning strategy is a cross-level mediator between teacher support and student reading literacy. chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 162 application of cross-level mediation effect model individual attitudes and behaviors are influenced by many factors from individuals, groups, and societies; this has led today’s researchers to focus on the function and explanatory power of multi-level variables for dependent variables (klein & kozlowski, 2000; li & chang, 2013). in this study, students were nested in the school. the student’s reading literacy and learning strategies belong to the first level of the data structure, and the teacher’s reading support is the second level of the data structure. if we ignore the hierarchical structure of the data, use traditional linear models (such as analysis of variance and regression analysis) to analyze data, it will not only weaken the explanatory power of the theory, but also reduce the externality effect of the research results (zhang, 2010). at present, there are few research reports that use multi-level perspectives to analyze the factors affecting academic literacy, especially for chinese students. chen et al. (2017) pointed out that pisa data has multiple levels, and different levels will affect each other. it is recommended that researchers use advanced statistical methods that are more suitable for pisa data patterns and features, such as hierarchical linear models to perform data analysis and model construction. therefore, this study uses a multi-level linear model to comprehensively examine the influence of teacher support and learning strategies on reading literacy, and has certain value in both theoretical construction and analysis methods. method sample a total of 5,115 students from shanghai city who participated in the pisa 2009 test were tested and with age between 15 years and 3 months to 16 years and 2 months. among them, girls were 2,587 (50.6%) and boys were 2,528 (49.4%). 52 were in the 7th grade (1.0%), 208 were in the 8th grade (4.1%), 1,924 were in the 9th grade (37.6%), 2,908 were in the 10th grade (56.9%), 22 were in the 11th grade (0 .4%), 1 person was in grade 12. all the students were from 152 schools in shanghai, among them, there were 2 schools both had 21 participants, 1 school for 3 participants, and the remaining 149 schools had 30-35 participants. research variable teacher support the teacher support uses the “inspired reading participation strategy” score in pisa as an indicator, which measures the teacher support on the motivating learning strategies and reading skills of the students. the frequency of the 7 teaching activities (such as “require students to explain the meaning of the text”) by the teacher in the language lesson was reported by students, on a 4-point scale, from “no or almost no” to “in all chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 163 lessons”, the α coefficient is 0.78. each item score is combined with a weighted likelihood estimate to synthesize the total score. teacher support is a variable at the school level. learning strategy learning strategies are variables at the student level, including the use of learning strategies and reading metacognitive strategies. there are 13 items in the use of learning strategies. among them, the memory strategy subscale has 4 items, the α coefficient is 0.74; the elaboration strategy contains 4 items, and the α coefficient is 0. 72; the control strategy has 5 items with an α coefficient of 0.72. there are 11 items for reading metacognitive strategies. among them, understanding and remembering the information strategy contain 6 items, and the α coefficient is 0.83; the generalizing information strategy has 5 items, the α coefficient is 0.80. all of the above items were assessed on a six-point scale, from “not at all useful” to “very useful”. reading literacy the pisa reading test examines reading literacy by setting up four test scenarios based on personal purpose, public purpose, occupational purpose, and educational purpose, through two kinds of reading materials: continuous reading texts (such as explanatory texts, argumentations) and non-continuous texts (graphs, tables) to investigate the three levels of reading literacy: retrieving and inference, integrating and interpreting, and evaluating and reflecting. the pisa2009 reading test consisted of 13 sets of test questions, the tested students were randomly assigned to a set of questions, and the students’ original scores were transformed and estimated using the item response theory (irt) technique. the reading literacy test score was the average of five plausible values (α coefficient of 0.92) for the total score of the reading cognitive test. this variable is at the student level. data analyses data analyses and model construction were carried out using spss 20.0 and hlm 6.08. in this study, the teacher support is a level 2 organizational variables, and the students’ reading literacy and learning strategies belong to level 1 variables, and they have a nested relationship in the data structure. therefore, this model is a cross-level of low-level mediation model, a 2-1-1 model. according to the recommendations of fang (2010) and zhang (2009), in order to separate the between-group mediation effect and withingroup mediation effect, and to more accurately estimate the cross-level mediation effect, we centered mediating variables of the level 1 by group mean and at the same time, the group mean is placed in the level 2 intercept equation, then follow the steps below to perform model checking. in the first step, a zero model (model m0) is tested to determine if multi-level analysis is required. the m0 decomposes the equation into intra-class variance caused by individual differences and between-class variance caused by group differences; we chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 164 examine the percentage of the variance of the dependent variable explained by the second level of variables, i.e. intra-class correlation coefficient (icc). a multi-level analysis is necessary if the icc is greater than 0.06. in the second step, the direct effect c of the level 2 independent variable x·j on the level 1 dependent variable yij (model m1) is examined. in the third step, the direct effect a of the independent variable x·j on the dimensions of the mediator m ij (model m2) is examined. in the fourth step, the effects c’ and b of the independent variable x·j and the mediator m ij are simultaneously applied to the variable yij, (model m3). according to the results of the significance test of each regression coefficient, it can be judged whether or not the hypothesis model is verified. result descriptive statistics the descriptive statistical results are shown in table 1. since the teacher support is a level 2 variable, there is no correlation coefficient with the variables of t level 1. in level 1 variables, except that the correlation coefficient between the memory strategy and the generalizing information strategy is not significant, the correlation coefficients among the other variables are significant at 0.01 level. table 1. variable description statistics. m sd 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 teacher support 0.14 0.88 – 2 memory strategy -0.06 0.8 – – 3 control strategy -0.28 0.82 – 0.54** – 4 elaboration strategy 0.16 0.82 – 0.40** 0.61** – 5 understanding and remembering information strategies 0.14 0.97 – 0.40** 0.15** 0.07** – 6 generalizing information strategy 0.06 0.9 – 0.02 0.16** 0.10** 0.39** – 7 reading literacy 556.2 76.97 – 0.05** 0.29** 0.16** 0.35** – note: ** p < 0.01; 0 = female, 1 = male; teacher support is level 2 data, so there is no correlation coefficient with level 1 data. cross-level mediation effect model test first, a zero model (m0) test is performed. the m0 model is as follows: level-1: level-2: the results show that = 2,880.19/(2,880.19/3,106.36) = 0.48, indicating that for the total variance of reading literacy, the school level factor explains 48%, it is necessary to build a multi-level linear model. the second step is to examine the effect c of teacher support (stimread) on reading literacy, m1 model is as follows: level-1: chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 165 level-2: the results showed that teacher support had a positive effect on reading literacy ( = 107.37, p < 0.001). the third step is to test the direct effect a of teacher support on the dimensions of the learning strategy (medij). the m2 model is as follows: level-1: level-2: the results showed that teacher support has a positive effect on them. the fourth step is to examine the effects c’ and b of teacher support and learning strategies on reading literacy: level-1: level-2: the results (table 2) showed that: (1) the within-group effect ( =14. 00, p < 0.001) and the between-group effect (γ02 = 135.09, p < 0.001) of the control strategy had significant effects on reading literacy, and the influence of teacher support on reading literacy is not significant ( =22.45, p>0.05). that is, the control strategy is a cross-level mediator between teacher support and reading literacy, and the mediating effect is 27.88%. (2) within-group effect ( =6.59, p < 0.001) and between-group effect (γ02 = 74.92, p < 0.001) of elaboration strategies were significant, and the influence of teacher support on reading literacy decreased but remained significant ( = 65. 60, p < 0. 01). the elaboration strategy is a cross-level mediator with a mediating effect of 5.24%. (3) understanding and remembering the information strategy’s within-group effect ( =17. 01, p < 0.001) and between-group effect ( = 128.11, p < 0.001) were significant, and the influence of teacher support on reading literacy ( = 62.20, p < 0.001) was significantly reduced but still significant. understanding and remembering information strategy was a cross-level mediator with a mediating effect of 8.73%. (4) the generalizing information strategy also belongs to the cross-level mediator because its within-group effect ( = 19.29, p < 0.001) and between-group effect (γ02 = 140.22, p < 0.001) were significant, and the influence ( = 42.53, p < 0.001) of teacher support on reading literacy is significant but significantly decreased, with a mediating effect of 16.95%. (5) the within-group effect of memory strategy ( = 2.80, p < 0.05) and teacher support ( = 108.31, p < 0.001) were significant, but between-group effect (γ02 = 4.25, p > 0.05) was not significant, so no cross-level mediation effect was found. discussion the influence mechanism of teacher support and learning strategies on students’ reading literacy chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 166 table 2. test of the effect of cross-level mediation of learning strategies. γ00 γ01 γ02 γ10 τ00 σ 2 m0 555.19*** 3,106.36 m1 539.43*** 107.37*** 3,106.27 m2 (memory) -0.10*** 0.21*** 0.63 m2 (control) -0.37*** 0.62*** 0.63 m2 (elaboration) 0.08*** 0.55*** 0.63 m2 (understanding & remembering) 0.08*** 0.35*** 0.64 m2 (generalizing) -0.10 0.45*** 0.89 m3 (memory) 539.08*** 108.31*** -4.25 2.80* 0.75 m3 (control) 590.24*** 22.45 135.09*** 14.00*** 3,092.76 m3 (elaboration) 534.12*** 65.60** 74.92*** 6.59*** 2,958.13 m3 (understanding & remembering) 529.27*** 62.20*** 128.11*** 17.01*** 2,843.42 m3 (generalizing) 540.86*** 42.53*** 140.22*** 19.29*** 2,824.21 note: *p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001; τ00 is the residual of the intercept, and σ 2 is the residual of level 1. cross-level mediation effects of control, elaboration, understanding and remembering information, and generalizing information strategies strategies such as control, elaboration, understanding and remembering information, and generalizing information can be improved by teacher support, and as a cross-level mediator affects students’ reading literacy. this provides further evidence for the theory of various learning strategies and teaching modes. on the other hand, we have a deeper understanding of the influence and mechanism of the interaction between teacher support and student learning strategies on the improvement of reading comprehension. learning strategies are cognitive activities that readers plan to do before, during, and after reading in order to gain a full understanding of the text, avoid and solve various problems encountered in reading (mcnamara, 2007). learning strategy teaching is an important method for students to learn to use learning strategies and improve reading literacy. for the scientific and effective learning strategy teaching, scholars have developed the reciprocal teaching, transactional strategies instruction model, interactive strategy training for active reading and thinking, concept-oriented reading instruction and many other modes. although the specific operating methods of these teaching models are different, their theoretical and empirical studies have shown that teacher support can promote students to effectively use a variety of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies to improve reading literacy. the reciprocal teaching mode allows teachers and students to exchange roles, the “teacher” guides the “student” to use the learning strategies such as prediction, questioning, clarification and summarization to conduct teaching dialogues, jointly realchen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 167 ize the construction of the meaning of the article, and let the students learn how to use learning strategies in the teacher-student interaction to further improve reading literacy (rosenshine & meister, 1994). the transactional strategies instruction model advocates the interaction between students and articles, the interaction between teachers and students, and the interaction between team members to improve students’ ability to use prediction, visualization, questioning, clarification, contact and summary strategies and reading literacy. the interactive strategy training for active reading and thinking mode provides interactive and appropriate training for students to flexibly and actively use learning strategies such as comprehension monitoring, interpretation, prediction, and accurate processing to improve their reading literacy through multimedia technology (graesser, et al, 2005). the learning strategies involved in these teaching models, such as prediction, questioning, clarification and summarization, visualization, connection, comprehension monitoring, interpretation, accurate processing, etc., are all related to the elaboration strategy, understanding and remembering information strategy, generalizing information strategy in pisa evaluation. it is not difficult to understand that these strategies can play a cross-level mediation effect between reading teaching and reading literacy. the discovery of the cross-level mediation effect of each dimension of the learning strategy in this study make us has a deeper understanding of the role of learning strategies in reading comprehension and reading literacy training. learning strategies can effectively promote students’ reading comprehension and reading literacy. this role can be explained by a self-regulating comprehension model. when reading, the metacognitive level monitors the activity state and process of the cognitive level, helping the reader to conduct an understanding assessment, and paying attention to whether the cognitive activities of the cognitive level and the metacognitive level are consistent. if it is consistent, it will be judged that the chapter is understood, and reading will continue; if there is a difference, the reader will feel doubts and troubles, and be aware that appropriate strategies should be taken to identify and solve the problem, and to eliminate doubts and problems (chen, 2009, 2010). the understanding of self-regulation is conditional: the reader’s understanding of monitoring should be sufficiently precise. if the reader’s learning strategy is based on inaccurate understanding of monitoring, its effectiveness will be greatly compromised. unfortunately, a large number of studies have shown that the reader’s understanding of monitoring is not accurate; the average of monitoring accuracy coefficient is 0. 25 approximately; moreover, such inaccurate monitoring seems to be an inherent part of human cognition inadequate (xu & chen, 2013). therefore, we have to consider “when” learning strategies can effectively affect reading comprehension performance and reading literacy. if the reader knows the “when to use”, “what to use” and “how to use” learning strategies, there is naturally no problem, which can promote reading comprehension. the problem is that readers usually cannot accurately judge “when to use” or “what to use”, and the “how to use” learning strategy. fortunately, we can use the external support form of teacher support to teach students “when to use,” “what to use,” and “how chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 168 to use” learning strategies (shiu & chen, 2013). in other words, the reader’s selfregulated reading is an effective way to read; but because the reader’s understanding of monitoring is usually not accurate enough, it is not always effective; and learning strategies based on external feedback, such as teacher-led are more accurate, effective and easy to implement. why does the memory strategy have no cross-level mediating effect? the student’s memory strategy will be improved by teacher support, but it is less relevant to reading literacy and does not have a cross-level mediating effect between teacher support and reading literacy. this result may be discussed in terms of the theory of reading processing and the characteristics of pisa evaluation. reading comprehension is a process of constructing a series of simple or complex psychological representations based on the surface coding, text representation and situational models of reading texts. understanding can occur at different levels, so the reading test can be either a surface memory based on article information or a deep understanding based on the content of the article. by setting different reading scenarios, pisa examines the reading literacy level of readers’ ability in retrieving and inference, integrating and interpreting, and evaluating and reflecting, which focus on the reader’s deep understanding of the article rather than the surface memory of the article. the memory strategies in the pisa assessment (such as “repeated reading texts”, “remembering details”, etc.) are more focused on the surface memory of the article. perhaps for this reason, memory strategies are less relevant to reading literacy and do not play a cross-level mediating role between teacher support and reading literacy. implications this study explores the influence of teacher support and various learning strategies on students’ reading literacy, and finds that the various components of learning strategies play different roles. the findings of this study have both theoretical and practical implication. from a theoretical point of view, we have deepened our understanding of the role of learning strategies between teacher support and reading literacy. moreover, it tells us that in the empirical study of the influence of learning strategies, different strategies should be examined independently, rather than simply merging and averaging. from a practical point of view, as confucius said, “don’t go to guide him until he tries to figure it out and cannot get it. don’t inspire him until he understands it but cannot speak it.” teacher support is not a blind infusion, but a targeted suggestion at the right time. not all the support can promote students’ reading literacy. teacher support is the easiest to improve their students reading literacy by promoting the use of student control strategies. it also has a certain effect on the role of elaboration strategies and metacognitive strategies, but not for memory strategies. what could we know is that only leads students to read mechanically will not produce good results, and retelling the chen, et al. teacher support, reading strategy and reading literacy vol.2, no. 1, 2019 169 text simply will learn only about the text itself which may not play a great role in students’ learning ability? conclusion teacher support can directly affect students’ reading literacy, and can also influence reading literacy through the cross-level mediation effect of learning strategies. the cross-level effects of learning strategies of different dimensions are different. control strategies, elaboration strategies, understanding and remembering information strategies, generalizing information strategies have cross-level mediating effects, while memory strategies does not have it. references alvermann d e, unrau n, ruddell r b. 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(2015). research on reading strategy instruction and its implications. global education, 44(7): 120-128. zhang, w., & xin, t. (2012). a cross-culture comparison study of the impact of reading engagement on reading literacy: based on pisa 2009. psychological development and education, 28(2):175-183. zhang, z. (2010). the contextualization and multilevel issues in research of organizational psychology. acta psychologica sinica, 42(1): 10-21. zhang, z., zyphur, m. j., & preacher, k. j. (2009). testing multilevel mediation using hierarchical linear models: problems and solutions. organizational research methods, 12(4): 695-719. received: 21 april 2019 revised: 13 may 2019 accepted: 21 may 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in global edu 2018; 47(12):51-61. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 陈启山, 雷雅缨, 温忠麟, 李舒彤, 李洁莹, 孔雨柔. 教师指导, 学习策略与阅读素养的关系: 基于 pisa测评的跨层中介模型. 全球教育展望 2018; 47(12):51-61. article-qishanchen-bece_title_31may2019 article-qishanchen-maintext-bece_31may2019 online home study plan for postponed 2020 spring semester during the covid-19 epidemic: a case study of tangquan middle school in nanjing, jiangsu province, china daxiang dai, gaofeng lin tangquan middle school, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china abstract. the implementation of “school’s out, but class’s on” is inseparable from the support of online education. the problem that each school needs to consider for online teaching during the delayed start period is how to use the network for teacher and student learning and management on the basis of ensuring the health of teachers and students to ensure high quality and high efficiency of online teaching. taking the practical exploration of tangquan middle school in nanjing, jiangsu province as an example, we explored the implementation plan of online teaching in schools during the covid-19 epidemic. best evid chin edu 2020; 4(2):543-547. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.rp005. keywords: covid-19 epidemic; “school’s out, but class’s on”; online home teaching; implementation plan; middle school about the author: daxiang dai, advanced teacher, tangquan middle school, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china, email: 447604856@qq.com. correspondence to: gaofeng lin, advanced teacher, tangquan middle school, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china, email: 23899158@qq.com. conflict of interests: none. dai & lin. online home study for postponed 2020 spring semester with covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 544 ffected, by the covid-19 epidemic, on january 27, 2020, the chinese ministry of education issued a notice requiring all types of schools to postpone the start of the 2020 spring semester, and emphasized the use of the internet platform to ensure “school’s out, but class’s on” plan, i.e., “school is closed, but student learning is continuing online” or “online home study” (this refers to the official website of the chinese ministry of education: http://en.moe.gov.cn/). tangquan middle school in nanjing city, jiangsu province, according to the requirements of all levels, take multiple measures to effectively and effectively solve the problem of autonomous learning of students, so that students can safely, orderly and effectively carry out the extended learning life during the extended school period. establish work goals and requirements in order to solve the problem of student learning during the epidemic, the school focuses on cultivating students’ autonomous learning ability and adheres to the five ethics of “morality, intelligence, sports, aesthetics, and labor.” in accordance with the characteristics of online learning and the actual needs of students, guide students to carry out independent learning, ensure the effectiveness and quality of online teaching, and promote the all-round development of students. after discussion, the school established the following job requirements: 1. raise awareness. class teachers and teachers in all subjects should attach great importance to online teaching, actively guide students, organize students in this class to do online learning, and give full play to the role of leading cadres, party member teachers, and backbone teachers in exemplary and exemplary roles. 2. organization is in place. each class teacher and teacher in each subject must carefully plan, arrange carefully, and organize carefully to ensure that the student’s “school’s out, but class’s on”. 3. strengthen publicity. the head teachers and teachers in each subject should timely publicize the work highlights and advanced models during online teaching and learning, and continuously gather positive energy. 4. encourage innovation. class teachers and teachers in each subject are encouraged to develop students’ autonomous learning ability based on the actual development of resources and focus on the guidance of learning methods. but to control the total amount of learning resources, we must not increase the excessive academic burden. 5. strengthen supervision. the head teachers and teachers in each subject should strengthen inspections to ensure the effectiveness of work; the teaching affairs office and information center should strengthen their work guidance to solve technical and teaching problems in a timely manner for each head teacher and teachers in each subject; the teaching affairs office should strengthen supervision. set up a working group a dai & lin. online home study for postponed 2020 spring semester with covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 545 in order to better carry out “school’s out, but class’s on”, the school set up a working group led by the principal, and the vice principal as the vice-group leader. the heads of the teaching and research offices, and the lesson preparation teams are as the team members, so as to guarantee a good job of network teaching during the extended school period. develop an online teaching plan with reference to the online teaching requirements of the municipal and district education bureaus, the school has formulated online teaching plans for each grade. the online learning in the “school’s out, but class’s on” period was divided into two stages, namely the review and the new lesson stage. develop an online review plan. for the first week (02/03/2020-02/07/2020), it was the review period for students. the school arranged students to conduct home-based review through the jiangsu provincial tv teaching channel and other platforms. develop plans for online new lessons. starting from the second week, online teaching had entered the new lesson learning stage. the school arranged students to study according to schedules through multiple platforms, and prepares record books for recording. build an online teaching platform with various teaching platforms at all levels, the school builds a platform for online teaching, tutoring and answering questions for teachers and students throughout the school. this effectively solves the problem of delaying students to attend school due to the epidemic situation, and realizes the “school’s out, but class’s on” of the whole school, and teachers are suspended from teaching. 1. national or local public education platform. the school uses jiangsu’s teaching platform “air master classes and jinling micro school”, pukou district’s teaching platform “pukou e start”, and jiangsu province’s online learning mobile app “i su” for online teaching. 2. national or local television education channels. during the review phase, the school required the school to listen to the “drum tower online review class” for home-based independent review by watching the jiangsu education channel. for ninth grade students, the school organizes students to learn independently by watching pukou television news channel. 3. public communication platform. the school establishes communication groups for each class through public communication platforms such as qq or wechat, so that teachers can help students answer questions in a timely manner. dai & lin. online home study for postponed 2020 spring semester with covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 546 4. enterprise live broadcast platform. the school uses the office communication platform “dingding” to carry out online group live broadcasts, and conducts online interactive teaching through the network live broadcast platform. building online teaching resources schools give full play to their subjective initiative and, based on the use of public teaching resources in provinces, municipalities, districts and other countries, will further enrich curriculum resources for students’ learning based on the results of school classroom instruction reform. 1. school-based resources. the school encouraged class teachers and teachers in each subject to develop resources, especially the construction of online instructional resources, according to the actual semester and the age characteristics of the students. the school organized teachers to prepare pre-study sheets and guide plans for students to study independently, appropriately increased the learning contents, focused on the guidance of learning methods, and enriched the online teaching courses during the postponed start of the school. 2. national and local public course learning resources. the school made use of the learning resources of famous teachers and lessons in public platforms such as the country, the province, and the urban area to conduct online teaching, and guided students to use rich network resources for student preview and development. 3. epidemic prevention and health knowledge. in addition to academic knowledge, the school paid attention to the spread of epidemic protection knowledge, strengthened life education, public safety education, and enabled students to obtain comprehensive and vivid training and development. implementation of online teaching 1. develop a home study plan suitable for students. the teachers in each class put forward different requirements to different students according to the students’ ability, and strive to have each student have their own home study plan. 2. teachers of each class teach online. the teachers of each subject (chinese, mathematics, english, physics, chemistry, politics, history, geography, biology, and 9th grade sports) would arrange the learning content of the new class in the first week and publish it in the class qq or wechat platform with the textbook pictures, self-study pre-study sheets, and tutorials. the answers were checked and announced the next day. students revised and corrected them by themselves, then uploaded the pictures of the learning results to the group, and finally the teachers answered individual questions online. 3. home-school joint education. in order to facilitate the communication between parents and children, the school had strengthened contact with pardai & lin. online home study for postponed 2020 spring semester with covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 547 ents, unified curriculum and activity arrangements. all learning and activity resources were mainly based on pukou district teaching platform (“pukou e co-study”) online learning, supplemented by teachers’ live broadcasts, through qq, wechat, dingding and other platforms jointly carried out home study and counseling with parents. for the students who had the ability to learn, the school organized parents’ guidance and arranged for the students to choose the famous teacher class in jiangsu province, “sky master classes and jinling micro school platform” for independent learning with the help of parents. received: 04 march 2020 revised: 09 march 2020 accepted: 12 march 2020 report-gaofenglin-bece_title_15mar2020 report-gaofenglin-bece_maintext15mar2020 bece. newsletter vol.8, no.2, 2021 1154 effects of e-reading on reading literacy by li, w., & yao, j. correspondence to: yao, j., nanjing normal university, nanjing, jiangsu, china, 210023. email: yaojijun_njnu@163.com n the information society, more and more students are reading through electronic devices. however, there is no consistent conclusion about the influence of the change of reading style on the reading effect. in addition, the current discussions on the merits of “screen reading” and “book reading” are mostly based on experience rather than scientific evidence. a small amount of empirical research still has a large room for improvement in the authoritativeness and representativeness of data and the robustness of conclusions. in this case, the research published in open education research analyzed the influence of the different ways of reading on the reading literacy of students. the researchers selected variables related to the reading in the pisa2018 database, using the least-square regression method to establish the baseline. the selection bias is controlled by the coarsen exact matching technique. furthermore, the quantile regression and the mediation effect model are used to explore the heterogeneity of e-reading and its influencing mechanism. the findings of the research are as follow:  the “screen disadvantage” does exist, whether the selection bias is controlled or not, which indicates the effect that “screen reading” is not up to “book reading”.  quantile regression results show that the different levels of students have significant differences under the influence of e-reading, and students under the influence of e-reading at different quantiles have a significant decline trend. the effects of e-reading on students at the lower and upper quantile of the reading literacy experiment were distinctly different. moreover, there may be a “matthew effect” in the process of e-reading.  the results of mediation effect analysis show that metacognitive strategies can play an important role in promoting and mediating reading, and good reading metacognitive strategies can help students effectively eliminate the negative effects of e-reading. source: open education research, 2021; 27(2):110-120. i mailto:yaojijun_njnu@163.com the impact of higher education and human capital quality on “localneighborhood” economic growth ran zhao, yuhong du beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. based on china’s provincial panel data from 1990 to 2017 and the improved lucas, nelson & phelps model, the spatial dubin model is used to test the spatial effects of higher education and human capital quality. the results showed that high-level human capital, characterized by higher education and urban labor income index, indirectly promoted local economic growth through technological innovation. there was also a “local-neighborhood” synergy effect. the neighborhood effect was manifested in that it affected the economic development of neighbors by promoting technological catch-up. after considering the quality factor, both the local and neighborhood effects were enhanced. from a regional perspective, higher education in the yangtze river delta, where the level of economic development is relatively high, was manifested as a spatial spillover effect of technological innovation and the neighborhood effect in the northeastern bohai rim and the pearl river delta was manifested as a technological catch-up. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 8(1):1041-1057. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.ar22. how to cite: zhao, r., & du, y. (2021). the impact of higher education and human capital quality on “local-neighborhood” economic growth. best evidence in chinese education, 8(1):1041-1057. keywords: higher education, human capital quality, economic growth, spatial dubin model zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no.1, 2021 1042 about the authors: ran zhao, lecturer, faculty of education/institute of educational economics, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: zhaoran@bnu.edu.cn correspondence to: yuhong du, professor, faculty of education/institute of educational economics, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: dyh@bnu.edu.cn funding: this study was supported by the ministry of education’s philosophy and social science major research project (15jzd040) and the central government’s special fund for basic scientific research in universities (2019ntss06). conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1043 introduction rom 1978 to 2010, the chinese economy maintained an average annual growth rate of more than 10%, creating a growth miracle that attracted worldwide attention. after 2010, the growth rate has gradually slowed down, and the gdp growth rate from 2017 to 2019 was below 7%. the economy has transformed from high-speed growth in the past to mediumand high-speed growth. china’s “demographic dividend” advantage is gradually diminishing. labor shortage and population aging have gradually become key factors restricting economic growth. as a comprehensive indicator to measure population size, structure, and quality, human capital determines national and regional economic development speed and quality. from 1982 to 2017, the proportion of the population with an associate degree education and above in the chinese labor force showed a significant upward trend increased from 0.9% in 1982 to 18% in 2017. the decline in the number of labor forces will not be conducive to economic growth, but can the improvement in labor quality make up for the growing gap caused by the decline in the number of labor forces? what is the mechanism and realization path of higher education’s influence on regional economic growth? does this impact show spatial dependence characteristics among regions with significant differences in population size, education quality, and economic development? previous studies adopted the average years of education or the total years of education, which could not reflect the change in the quality of the labor force. our study used the revised lucas and nelson & phelps models for spatial econometric analysis by constructing two data sets of labor income index human capital and education human capital (lucas, 1988); nelson & phelps, 1965). this helps to understand the spatial mechanism of higher education and human capital quality from a deeper level and provides a decision-making reference for implementing the coordinated development of china’s higher education and regional economy to a certain extent. literature review the mechanism and direction of human capital in economic growth research under the macro-framework mainly focuses on the mechanism of education and human capital in economic growth and the direction and significance of human capital in economic growth. there are primarily the following views on the mechanism: firstly, human capital directly participates in the production process as a production factor that improves the quality of labor, and the accumulation of specialized human capital is the decisive factor in promoting sustained economic growth (lucas, 1988). secondly, human capital promotes the indirect effects of economic growth by fostering technological innovation and technological catch-up, emphasizing that the stock of human capital is a critical factor in economic growth (romer, 1990; ding & knight, 2011; f zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1044 li et al., 2016). thirdly, human capital directly affects output as a factor and indirectly promotes a joint mechanism of economic growth by promoting technological innovation and imitating absorption (engelbrecht, 2003; du et al., 2014). fourthly, from a regional perspective, some studies have confirmed that education and human capital have positive spatial externalities (chang & zhao, 2017; deng & ke, 2020), but some studies have reached the opposite conclusion (fischer et al., 2009). it can be seen that the mechanism of different levels of education and human capital in space still needs to be further tested. “stock” and “quality” in human capital measurement in the research on the relationship between education, human capital, and economic growth, a vital issue is distinguishing between “stock” and “quality” in human capital. the more mature human capital measurement methods mainly include cost method, income method, and education characteristic method. the main idea of the cost method is to compare the method of measuring physical capital. most scholars estimate the stock of human capital in various countries or different periods based on perpetual inventory technology (schultz, 1961; kendrick, 1976; qian, 2012; meng & wang, 2014). previous studies on the impact of education on economic growth have focused more on quantitative educational indicators. the commonly used proxy variables include the average years of workers’ education (psacharopoulos & patrinos, 2004; barro & lee, 1993) and the adult literacy rate (cai & du, 2000). studies have also shown that once the factors of education quality (international test scores, etc.) are considered, the influence of the quantity of education becomes insignificant. in contrast, the quality of education has a strong positive effect on economic growth (jamison et al., 2007; hanushek & woessmann, 2011). still, the use of international test scores cannot directly measure the human capital level of the working-age population (graham & webb, 1979). there are two ways to use the income method to calculate human capital: one is to use the sum of the present value of future income to measure human capital (jorgenson & fraumeni, 1989; li & tang, 2015; dong, 2017). however, it is impossible to eliminate the influence of the annual increase in physical capital on the stock of human capital. the other is to estimate human capital by using the present value income of workers. the most representative is lihk (labor-income-based human capital) labor income method (mulligan & sala-i-martin, 1997). it reflects the difference of different education levels, the change of education quality over time, and factors such as work experience on human capital accumulation. simultaneously, it effectively eliminates the influence of physical capital on the measurement, which is more reasonable for analyzing economic growth (zhu & xu, 2007; liang et al., 2015). based on the concept of unit human capital in the income method, this research constructs two types of panel data: human capital index and educational human capital, including scale, structure, and quality. by establishing a spatial measurement model, the spatial effect mechanism of higher education and human capital quality in economic growth is tested under the premise of fully considering spatial and geographical factors. zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1045 human capital measurement based on lihk income method according to china’s primary data, we first need to estimate the annual population data according to gender, age, urban and rural areas, and education level. secondly, we need to evaluate the income of each part of the group. using the method of the china human capital and labor economics research center (chlr), we estimated the expanded mincer income equation (1): (1) where ln(wage) is the natural logarithm of income. sch represents the number of years of education. exp is an individual’s work experience. ave_gdp represents the per capita gdp of the province. indus_gdp indicates the proportion of tertiary industry output value in gdp in the province where it is located. ave_wage represents the average wage level in the province. according to the two databases of chns (china health and nutrition survey, 1989-2015) and cfps (china family panel studies, 2010-2016), the weighted results based on the sample size yield the intercept term, sch, exp, and the coefficient of exp 2 . then, the linear fitting of the variable to the time trend is made, and the fitting value of the missing year is obtained. then the human capital index of the individual by sex, age, urban and rural, and education level was calculated. the total human capital stock is obtained by adding up the number of labor forces in each group. construction of spatial panel data measurement model research method the two basic setting methods for spatial interaction are: one is spatial lag model (slm) (lagged dependent variable), and the other is spatial error model (sem) (the error term contains a spatial autoregression process). spatial dubin model (sdm) is a general form of the spatial measurement model and a broader slm and sem measurement model. among them, yit is the explained variable, xit is the explanatory variable, and the primary expression of the model is: slm: (2) zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1046 sem: (3) sdm: (4) this study draws on the model of lucas and nelson & phelps (lucas, 1988; nelson & phelps, 1965), combined with the improved research framework of yuhong du et al. (du & zhao, 2018), to test the spatial effect mechanism of higher education and human capital quality on economic growth. we hypothesized that different levels of human capital have different growth paths: basic human capital influences growth by increasing factor accumulation. in contrast, advanced human capital promotes growth by promoting technological innovation and imitating catch-up. we set the production function to the following form: (5) y represents output, k represents capital, ha represents high-level human capital, hb represents basic human capital, l represents labor force. a means technological progress rate or total factor productivity. drawing on the study of nelson & phelps (nelson & phelps, 1965), ha represents technological innovation and means technological imitation and catch-up, as shown in equation (6): (6) take the per capita form and digitize both sides of equation (5) at the same time, and add the spatial effect after substituting equation (6) to obtain the spatial panel model (7): zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1047 (7) among them, the explained variable is represented by gdp per capita, and the explanatory variables include physical capital (k), number of laborers (l), basic human capital (hb), advanced human capital (ha), technological imitation, and catch-up (catch), representing a series of control variables include foreign trade dependence (open), industrial structure (indus), and government support (gov). c, αi, and εit represent a constant term, a regional fixed effect, and a random error term, respectively. wij represents the elements of the spatial weight matrix. this study uses three types of matrices for analysis. the adjacency weight matrix w1 is constructed by studying whether the variables are adjacent to each other by assigning values of 0 or 1. if i = j, it means that province i and j are adjacent; if i ≠ j, it means that province i and j are not adjacent. (8) besides, in order to test the robustness of the estimation results, we also consider the attenuation of the spatial effect as the distance increases and construct the geographical distance weight matrix w2: (9) at the same time, to objectively express the spatial correlation of the economic development level of the spatial unit, we also construct the economic distance weight matrix w3, where i is the average gdp of the region i over the years, and is the average gdp of the full sample. zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1048 (10) data sources and variables according to the availability of samples, this paper selects the panel data of 30 provinces from 1990 to 2017 as the research sample (the tibet autonomous region has been eliminated due to excessive data missing). the data we used to measure lihk’s human capital came from “china’s 1982 census”, “china’s 1990 census”, “china’s 2000 census”, “china’s 2010 census”, “china demographic yearbook (1991-2018)”, the provincial census data and statistical yearbooks, the china nutrition and health survey (chns, 1989-2015) and the chinese family panel studies (cfps, 2010-2016) microdatabase; the original data of other variables were from the “china statistical yearbook” (1991-2018)”, “china labor statistics yearbook (1991-2018)” and statistical yearbook of each province.  output level (y/y) the output level reflects the economic development status of a province and is expressed by the province’s gross regional product (y) and per capita gross regional product (y).  capital stock (k) / capital stock per capita (k) as there are currently no official statistics on annual physical capital stock data, the most commonly used calculation method is the perpetual inventory method. the interprovincial material capital stock data used in this article came from holz and dr. sun yue (holz & sun, 2018).  human capital we measured human capital in two forms: years of education and lihk human capital index. advanced human capital (ha) is equal to the sum of years of education of all workers with higher education, and basic human capital (hb) is equal to the sum of years of education of all workers with elementary, middle, and high school education. this study also measured the human capital index based on the lihk labor income method, reflecting the comprehensive effect of labor force size and quality. considering the conditions in rural areas in china, they usually only have limited opportunities for higher education, and it is difficult for them to have the opportunity to obtain advanced skills from their jobs. therefore, the main reason for the urban-rural income gap can be attributed to the difference in advanced human capital levels. the measured rural labor income index and urban labor income index were used as substitute variables for basic (hb_lihk) and advanced human capital (ha_lihk). zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1049  other control variables foreign trade dependence (open), industrial structure (indus), and government support (gov) respectively used the proportion of total regional imports and exports to gdp, the ratio of the added value of the tertiary industry to gdp, and the balance of government public budget fiscal expenditures in gdp. empirical result analysis preliminary test of spatial effect model before estimating the model, it was necessary to test whether there was a spatial effect between the quality of higher education and human capital and economic growth (shown in table 1). both the lagrange multiplier test and robust test results rejected the null hypothesis that there was no spatial lag effect or spatial error effect. it showed that there was a significant spatial dependence characteristic between higher education, human capital quality, and economic growth in various regions. the wald statistics of spatial lag and spatial error were both significant at the 1% statistical level, indicating that the spatial dubin model’s null hypothesis could be transformed into a spatial lag or error model should be rejected, so it was more appropriate to establish the spatial dubin model. simultaneously, the hausman test result passes the 1% significance test, and a fixed-effect spatial dubin model (sdm-fe) should be established. considering that china’s education, human capital level, and economic growth all present significant imbalanced characteristics, the mixed effects and time fixed effects ignore regional structural economic differences. in contrast, the space-time double fixed-effect model can simultaneously consider regional spatial differences and period effects, further effectively distinguish the role of spatial dependence from the impact of spatial heterogeneity and omitted variables. studies have pointed out that the parameters obtained using maximum likelihood estimation (mle) were asymptotically effective (chen, 2014). therefore, we used the spatial dubin model with dual fixed mle time and space. model estimation results the estimation results obtained under the three spatial weight matrices of the national adjacency matrix, inverse distance matrix, and economic distance matrix were relatively stable (shown in table 2). most of the coefficient estimates had not changed significantly, indicating the robustness of the estimated results. simultaneously, the best fit of the model was assessed under the economic distance matrix, indicating that the spatial effect of education and human capital quality on economic growth was more reflected in economic spatial connections. therefore, in the following, we mainly analyzed the economic distance matrix w3. the estimated values of advanced human capital (variables ha and ha_lihk) were both positive at the 1% significance level, indicating that advanced human capital represented by higher education (ha) could significantly pro mote regional economic growth through technological innovation effects and urban zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1050 table 1. the spatial effect test of higher education and human capital quality in economic growth. test w1 w2 w3 lagrange multiplier test (spatial lag) 7.857*** (0.005) 9.529*** (0.002) 4.279** (0.039) robust lagrange multiplier test (spatial lag) 7.047*** (0.008) 8.746*** (0.003) 4.052** (0.044) lagrange multiplier test (spatial error) 16.072*** (0.005) 8.031*** (0.005) 3.231* (0.072) robust lagrange multiplier test (spatial error) 15.262*** (0.005) 7.248*** (0.007) 3.004* (0.082) wald test (spatial lag) 83.06*** (0.000) 240.39*** (0.000) 100.24*** (0.000) wald test (spatial error) 82.52*** (0.000) 154.71*** (0.000) 53.03*** (0.000) hausman test 346.48*** (0.000) 34.81*** (0.000) 95.33*** (0.000) ***, **, * represent significant at the statistical level of 1%, 5%, and 10%, respectively. the p value of the coefficient is in parentheses. table 2. robust estimation results of spatial dubin model (sdm). variable educational human capital lihk human capital sdm-fe sdm-fe sdm-fe sdm-fe sdm-fe sdm-fe adjacency weight matrix geographic distance matrix economic distance matrix adjacency weight matrix geographic distance matrix economic distance matrix capital stock 0.3169*** (0.0107) 0.3090*** (0.0112) 0.3364*** (0.0113) 0.2983*** (0.0113) 0.2926*** (0.0122) 0.3059*** (0.0119) number of labor -0.7215*** (0.0314) -0.7326*** (0.0291) -0.6796*** (0.0297) -1.0331*** (0.0461) -0.9616*** (0.0437) -0.8552*** (0.0393) basic human capital 0.5145*** (0.0929) 0.3112*** (0.0856) 0.5216*** (0.0855) 0.1160*** (0.0195) 0.0444** (0.0187) 0.0407** (0.0187) advanced human capital 0.1196*** (0.0156) 0.0832*** (0.0143) 0.1461*** (0.0140) 0.4696*** (0.0580) 0.4945*** (0.0462) 0.5389*** (0.0537) technology catch-up -0.0383*** (0.0042) -0.0335*** (0.0037) -0.0394*** (0.0044) -0.1411*** (0.0306) -0.1667*** (0.0219) -0.2120*** (0.0261) spatial effect of capital stock 0.0036 (0.0239) 0.0613** (0.0310) 0.1187** (0.0466) -0.0328 (0.0247) 0.0036 (0.0333) 0.2024*** (0.0505) spatial effect of labor number 0.4491*** (0.0566) 0.6311*** (0.0922) 0.1447 (0.1304) 0.8156*** (0.1055) 0.9434*** (0.0994) 0.4077** (0.1333) spatial effect of basic human capital -0.3800** (0.1619) 0.6952*** (0.1904) -0.7506** (0.2837) -0.2086*** (0.0382) -0.1922*** (0.0487) -0.1422** (0.0659) spatial effect of advanced human capital -0.0658** (0.0297) 0.0785** (0.0322) -0.1696*** (0.0509) -0.4810*** (0.1240) -0.1513 (0.1273) -0.2338 (0.1957) spatial effect of technology catch-up 0.0483*** (0.0080) 0.0492*** (0.0088) 0.1105*** (0.0121) 0.1479** (0.0564) 0.2158*** (0.0528) 0.2922*** (0.0744) sample size 840 840 840 840 840 840 r2 0.311 0.366 0.470 0.164 0.294 0.367 ***, **, * represent significant at the statistical level of 1%, 5%, and 10%, respectively. this table only reports the estimated results of the core explanatory variables, and the complete results can be obtained from the author. zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1051 labor quality factor (ha_lihk) included in the income index had a more substantial impact on local economic growth. the estimated value of the spatial effect of advanced human capital is negative, and it is only significant under the human capital index measured by education level. the estimated value of the spatial impact of technological catch-up is positive at the 1% significance level, indicating that although the flow of technology and personnel and other factor resources have produced spatial spillover effects, the spillover effects of high-level human capital are mainly realized as technological imitation and catch-up. since the estimation results of the sdm model cannot fully reflect the relationship between the explained variables and the explanatory variables, according to the research of lesage and pace (lesage & pace, 2009) , the use of partial differential methods could better deal with the error of spatial spillover effect estimation. the partial differentiation method decomposed the spatial dubin model (sdm) total spatial spillover effects into direct and indirect effects. the total effect was the sum of the immediate impact and the indirect effect. table 3 reports the estimated results of the local direct effects, the indirect impact of neighbors, and the total effects of higher education and human capital quality under the economic distance matrix. different levels of human capital have other spatial mechanisms for economic growth. among them, essential human capital directly affects local economic growth through the production of final products, but it will inhibit the economic growth of neighboring provinces. the local effect coefficient of highlevel human capital, characterized by higher education and urban labor income index, which promotes economic growth through technological innovation, is significantly positive, confirming the mechanism of high-level human capital indirectly promoting regional economic growth through technological innovation. and for every year of higher education years, the growth effect brought by technological innovation in the region will increase by 0.15%. the level of high-level human capital, including quality factors, will increase by one unit. the economic growth brought by technological innovation in the region will increase by 0.55%. it shows that compared with the quantity of education, quality factors can promote economic growth in the region. the spillover effect of advanced human capital through technological innovation in promoting the growth of neighboring areas was not significant or significantly negative, which may be due to the “matthew effect” existing in the advanced human capital level of different provinces, which makes it impossible to form the spillover effect of technological innovation. the spatial spillover effect of advanced human capital was mainly manifested in improving the economic growth level of neighboring regions through the promotion of technological imitation and catch-up. the impact of technological catch-up to promote the growth of neighboring areas was 0.11%-0.29%. therefore, to realize the leapfrog transformation of the spatial spillover effect of higher education from technological imitation and absorption to high-end technological innovation, it is also necessary to rely on higher levels of education and human capital. improving the quality of education is the key to promoting the coordinated development of higher education and the regional economy. zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1052 table 3. decomposition of the spatial effect of higher education and human capital quality in promoting regional economic growth. variable local effect neighborhood effect overall effect education level lihk education level lihk education level lihk capital stock 0.3355*** (0.0115) 0.3033*** (0.0123) 0.0716** (0.0358) 0.1299*** (0.0388) 0.4070*** (0.0365) 0.4332*** (0.0403) number of labor -0.6850*** (0.0269) -0.8687*** (0.0358) 0.2061* (0.1179) 0.4841*** (0.1162) -0.4790*** (0.1133) -0.3846*** (0.1153) basic human capital 0.5351*** (0.0925) 0.0456** (0.0186) -0.7291** (0.3054) -0.1265** (0.0611) -0.1940 (0.2830) -0.0809 (0.0630) advanced human capital 0.1499*** (0.0152) 0.5493*** (0.0578) -0.1715** (0.0528) -0.2953 (0.1848) -0.0216 (0.0487) 0.2540 (0.1878) technology catch-up -0.0416*** (0.0050) -0.2212*** (0.0295) 0.1058*** (0.0129) 0.2934*** (0.0752) 0.0642*** (0.0115) 0.0722 (0.0674) foreign trade degree of dependence 0.0436** (0.0144) -0.0028 (0.0159) 0.0455 (0.0386) -0.0781* (0.0449) 0.0891** (0.0382) -0.0808* (0.0477) industrial structure -0.3621*** (0.0639) -0.3022*** (0.0623) -0.0902 (0.2330) 0.0419 (0.2219) -0.4523* (0.2402) -0.2604 (0.2352) government support -0.4233*** (0.0623) -0.3146*** (0.0692) -0.3324* (0.1833) 0.3758** (0.1828) -0.7558*** (0.1774) 0.0612 (0.1710) ***, **, * represent significant at the statistical level of 1%, 5%, and 10%, respectively. table 4. estimation of the spatial effect of higher education by dividing economic zones. bohai sea economic belt and northeast china yangtze river triangle economic belt pearl river delta economic belt local neighborhood local neighborhood local neighborhood capital stock 0.4932*** (0.0212) -0.1160* (0.0687) 0.1341*** (0.0190) -0.0904** (0.0416) 0.2900*** (0.0261) -0.0411 (0.0845) number of labor 0.0311 (0.0800) -0.2317 (0.2230) -0.1039*** (0.0063) 0.0439** (0.0181) -0.0426*** (0.0050) -0.0841*** (0.0240) basic human capital 0.1777*** (0.0211) 0.1016* (0.0537) -0.0480* (0.0248) 0.2370*** (0.0574) 0.0499** (0.0242) -0.1249*** (0.0369) advanced human capital 0.1624*** (0.0290) -0.1099 (0.0753) -0.0239 (0.0358) 0.1607** (0.0591) 0.1853*** (0.0553) -0.1323 (0.0850) technology catch-up -0.0674*** (0.0075) 0.1659*** (0.0292) 0.0471** (0.0201) 0.0575 (0.0369) 0.0161 (0.0255) 0.1584** (0.0575) sample size 252 112 168 r2 0.883 0.362 0.658 *this table only reports the spatial direct and indirect effects of using w3 matrix and education human capital to estimate core explanatory variables. the complete results can be obtained from the author. in terms of regional division, this article draws on the division method of tongbin zhang (2016). among them, the bohai sea economic belt and northeast china include 9 provinces (cities, autonomous regions), including beijing, tianjin, hebei, shanxi, inner mongolia, liaoning, jilin, heilongjiang, and shandong; the yangtze river triangle economic belt includes 4 provinces (cities) of shanghai, jiangsu, zhejiang, and anhui; the pearl river delta economic belt includes 6 provinces of fujian, jiangxi, hunan, guangdong, guangxi, and hainan. zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1053 further discussion on the spatial spillover effect of higher education about 70% of the world’s entire economy is from the economic output of more than 40 major urban agglomerations globally. in recent years, china’s three major urban agglomerations, the yangtze river delta, the pearl river delta, and beijing-tianjinhebei have become the three growth poles of china’s economic development and have produced more than 40% of gdp. we refer to the classification standard of zhang et al. (zhang, 2016) to further estimate the sub-samples of the northeast, yangtze river delta, and pearl river delta economic belts in the bohai rim economic zone, observe the spatial effects of higher education within the region and make regional comparisons (table 4). in terms of regional differences, the yangtze river delta has the highest per capita gdp during the sample period. the bohai rim economic belt has a higher per capita gdp than the pearl river delta. the technological innovation spillover effect of advanced human capital represented by higher education is significantly positive in the yangtze river delta region, indicating that the “agglomeration effect” of the economic belt has brought new momentum to regional economic growth. the neighborhood effect is not significant in the northeastern bohai rim region and the pearl river delta region. the neighborhood effect of higher education in the northeastern bohai rim and the pearl river delta is mainly manifested in technology catch-up and imitation. complying with the “guangdong-hong kong-macao greater bay area” policy, along with the flow of talents and technologies, higher education has enhanced the ability to absorb and imitate technology in the pearl river delta region, promoted the economic growth of neighboring areas, and strengthened the economic growth of higher education throughout the region. conclusions and suggestions using panel data from china’s provinces and municipalities from 1990 to 2017, combined with microdata, two human capital measurement data were constructed using the education stock and labor income index method. and learn from the improved lucas and nelson & phelps models to clarify the mechanism of higher education and human capital quality from the spatial dimension. the results found: (i) higher education indirectly promotes local economic growth through technological innovation, but the spatial spillover effect is mainly manifested in promoting economic growth in neighboring areas through technological catch-up and imitation. after considering quality factors, the local and neighboring growth effects of advanced human capital are both enhanced. (ii) basic human capital directly acts on output to promote regional economic growth, but it will inhibit the economic growth of other neighboring provinces and cities. (iii) higher education exhibits different effects in regions with different economic development levels, and it can, even more, exert a technological innovation spillover effect on economic growth in areas with high economic development levels. based on the above research conclusions, the policy implications are as follows: zhao & du. higher education, human capital quality and “local-neighborhood” economy. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1054 firstly, give full play to the spatial coordination mechanism of higher education that promotes local-neighborhood growth through technological innovation and technological imitation and enhances the contribution of higher education to regional economic growth. when formulating regional development policies, spatial factors should be included. continuously improve the level and quality of human capital, amplify the agglomeration effect and scale effect, ensure the full use of human capital externalities, and constantly increase the contribution of higher education and human capital to regional economic growth. secondly, realize the complementary advantages of provincial education and human capital, and form a regional economic layout with high-quality development. it is necessary to strengthen further the positive spillover effect of human capital in promoting technology imitation and absorption in the region and at the same time enhance the technology assimilation and absorption capacity of neighboring areas. creating an environment conducive to sharing knowledge within the region and stimulating imitation, absorption, and independent innovation in neighboring areas and the quality of economic development in the entire area are ultimately improved. thirdly, implement differentiated policies for regions with different development levels, and build an innovative system for the coordinated development of regional higher education and economy. the external environment for technological innovation and economic growth should be continuously optimized to enable the spillover of the talent innovation effect to break through the limitations of geographical proximity. open up the path of high-level talent knowledge spillover, improve regional connectivity, realize the matching interaction between high-level innovative talents and the upgrading of regional industrial structure, and form a talent layout conducive to regional coordinated development. references barro, r.j., & lee, j.w. 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(2020). 高等教育, 人力资本质量对“本地-邻地”经济增长的影响. 高等教育研究, 2020, 41(8):52-62. article-ranzhao-bece_title_may2021 article-ranzhao-bece_maintextmay2021 an empirical study on the data analyticsbased self-regulated learning scaffolding model for primary students han wang, 1 tao huang, 1 jun tian, 2 huali yang, 1 pengdong han 3 1. faculty of artificial intelligence in education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. 2. school of information technology in education, south china normal university, guangzhou 510631, guangdong, china. 3. weifang institute of education information, weifang 261045, shandong, china abstract: in the age of internet plus, the deep integration of information technology into education and individualized instruction have become a growing trend in education development. self-regulated learning is a key element of student core competence, but easy to be overlooked in basic education. the purpose of this study is to establish the data analyticsbased self-regulated learning scaffolding model for primary students and test its results in teaching practice, citing scaffolding theory and zone of proximal development theory as its rationale. research findings demonstrate that learning data analytics-enabled self-regulated afterclass learning can help enhance learning outcomes and develop student learning strategies. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(2):1529-1533. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab006 how to cite: wang, h., huang, t., tian, j., yang, h., & han, p. (2022). an empirical study on the data analytics-based self-regulated learning scaffolding model for primary students. best evidence in chinese education, 11(2):1529-1533. keywords: learning analytics, scaffolding, self-regulated learning, learning effectiveness wang et al. (wuhan, guangzhou, & weifang). learning scaffolding in primary students. bece, vol.11, no.2, 2022 1530 correspondence to: tao huang, faculty of artificial intelligence in education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. e-mail: tmht@mail.ccnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:tmht@mail.ccnu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ wang et al. (wuhan, guangzhou, & weifang). learning scaffolding in primary students. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1531 introduction the integration of big data and artificial intelligence into education and teaching is a driving force for more scientific and goal-oriented development of learning, teaching, and administration. huge amounts of data have been amassed through expanded application of online learning platforms. learning data mining, analytics, and modeling allow teachers to precisely grasp student learning situation and to improve instructional efficiency and effectiveness; education administrators can equalize the distribution of educational resources. it has been acknowledged in relevant investigations that selfregulated learning ability is a key component of student core competence and a foundation for further education; and that educational technology can serve as scaffolding that supports student after-class learning. how to deploy educational technology as a measure supporting primary students’ after-class learning? to address this question, we attempted to construct a data analytics-based self-regulated learning scaffolding model for primary students and verified its effects on student learning outcomes through experiments. research methodology this study selected two classes taught by the same teacher in x primary school in ningxia province to conduct a control experiment. one of the classes was randomly chosen as the experimental group and required to use the scaffolding model to carry out self-regulated after-class learning; learning data were also collected from the control group, but no intervention was imposed on it. the learning analytics system developed by the project team was used as a supporting platform, and an intelligent teaching environment was built in x school to track and evaluate student learning activities in and after class. researchers used the questionnaire survey to identify the change in student learning attitudes and strategies. the results of the diagnosis and assessment of student cognition were used to compare the learning efficacy of the experimental group and the control group. the measurement tool was designed by three senior mathematics teachers and the preand post-tests were conducted at the beginning and end of the experiment respectively. research findings the effect of the scaffolding model on learning outcomes in student self-regulated study comparing the results of the diagnosis and assessment of student cognition before and after the experiment, we discovered that there was a significant gap in the scores between the two groups after the experiment. the average post-test score of the experimental group was 12.5 points (against a total score of 100 points) higher than that of the control group, and the difference reached a significant level (t = 3.558, p < 0.05). looking at the score change among students with different pretest results, we found that wang et al. (wuhan, guangzhou, & weifang). learning scaffolding in primary students. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1532 scores of mediumand lower-level students increased, whereas those of high-achieving students declined. the effect of scaffolded self-regulated learning on student learning strategies the learning strategies of students in the experimental group significantly changed after the experiment. specifically, student cognitive strategies and resource management strategies improved remarkably; the average score of metacognitive strategies rose slightly, but the increase did not reach a significant level. in addition, this study also ascertained a positive correlation between test score improvement and the level of learning strategies (r = 0.204, p < 0.05). in other words, students with higher levels of learning strategies could achieve better learning results in scaffolding-based self-regulated study. the impact of student learning attitudes and selfregulated learning process on the outcomes of scaffolding-supported study the questionnaire was designed to survey student learning attitude improvement in three dimensions: emotion, cognition, and behavior. according to the pretest results, the average score of student learning behavior was relatively low, while those of student learning emotions and cognition were slightly higher. the results of the matched samples t-test indicated that student learning attitudes did not improve significantly after the experiment; and that there were considerable gaps in pretest results among students of low, medium, and high levels of learning attitudes [f (2, 47) = 3.282, p = 0.046], while the gaps were significantly closed in the posttest [f(2, 47) = 0.774, p = 0.467], probably due to the fact that in the highly structured scaffolding-based self-regulated learning, student behavior and learning paths are less likely affected by objective attitudes. discussions and conclusions scaffolded self-regulated study based on data analytics can improve student learning results examining student performance before and after the experiment, we discovered that the scaffolding model can effectively promote student cognitive development. in selfregulated after-class learning, the proper use of learning analytics system to obtain feedback on learning results and impose timely intervention in the learning process can significantly improve student learning efficiency and boost student cognitive development. appropriate learning material organization has a positive effect on the outcomes of self-regulated learning, and students should follow the sequence of learning-practice in the self-regulated after-class study. wang et al. (wuhan, guangzhou, & weifang). learning scaffolding in primary students. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1533 scaffolded self-regulated study has a positive influence on student learning strategies. scaffolded self-regulated study can upgrade student learning strategies because the dashboard of the scaffolding can visualize learning analytics results and present them to students in time. when students are regularly updated on their learning progress and provided with corresponding improvement suggestions, their learning motivation, confidence, and efficacy will be enhanced, which help students clarify their learning goals and modify their learning process. individual characteristics of students and learning paths can affect the outcomes of scaffolded selfregulated learning. the outcomes of scaffolded self-regulated learning vary among students of different original academic levels. this learning model is more effective to students of medium and low academic levels, while high achieving students can adjust their learning strategies by themselves. in addition, scaffolded self-regulated learning can mitigate the negative impact of learning attitudes on student learning results. in the dashboard-based individualized learning, learning attitudes have no significant influence on learning results, because the system formulates personalized learning paths for students and provides corresponding learning resources, and the scaffolding model helps standardize the processes of selfregulated learning for students. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of e-education research, 2022,43(5): 8. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 王涵, 黄涛, 田俊, 杨华利, 韩鹏东.基于学习分析的小学生自主学习脚手架模型及实证研究. 电化教育研究, 2022,43(5): 8. received: 27 june 2022 revised: 10 july 2022 accepted: 14 july 2022 absbract3-taohuang-bece_titlejuly_2022 absbract3-taohuang-bece_maintextjuly2022 can information technology promote academic performance of school-aged children? an empirical study based on ceps chao fang, bin huang nanjing university of finance and economics, nanjing, china abstract. it is inconclusive whether the information technology can promote academic performance of school-aged children. based on the china education panel survey data provided by the nsrc, we used the method of quasi-experimental of propensity score matching to discuss the net effect of information technology on academic achievements. we found that: i) a significant difference existed in the academic performance between urban and rural school-aged children. the urban students were superior to those from the rural areas, whereas no positive correlation was found between the educational level and family economic condition; ii) family human capital stock and family size (single child families) were positively correlated with internet usage, but the academic pressure reduced the probability of family internet usage; iii) psm revealed the negative impact of information technology on students’ achievements when stratified into urban versus rural, and poverty versus non-poverty. the improvement of chinese and english was realized indirectly by changing reading habits, while mathematics was directly by taking effective learning time. our findings implied that a three-party linkage among the government, the school, and the family is required to emphasize the instrumental rationality of the information technology, promote the formation of the internet learning preference, and support the development of the information technology hardware. best evid chin edu 2019; 2(2):209-227. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1045 keywords: information technology; academic achievement; propensity score matching; internet preference correspondence to: chao fang, college of public administration, nanjing university of finance and economics, nanjing, china. email: 99288137@qq.com. fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 210 introduction he popularization of information technology at the elementary and middle schools in china has been on the fast track after entering the 21st century. the launch of “xiaoxiaotong” program in 2001 ushered in a new era of comprehensive connection between elementary and middle schools and the internet. in that year, there were 3.67 million computers in elementary and middle schools nationwide, and the “student-computer ratio” was as high as 51:1. a total of 10,687 elementary and middle schools had internet access, which account for only 1.8% of the whole schools (gu, et al., 2017). until 2016, according to the data provided by the ministry of education of china, the internet access rate by elementary and middle schools nationwide reached 87.45%, and the coverage rate of multimedia classrooms reached 64.29%. education informatization objectively resulted in the unbalanced distribution geographically of the supporting information technology (liu, et al., 2018). from the data of the special supervision report on national education informatization work in 2016, there was a big regional gap in the internet access rate of elementary and middle schools between the eastern, central and western areas, as well as the rate of multimedia distribution. the internet access rate in the eastern was 94. 61%, which was 10% and 10.49% higher than the central and western regions, respectively. the rate of multimedia equipment in the eastern was 76.95%, which was 11.69% and 24.83% higher than the central and western regions, respectively. the polarization of information technology has caused both “information rich” and “information poor”. rich of information means the internet can be used to invest human capital in education, improve children’s achievement, form a closed loop between information capital and the reproduction of human capital, causing use of internet aggravates the unfair of educational results, these were called “digital divide” (yang, et al., 2017). furthermore, the popularity of information technology makes children from low-resource families get preferred access to information resources, i.e., entertainment versus learning. children from the low-resources families may have higher preference of entertainment (oecd, 2015), which makes the information technology be an inhibitor for children’s achievements. as a result, educational inequality has been further widened. in view of the “digital divide”, educational inequality and the uncertainty between information technology and academic achievements, we hereby designed this study to focus on the following three questions: first, if information technology could improve academic achievements of school-age children? second, whether the using of computer and internet has different effect on students’ academic achievements between urban and rural families? third, if children from different economical backgrounds (poverty versus non-poverty family) could use information technology equally to about the author: bin huang, college of public administration, nanjing university of finance and economics, nanjing, china. email: james7526@163.com. conflict of interests: none. t fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 211 improve their academic abilities. in addition, our study helped to reach a consensus on the topic whether information technology can help children improve their academic achievements to get theoretical and practical implications (chan, et al., 2017; cheng, et al., 2016; xin, et al., 2010). research design research methods model setting in order to test the causal relationship between information technology and school-age children’s academic achievements, linear model is set up as below: (1) in formula (1), i and t indicate the individual (child) and family, respectively. the explained variable ( iteduc ) represents the academic achievements of the child i in family t. cit represents the set of control variables that will affect the use of information technology by child i, containing family background variables and individual characteristic variables, μit represents the residuals. measurement process ordinary least square (ols), the traditional research method, was generally used for observing the influence of information technology on the academic outcomes of schoolage children. this works through observing values in the treatment group as the “net effect” of the changes in children’s academic achievements from the influence of information technology. this method can lead to self-selection bias and counterfactualselection bias. because family providing children with a computer or internet is not a random selection process, but a factor is influenced by both characteristics of family (such as parents’ economic capital, cultural capital, education decision preference) and individual child (such as gender and grade). this will produce a big difference between the treatment in which children were provided with computer/internet and the control in which no computer/internet was provided. therefore, it is unavoidable for both selfselection and counterfactual estimation biases if we use ols in such a situation. in order to accurately identify the “net effect” of computer and internet on the academic outcomes, propensity score matching (psm) a method presented by rosenbaum and rubin (1985), will be used in this study to reduce the estimation bias. psm was used to find control group with similar individual and family characteristics as well as education decision for the treatment group. meanwhile, the control group also was the counterfactual choice of the treatment group. technically, psm treats factors that affect family ownership of computers and internet as co-variables, and then estimates the probability of using the internet; therefore, the process of allocation can be regarded as approximately random. on the one hand, it can improve the precifang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 212 sion of data matching; on the other hand, children in different groups can be compared horizontally. the influence of information technology on the academic achievements of school-age children was marked as average treatment effect (att). (2) in formula (2), educ1i and educ0i indicate children’s academic achievements in those who had and did not have computer/internet, respectively. di is the indicator function, expressed in dummy variable. if family t has a computer or internet then di = 1, otherwise di = 0. p(xi) indicates the probability of child i using internet for study. the selection of factors that affect children’s use of internet represented by x is the key of psm. data sample we used the chinese educational panel survey (ceps) data, which was conducted by the national survey research center at renmin university of china. data collecting procedures were in multi-stage stratified probability proportional to size (pps), including the 7th and 9th graders. four stages were included, and a total of 438 classes in 112 schools from 28 national level units were sampled in probability proportionally, and approximately 20,000 students were involved. the primary analysis was based on the baseline of this survey, which was collected during the 2013-2014 academic year. variable processing and summary statistics according to the educational production function from hanushek (1992), school, government, family, and peers were the four major factors that influence educational output. academic achievement can be seen as a proxy indicator of education output, but it was interfered by the education level and location of the school. this means it does not have horizontal comparability. however, this survey has provided standardized scores of chinese, math, and english, facilitated our study. children’s academic achievements were measured by the standardized scores of the three subjects, which were set as the dependent variable. as shown in table 1, the mean standardized scores of chinese, math, and english were 70.458, 70.380 and 70.450, respectively. the mean score of chinese was higher than the math and english by 0.078 and 0.008 points, respectively, which indicated that children’s academic achievement in chinese was slightly better than both math and english. the provision of computer and internet was an important identifying variable as well as the key to explore if information technology can improve the academic achievement of school-age children. both sets of variables in equation (2) were composed of dummy variables with values of 0 or 1 (0=no computer or internet, 1=have computer or internet). the families with computers but no internet accounted for 8.5%, whereas the families with both computers and internet accounted for 60.8%. overall, fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 213 table 1. basic statistical information of variables. variable name mean sd min max chinese score 70.458 9.641 6.164 98.475 math score 70.380 9.733 8.422 145.115 english score 70.450 9.707 11.349 104.833 computer or not 0.085 0.279 0 1 internet or not 0.608 0.488 0 1 mother’s educational level 3.828 1.977 1 9 father’s educational level 4.205 1.994 1 9 educational expectation 6.740 1.656 1 10 economic conditions 0.879 0.326 0 1 family size 0.438 0.496 0 1 gender 0.504 0.50 0 1 age 14.559 1.240 12 18 grade 0.498 0.50 0 1 household register 0.540 0.498 0 1 minority 0.915 0.288 0 1 academic pressure 0.362 0.480 0 1 preschool education or not 0.80 0.40 0 1 over half families provided information technology assistant tools for their children’s learning or entertainment. parents’ education level, family education expectation, economic status, and family size were family characteristic variables. among them, the level of parents’ education was used to control the human and cultural capital in different families by measuring as an ordinal variable with value 1 to 9, which represented as illiterate, elementary school, middle school, secondary school (technical school), vocational high school, high school, junior college, undergraduate, and postgraduate. the higher the level was, the higher the family human capital had. the average educational levels of mother and father were 3.828 and 4.205, respectively, which indicated that mother’s education level ranged from middle school to secondary school (technical school), and father’s ranged from secondary school (technical school) to vocational high school. the expectation of family education was composed of ordinal variables with value 1 to 10. the mean value was 6.740, indicating that parents expected their children to have a degree between junior college and undergraduate. the family economic condition was represented by a dummy variable with a value of 0 or 1, which was used to control the economic capital of different families. value 1 indicates poverty, namely the school-aged children thought their families were very poor, poor or general, whereas value 0 indicates non-poverty, i.e., the school-aged children thought their families were rich or very rich. in our study, the mean value was 0.879 that indicated that 87.9% of school-aged children thought their families were poor (poverty), but only 12.1% of school-aged children thought their families were rich (nonpoverty). family size was also represented by a dummy variable with a value of 0 or 1 and it was used to control the resource dilution or sibling competition effect in the use of information technology. value 0 indicates non-one-child family and value 1 indicates fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 214 one-child family. the mean value was 0.438 indicated that one-child families account for 43.8% of the whole sample and non-one-child families account for 56.2%. theoretically, children were more likely to use information technology tools to learn if their parents had higher education level, higher education expectation and better family conditions (fang & huang, 2018). gender, age, grade, household registration, ethnicity, academic pressure, and preschool education were individual characteristic variables of school-aged children. male and female children accounted for 50.4% and 49.6% respectively. the age ranged from 12 to 18 with an average of 14.6 years. children in the grades 7 and 9 accounted for 50.2% and 49.8%, respectively. about 91.5% were from the ethnicity of han, and 8.5% were minorities. after eliminating invalid samples without household registration, we defined agricultural household registration as rural household, non-agricultural household registration (including resident household registration) as urban household, the children with either rural or urban household registration accounted for 54% or 46%, respectively. the perception of academic pressure was represented by a dummy variable with a value of 0 or 1, which indicated children’s response level to parents’ education expectation. value 0 indicated children under no pressure or a little pressure, and value 1 indicated children under pressure or a lot of pressure. about 36.2% children mentioned that their parents’ education expectation caused pressure during their learning, but 63.8% children said no. finally, 80% of the children have received preschool education and 20% have not. additionally, in order to solve problems mentioned above if information technology affecting academic achievements varied with household registration and family economic conditions, we took household registration and family economic conditions as the base of stratification. and then the differences of chinese, math, and english scores between urban and rural, poverty and non-poverty samples were shown. in table 2, the mean scores of chinese, math, and english in those with urban household were 70.563, 70.432, and 70.799, respectively, which were higher than children with rural household (70.367, 70.439, and 70.152, respectively) by 0.196, 0.096 and 0.647, respectively. the overall academic achievements of urban students were better than that of rural students, and they had obvious advantages in english. the scores of these three subjects in children from poverty families were 70.496, 70.439, and 70.471, respectively, which were higher than those from rich family (70.181, 69.591 and 70.229, respectively), showed that there was a difference in scores between children who came from the poverty and non-poverty families, but the evidence was not solid enough to prove a positive correlation between family economic conditions and academic outcomes. results and analysis factors that influence the information technology use following the research design of quasi-experimental, the net effect of information technology on school-aged children’s academic performance could be estimated based on fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 215 table 2. sub-sample of academic achievement. score urban household rural household poor family non-poor family mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd chinese 70.563 9.651 70.367 9.631 70.496 9.672 70.181 9.407 math 70.432 9.743 70.336 9.725 70.439 9.707 69.951 9.912 english 70.799 9.523 70.152 9.853 70.471 9.695 70.299 9.795 obs. 7,437 8,674 14,172 1,944 psm, which were divided into two steps: step 1, logit model was used to estimate the influence of the covariates between the treatment and control groups on the utilization of information technology, namely the analysis of the relevant factors that affect the utilization of information technology; step 2, on the basis of data balance, the abovematching strategies were used to identify the average treatment effect (ate) of information technology on academic performance of different disciplines. therefore, the logit model was used first to estimate the factors that affect the usage of computers and internet. then internet including computers was regarded as the identification variable. the estimation results are showed in table 3. since the dependent variable of the logit model was a dummy variable with value 0 or 1, we only got the direction of effect of the explanatory variable on the explained variables according to the results. in order to get the probability value, we calculated the average marginal effect (dy/dx) of each variable on the basis of logit estimation. it should be noted that all variables in table 3 are average marginal effects except the intercept. in terms of the whole sample, the human capital in the family characteristic variables was positively correlated with internet use. the probability value of internet use increased by 3.1% and 3% for mothers’ and father’s education, respectively. in terms of family capital, poverty exerted a negative effect on the computer use. for each unit value of the school-aged children’s perception regarding whether their family were poor or not, the probability value of internet use reduced by 22.2%. internet use was negatively correlated with family size. the probability value of internet use of one-child families was 9.7% higher than that of non-one-child families. regarding children’s characteristics, the estimated value of grade variable was significantly positive, indicating that the probability value of internet use of children in the grade 9 was 12.7% higher than that of children in the grade 7; compared with ethnic minorities, the probability value of internet use in han children was 14.3 percentage points higher. the registration of rural household had a negative effect on internet use, which was significant at the level of 1%. academic pressure was also negatively correlated with internet use. when the perceived academic pressure increased by one unit, the probability value of internet use decreased by 2.4%. in terms of the urban and rural sub-samples, the estimated values of mothers’ and fathers’ education in rural samples were 1.1 and 1.9 percentage points higher than that in urban samples. the negative impact of family poverty on internet use of rural children was greater than that of urban children, whereas the positive impact of family fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 216 table 3. results of logit’s estimation. variable full sample urban sample rural sample poverty sample non-poverty sample mother’s educational level 0.031*** (0.003) 0.021*** (0.003) 0.040*** (0.004) 0.033*** (0.003) 0.016*** (0.005) father’s educational level 0.030*** (0.002) 0.024*** (0.003) 0.035*** (0.004) 0.033*** (0.003) 0.013*** (0.005) educational expectation 0.003 (0.002) 0.003 (0.003) 0.002 (0.003) 0.003 (0.002) -0.00006 (0.005) economic conditions -0.222*** (0.014) -0.138*** (0.016) -0.314*** (0.023) — — family size 0.097*** (0.007) 0.093*** (0.009) 0.099*** (0.011) 0.109*** (0.008) 0.007 (0.015) gender -0.010 (0.007) -0.014 (0.009) -0.006 (0.010) -0.012 (0.007) 0.004 (0.014) age -0.060*** (0.005) -0.043*** (0.007) -0.073*** (0.007) -0.064*** (0.005) -0.029** (0.011) grade 0.127*** (0.012) 0.089*** (0.016) 0.157*** (0.017) 0.136*** (0.013) 0.049* (0.028) household register -0.124*** (0.007) — — -0.136*** (0.008) -0.030** (0.015) minority 0.143*** (0.012) 0.107*** (0.013) 0.174*** (0.021) 0.157*** (0.013) 0.024 (0.028) academic pressure -0.024*** (0.007) -0.016* (0.009) -0.032*** (0.010) -0.026*** (0.008) -0.011 (0.015) preschool education or not 0.064*** (0.008) 0.040*** (0.011) 0.082*** (0.012) 0.066*** (0.009) 0.045*** (0.017) cons. 3.937*** (0.406) 3.327*** (0.693) 3.585*** (0.508) 2.656*** (0.413) 4.250** (1.751) log likelihood -8,914.02 -3,413.82 -5,489.58 -8,251.25 -648.29 pesudo r 2 0.1939 0.1529 0.1083 0.1686 0.0797 obs. 16,516 7,601 8,915 14,525 1,991 notes: 1.robust standard errors are in parentheses. 2.*p<0.1, **p<0.05, ***p<0.01. size on internet use was higher than that of urban children. these results indicated that there may be a binary division between urban and rural families in the information technology usage. the higher parents’ educational expectation for their children, the higher the probability value of internet use, which is consistent with the theoretical hypothesis of this study, but the estimated value failed to find the significance. the possible reason is that the effect of educational expectation on internet use is not linear and direct, but indirectly moderates through some intervening co-founding variables. in terms of poverty and non-poverty sub-samples, the average marginal effect of each variable was roughly the same in the value and direction of the parameter estimation. the difference only lied in the absolute value of the estimation. for example, the effect of parents’ education on internet use was 3.3% and 3.3% in the poverty samfang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 217 ples, but 1.3% and 1.6% in the non-poverty samples. it was indicated that children from poverty families had a higher probability to use internet especially when their parents had higher education level compared with those from rich family. in terms of academic pressure perception, the estimate of the children from poor families was 0.026, which was 0.011 higher than children from the rich families. it was indicated that when academic pressure was perceived, children from poverty families were more likely to give up internet to study hard, which also showed that students’ use of internet was more likely to meet their own entertainment preferences rather than learning. due to the small sample size, the estimate of non-poverty samples was slightly less significant than that of poverty samples. the impact of information technology on academic achievement balance test of covariates based on the factor analysis of logit model on the information technology usage, we further used psm to estimate the “net effect” of computer and internet use on the academic achievements of school-aged children. in terms of technical processing, individuals in the treatment group and the control group were first paired. the propensity score of school-ages children who participated in the pairing was then calculated, therefore, the difference between the paired groups was the “net effect” of the treatment group, namely the ate. in order to ensure the robustness of the estimation, we selected knearest neighbor matching, radius (caliper) matching, kernel matching and mahalanobis matching as our matching strategies. before using the above-mentioned strategies to estimate the ate, each covariable was ensured to be balanced. therefore, the balance of each covariable was tested. in table 4, columns 3 and 4 show the sample mean size (including before and after matching) in both groups. column 5 shows standard errors of data before and after matching, which was the ratio of the sample mean difference of the two groups to the square root of the sample size. columns 6 and 7 show the absolute value of the percentage deviation reduction and the t value. according to table 4, except for the increase of 94.4% in the standard error coefficient of gender variable, the standard error of other covariables all showed a decline trend at various degrees. the family size decreased most in standard error, which reached 99.2%, but the grade variable had the smallest decline, decreased by 49.1%. there were significant differences in each covariable before matching, while with a few variables statistically rejected the null hypothesis after matching. the t values of majority variables are not significant in statistics, i.e., the null hypothesis treatment group and control group had no significant differences cannot be refused. it indicated that the data matching eliminated significant differences of individual and family characteristics from different groups, which verified the rationality of matching method and covariate selection in this paper. this is also confirmed by the common value range of propensity score depicted in figure 1. the effect of computer on academic achievement fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 218 table 4. covariate equilibrium test. variable type treated control %bias reduct |bias| t mother’s educational level before 4.396 2.970 79.7 97.7 47.72*** after 4.392 4.359 1.9 1.13 father’s educational level before 4.760 3.359 77.3 98.7 46.30*** after 4.756 4.738 1.0 0.60 educational expectation before 6.913 6.495 25.1 86.4 15.81*** after 6.912 6.969 -3.4 -2.59*** economic conditions before 0.825 0.965 -47.1 78.8 -27.36*** after 0.825 855 -10.0 -5.71*** family size before 0.557 0.259 63.6 99.2 38.87*** after 0.556 0.558 -0.5 -0.32 gender before 0.498 0.507 -1.7 -94.4 -1.08 after 0.499 0.482 3.4 2.37** age before 14.394 14.791 -32.0 91.6 -20.08*** after 14.395 14.361 2.7 2.00** grade before 0.487 0.508 -4.1 49.1 -2.55** after 0.487 0.498 -2.1 -1.47 household register before 0.411 0.738 -70.1 96.6 -42.93*** after 0.411 0.400 2.4 1.57 minority before 0.950 0.868 28.7 82.9 18.64*** after 0.949 0.964 -4.9 -4.82*** academic pressure before 0.333 0.403 -14.4 92.9 -8.98*** after 0.333 0.338 -1.0 -0.73 preschool education or not before 0.853 0.720 32.8 87.3 20.87*** after 0.852 0.869 -4.2 -3.43 notes: 1.*p<0.1, **p<0.05, ***p<0.01. figure 1. common range of tendency score. fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 219 in order to ensure the robustness of the estimation results, we used k-nearest neighbor matching, radius (caliper) matching, kernel matching, and mahalanobis matching on the basis of the covariate balance test, to accurately identify the “net effect” of computer usage on chinese, math, and english scores. in the k-nearest neighbor matching, set k = 4, which used one-to-four matching; radius was less than 0.01 in radius (caliper) matching; kernel function and bandwidth were defaulted in kernel matching. a method of handling heteroscedasticity robust standard error has been used in mahalanobis matching, which was indicated by adabie and imbens (2006). according to the table 5, the results of the k-nearest neighbor matching showed that the chinese, math, and english scores of the treatment group were 69.748, 70.20, and 70.015, respectively, before the matching, but were 70.524, 79.397, and 70.491, respectively for the control group. the differences between the two groups were 0.776, 0.197, and 0.476, respectively, of which the differences in chinese and english scores were negatively significant at levels of 1% and 10%. after the matching, the differences were 0.734, 0.131, and 0.241, respectively, which reduced by 0.042, 0.066, and 0.235, respectively, compared with prior-matching ones. the results showed that after adjusting the self-selection and counterfactual bias of family and individual characteristics by psm, the negative effect of computer use on academic achievements was significantly reduced, indicating that ignoring the self-selection and counterfactual bias would overestimate the negative effect of computer use on academic achievements. according to the estimation results of k-nearest neighbor matching, internet use had a negative effect on children’s academic achievements. that is to say, compared with families without computers, the use of computers cannot help school-aged children improve but inhibit their academic level. our results suggested that school-aged children may have two preferences for computer use learning and entertainment. given the sample was only from the 7th and 9th graders, and children in grade 7 and 9 were still in the formation and development period of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities, and their self-control ability was weak. in this case they are more likely to use computer for entertaining rather than for learning, which may be the major cause for the computer/internet use for negative academic achievements. in addition, when computers were used to meet their entertainment needs, it definitely caused a lack of effective learning time, which was another reason for the formation of negative causal relationship. in terms of the estimation results of different disciplines, the negative effect of computer use on chinese performance was higher than that on math and english, and the negative effect on english performance was higher than that on math. this partially showed that information technology had an exogenous impact on traditional reading methods and habits. since the cultivation of students’ understanding, the ability relies more on paper reading habits in chinese teaching. the dependence of school-aged children on computer and paperless reading habits was not conducive to enhancing their understanding. this is the reason why the computer use has the most significant negative effect on chinese performance. compared with chinese, math learning relies more on the construction of logic and deduction ability, computer use itself does not affect the development of logic, fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 220 table 5. the impact of computer on academic performance. strategy score type treated control att t-stat k-nearest neighbor chinese before 69.748 70.524 -0.776*** -2.85 after 69.748 70.481 -0.734** -2.40 math before 70.20 70.397 -0.197 -0.72 after 70.20 70.331 -0.131 -0.43 english before 70.015 70.491 -0.476* -1.74 after 70.015 70.255 -0.241 -0.77 radius chinese before 69.748 70.524 -0.776*** -2.85 after 69.748 70.380 -0.633** -2.27 math before 70.20 70.397 -0.197 -0.72 after 70.20 70.299 -0.099 -0.35 english before 70.015 70.491 -0.476* -1.74 after 70.015 70.307 -0.293 -1.03 kernel chinese before 69.748 70.524 -0.776*** -2.85 after 69.748 70.531 -0.783*** -2.81 math before 70.20 70.397 -0.197 -0.72 after 70.20 70.410 -0.210 -0.75 english before 70.015 70.491 -0.476* -1.74 after 70.015 70.482 -0.467* -1.65 mahalanobis chinese before 69.748 70.524 -0.776*** -2.85 after 69.748 70.895 -1.147*** -4.05 math before 70.20 70.397 -0.197 -0.72 after 70.20 70.598 -0.398 -1.36 english before 70.015 70.491 -0.476* -1.74 after 70.015 70.705 -0.690** -2.48 notes: 1.*p<0.1, **p<0.05, ***p<0.01. deduction, and other cognitive abilities of school-aged children. therefore, the negative effect of computer use on math performance was not from technology itself, but from the occupation of effective learning time. finally, it should be noted that the results of radius (caliper) matching, kernel matching and mahalanobis matching estimations were similar to k-nearest neighbor matching, which verified the robustness of the estimation of the study. but the att of math and english were not significant in statistics, the possible reason for this may be due to the small sample size of the control group, i.e., the families with computers only account for 8.5% in the total sample, which reduced the significance of the estimation results. the effect of the internet on academic achievement based on the effect of computer on academic achievement, we adopted the four matching strategies mentioned above to explore the effect of internet (including computer) on children’s academic achievements, so as to clarify whether there was a differentiated effect of computer and internet use on academic achievements. as the families that with internet account for 60.8% of the total sample, which was much higher than those with computers only (8.5%). in order to ensure both groups have equated sample size after fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 221 table 6. the impact of internet on academic performance. strategy score type treated control att t-stat k-nearest neighbor chinese after 70.572 70.279 0.293* 1.89 before 70.567 70.883 -0.316 -1.22 math before 70.359 70.413 -0.055 -0.35 after 70.356 71.392 -1.036*** -3.92 english before 70.570 70.263 0.307* 1.96 after 70.565 71.391 -0.826*** -3.10 radius chinese before 70.572 70.279 0.293* 1.89 after 70.567 70.796 -0.229 -0.95 math before 70.359 70.413 -0.055 -0.35 after 70.356 71.327 -0.971*** -3.98 english before 70.570 70.263 0.307* 1.96 after 70.565 71.141 -0.577** -2.37 kernel chinese before 70.572 70.279 0.293* 1.89 after 70.567 70.731 -0.164 -0.70 math before 70.359 70.413 -0.055 -0.35 after 70.356 71.248 -0.892*** -3.77 english before 70.570 70.263 0.307* 1.96 after 70.565 71.071 -0.506** -2.14 mahalanobis chinese before 70.572 70.279 0.293* 1.89 after 70.572 70.841 -0.269 -1.13 math before 70.359 70.413 -0.055 -0.37 after 70.359 71.275 -0.917*** -3.79 english before 70.570 70.263 0.307* 1.96 after 70.570 71.151 -0.581** -2.32 notes: 1.*p<0.1, **p<0.05, ***p<0.01. matching, we used the four matching strategies mentioned above to improve the significance of the att. the estimated results were reported in table 6. in overall, the att of internet use on all subjects were negative after matching, and with exception of chinese score, both math and english scores were statistically significant, which means that internet use inhibits children’s academic achievements. specific to different disciplines, the negative effect of internet on chinese performance fell within to the range of [-0.164, -0.316.], math [-0.892, -1.036] and english [-0.506, 0.826]. these indicated that internet use had the most significant negative effect on the improvement of math performance, followed with english and then chinese. meanwhile, in contrast to the estimation results given in table 5, the negative effect of internet use on academic achievements was somewhat eliminated in chinese and english, but expanded in math than computer use only. the estimated results confirmed the hypothesis the negative effects of information technology usage on different disciplines were different in mechanism. specifically, for liberal arts (chinese and english), it indirectly changes the way of reading and habits by means of technological change. but for science (math), it further strengthens the computer/internet entertainment preference, directly changing the time distribution of effective learning. fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 222 table 7. the impact of internet on school-age children’s academic performance in urban and rural areas (intra-group differences). score urban rural type trtd. ctrl. att t type trtd. ctrl. att t chinese before 70.75 69.91 0.834*** 3.10 before 70.32 70.41 -0.089 0.43 after 70.74 70.82 -0.078 0.20 after 70.32 70.82 -0.502* 1.82 math before 70.59 69.89 0.691** 2.54 before 70.03 70.59 0.565*** 2.70 after 70.58 71.15 -0.571 1.40 after 70.03 71.36 1.332*** 4.72 english before 70.99 70.13 0.858*** 3.23 before 69.97 70.31 -0.341 1.61 after 70.98 71.24 -0.263 0.66 after 69.96 71.18 1.223*** 4.31 notes: 1.*p<0.1, **p<0.05, ***p<0.01. trtd: treated; ctrl: control. for the estimated value of att, internet highlighted students’ entertainment preference in the process of information technology usage, so it had a higher negative effect on math scores than computer did. on the contrary, internet use objectively broadened the channels for children to obtain effective information, improved their knowledge level such as reading and understanding abilities. that was the reason why the internet had a weaker negative effect on chinese and english performance than sole computer. finally, the estimation results of computer and internet were integrated to answer the first question raised in this study: with the rapid development of information technology, the popularization of computer and the continuous increasing of internet access rate, the use of information technology by families failed to improve their children’s academic achievements. in contrast, the computer and internet use caused a decline in chinese, math, and english scores. our results were similar to that reported by chen et al. (2017). urban and rural sub-sample regression for the total sample, we estimated the effect of internet on the academic achievements of urban and rural children by using the k-nearest neighbor matching strategy. table 7 presents the estimated results of the differences between the urban and rural subgroups. in terms of urban sub-samples, the estimated value of the att was negative indicating that compared with the control group, internet use inhibited the academic achievements of urban children, and the inhibitory effect on chinese, math, and english scores were 0.078, -0.571, and -0.263, respectively. among them, the math performance was the most obviously affected. for the rural sub-samples, the effect of internet on students’ academic achievements was also negative, and the inhibitory effect on chinese, math, and english performance were -0.502, -1.332, and -1.223, respectively, and this negative impact of internet use on math was greater than chinese and english. the estimated results of rural-urban sample regression answered the second hypothesis of this study. to a certain extent, the information technology usage has fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 223 table 8. the impact of internet on school-age children’s academic performance in poor and non-poor families (intra-group differences). score poor sample non-poor sample type trtd. ctrl. att t type trtd. ctrl. att t chinese before 70.66 70.28 0.372** 2.27 before 70.18 70.17 0.009 0.01 after 70.63 70.99 -0.361 1.45 after 70.18 71.03 -0.849 0.96 math before 70.48 70.39 0.084 0.51 before 69.81 71.03 -1.215* 1.71 after 70.45 71.32 0.866*** 3.42 after 69.81 72.31 2.505*** 2.79 english before 70.62 70.27 0.358** 2.18 before 70.31 70.19 0.128 0.18 after 70.60 71.25 0.652*** 2.59 after 70.30 71.45 -1.143 1.23 notes: 1.*p<0.1, **p<0.05, ***p<0.01. trtd: treated; ctrl: control. caused decline in academic achievements in both urban and rural school-aged children, but no significant statistical difference was observed. for the absolute value, the negative impact of internet use on rural children was greater than the urban peers. possible reason for this phenomenon was that the education level of urban parents was generally higher than rural parents. the average education level of father and mother from urban area were 5.138 and 4.749, respectively, which showed that fathers’ average education level were senior high school (vocational high school) and mothers’ were secondary school/technical school. the average education level of father and mother from rural area were 5.138 and 4.749, respectively, which showed that fathers’ average education level was in the range of junior high school to secondary school/technical school and mothers’ was in the range of primary school to junior high school. higher education level helps parents control their children’s entertainment preference when they use internet as well as guide their learning preference in time. this is the reason why the absolute value of negative impact of internet use on academic achievements of children from urban families was lower than that of rural families. poverty and non-poverty sub-sample regression we used family economic status to distinguish poverty and non-poverty families, and adopted the k-nearest neighbor matching strategy to estimate the impact of internet use on the academic achievements of school-aged children with different family economic conditions (table 8). for the estimated value of att, no significant difference was found between internet users and non-users in both poverty and non-poverty families. the academic achievements of the treatment group were significantly lower than the control group indicating that internet use inhibits children’s academic achievements, and the inhibitory effect on the math performance was higher than on chinese and english. this was similar to that obtained by full-sample regression that verified the robustness of our study. for the absolute value of the estimate, the negative impact of internet on children who came from the better family economic status was higher than the comparisons. taking math scores as an example, the inhibitory effect of internet on its perfang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 224 formance was -0.866 in the poverty children, but was 0.866 in the non-poverty children. one possible reason was that children from poverty families were more sensitive to academic pressure and family economic conditions than those from non-poverty families. in the poverty group, 36% children felt academic pressure, but about 31.5% in nonpoverty children. children from poverty families could convert the academic pressures and the perception of family economic conditions into learning motivation. consequently, they actively suppress the entertainment preference and use internet as a learning assistant. as the proverb says, “poverty children are more independent”. therefore, the negative impact of internet use on poverty children was less significant than the nonpoverty comparison. conclusions and discussion conclusions our study was based on the china education panel survey data provided by the nsrc. in the context of the continuous popularity of computers and internet, we used the method of quasi-experimental of psm to find the net effect of information technology on academic achievements. it was indicated that:  there is difference in chinese, math, and english. chinese scores in the two grades (7 versus 9) were slightly better than math and english. the academic achievements of urban students were better than the rural peers, especially in english. it illustrated that the unbalanced distribution of urban and rural education resources in quantity and quality is the major reason leading to significant difference in the quality of education between urban and rural areas. however, there was no positive correlation between the education achievements and the family economic status.  based on the logit conditional probability model, we found that there was a positive correlation between the family’s human capital stock and the information technology use. the probability of internet use increased by 3% and 3.1%, respectively, for each education level of the parents. each one-unit increase in children’s perception of family’s poverty status reduced the probability of internet use by 22.2%. the probability value of internet use of one-child family was higher than non-one-child family by 9.7%.  we found that the use of information technology inhibited children’s academic achievements, but the underlying mechanisms were different in different subjects based on the psm. for liberal arts (chinese and english), it works indirectly by changing the way of children’s reading and habits, but for science (math), it works by taking away effective learning time. the entertainment preference was the basic cause of the negative impact. at the same time, ignoring the differences in family and individual characteristics led to selective bias and counterfactual bias, which resulted in overestimation of the negative impact of internet on the academic achievements. fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 225  sub-sample regressions showed a negative impact of information technology on school-aged children’s academic achievements in both urban and rural, poverty and non-poverty samples. guidance, moderation and regulation of parents’ education to entertainment preference as well as children’s perception of both academic pressure and family economic status were the leading causes of the differences between urban and rural, poverty and non-poverty children. discussion this empirical study on the influence of information technology on school-age children’s academic performance has essential implications for policy makers. as a means of teaching assistance, the application and popularization of computer and internet, theoretically, should help to improve students’ academic outcomes. however, our empirical study found that the information technology has not effectively promoted the academic achievements, no matter in urban or rural areas, or from poor or non-poor families. this conclusion obviously contrasted to the initial intention of education informatzation, i.e. the information technology had a negative impact on school-age children’s academic achievements. the reason is majorly due to students’ two preferences for the computer and internet use either learning or entertainment. given children in grades 7 and 9 are still in the formation and development period of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities, which means their self-control ability is weak (li, et al., 2017; li, et al., 2017; wang, et al., 2017; yang, 2018). when they use internet, they are more likely to be dominated by the preference of entertainment, which weakens and restrains their learning preference. in response to the reasons mentioned above, we suggest following three aspects below to make a full use of information technology to improve the quality of school education and narrow the “digital divide” in the context of education informatization. first, as a micro-field of educational activities, parents should not only provide the hardware of computer and internet for their school-aged children, but also devote themselves to cultivating the ability to distinguish their preference to entertainment and learning in the application of information technology. in addition, parents should replan and rationally allocate children’s entertainment time during their working day, and help their children to form good learning habits and point of view on information technology. second, as a medium of education activities, innovation of teaching model (such as the combination of “online” and “offline learning”) should be encouraged to stimulate children’s learning interest. meanwhile, school and teachers should manage the network teaching in a reasonable way by providing a civilized and ordered network teaching environment as well as preventing the negative phenomena, such as network violence, network uncivilization, and addiction. third, as a macro field, education activities should give priority to rural area to reduce the unbalanced distribution of educational resources between urban and rural areas, and pay more on the construction of education information system in rural schools, so as to eliminate the “digital gap”. moreover, corresponding administrative measures should be introduced at the policy aspect to ensure a reasonable advancement of information teaching. fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 226 it should be pointed out that the marginal contribution of this study is that we estimated the “net effect” of the information technology on the academic achievements in school-aged children by using psm to reduce the selective bias. however, there are additional two points need to be expanded further in this field. first, guide children to prefer to learn when they use computers and internet and restrain the entertainment preference using reasonable time planning. the next focus should set on the causal relationship between the rational use of information technology and academic performance. it is also the profound requirement that improves educational quality, as the education informatization going forward to the next new era. second, are there any other effects of information technology on the academic achievements in school-age children? for example, information technology functions as an intermediary variable, either positively intervening or negatively inhibiting the development of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities of school-aged children to affect their academic achievements. therefore, it would be another beneficial effect to discuss further the mediating role of information technology in promoting the cognitive/non-cognitive ability and academic performance, and clearly depict the differentiated effect of computer and internet on students’ development, and provide information support and decision-making basis for the input of national, school and family education resources. references abadie, a. & imbens, g. (2006) large sample properties of matching estimators for average treatment effect. econometrica, 74(1):235-267. chen, c.j. & gu, x.q. (2017) the impact of information technology on students’ literacy: a perspective on education informatization. open edu res, 3:37-49. chen, c.j. & zhi, t.j. (2016)the impact of information technology on students’ digital reading achievement: evidence from pisa. open edu res, 4:57-70. chen, q.l. & zhang, w.h. (2016) digital divide and students’ academic performance – a study based on the data from pisa2012 shanghai. youth res, 3:49-56. dimaggio, p. & hargittai, e. (2001). from the “digital divide” to “digital inequality”. working paper series no.15 princeton university. fang, c. &huang, b. (2018) influence of human capital investment on children’s academic achievement-analysis of multilevel liner model based on ceps tracking data. j anhui nor univ (hum. & soc. sci.), 2:116-124. golder, s.a. &mary, m.w. (2014) digital footprints: opportunities and challenges for online social research. annual review of sociology, 40(1):129-152. gu, x.q., wang, c.l. &wang, f. (2017) historical mission and roles of ict in educational reform in the past 20 years. e-edu res, 6:919. hanushek, e.a. (1992) the trade-off between child quantity and quality. j pol eco, 100(1):84-117. li, l., zhao, w.l. &bian, w.j. (2017) family background the non-cognitive skills. dongyue tribune, 1:45-52. liu, x.r., ren, q., li, f. & zhao, j. (2018) entering a new era: history achievement, challenges and reform strategies of information technology education in elementary and middle schools of china. modern edu tech, 6:17-24. fang & huang. information technology promote academic performance vol.2, no. 2, 2019 227 oecd. (2015) students, computers and learning: making the connection. paris: oecs publishing. rosenbaum, p.r. & rubin, d.b. (1985) constructing a control group using multivariate matched sampling methods that incorporate the propensity score. am statistician, 24(4):521-544. wang, h.m., wu, y.x. & huang, c. (2017) family socioeconomic status, preschool education and adolescents’ cognitive & noncognitive abilities. youth res, 6:46-57+92. xin, t. & zou, d. (2010) the impact of computer use in class on junior high school students’ math achievement. j edu stud, 4:6570. yang, p. & xu, y. (2017) digital divide and inequality in household investment. peking univ edu rev, 4:126-154. yang, z.c. (2018) the intermediary factors of family background affects the students’ development. chin econ edu rev, 3:61-82. received: 11 june2019 revised: 28 june 2019 accepted: 04 july 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in open edu res 2018; 6:88-99. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 方超, 黄斌. 信息技术促进了学生的学业表现吗?—基于中国教育追踪调查数据的实证研 究. 开放教育研究, 2018; 6:88-99. article-chaofang-bece_title_31july2019 article-chaofang-maintext-bece_31july2019 vol.7, no.2, 2021 939 blossoming branches symbol the real spring: chinese sample of school management alan c. k. cheung he development of education is influenced by the economy, politics, and culture. due to the differences in politics, economy, and culture of various countries, various countries’ education also shows different characteristics. china’s education is affected by specific economics, politics, and culture and has its unique operating model and mechanism. as far as school management is concerned, the management system of chinese schools more reflects chinese characteristics. two original papers in this issue of the journal focus on school management, one discusses the issue of physical education teachers serving as head teachers (bai et al., 2021), and the other discusses the impact of local political elites and decision-making collectives on china’s educational expenditures (cai & zhang, 2021). bai’s study object, “head teacher (it is referred to as ban zhu ren in chinese),” is a character with distinctive chinese characteristics. a teacher who serves as a head teacher has to teach one or more classes and manage a specific class. from this perspective, the head teacher often has a more significant influence on students than other teachers. so, who is the head teacher has become a particular concern for parents (shi, 2021). this research is different from most of the same kind of empirical research. it used more standardized experimental research, supplemented by qualitative research, and obtained interesting and robust conclusions. this was a helpful attempt by the head teacher to do scientific management research. cai’s study explores a more sensitive topic. people often think that political elites such as mayors and municipal party committee secretaries have greater discretion in china’s local education governance. previous studies © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. t vol.7, no.2, 2021 940 indicated that this is one of the characteristics of chinese authoritarian local governance that is different from western democratic systems (blanchard, 2011; qian & weingast, 1996). the study shows that in the field of local education expenditure, which is closely related to the welfare of the people, china’s local governments seem to rely more on the leadership collective rather than the “rule by the voice of one man alone” of the political elite to make decisions. this is an exciting discovery. this means that, at least in the process of local education governance in china, various localities are indeed making decisions by the principle of “democratic centralism.” this also shows that it is not appropriate to understand the logic of local education governance in china and simply apply western mainstream theories. therefore, we need to construct a more explanatory theory to describe the facts more accurately. we published these two papers with “chinese characteristics” at the same time. the intention was to present the uniqueness of china’s problems from both the micro and macro levels. for researchers who do not understand chinese education’s essence, it may not be easy to understand these two topics. however, considering the vast volume and incredible development speed of china’s education, we believe that such efforts are necessary to provide chinese samples to the world or promote the common progress of education between china and the world through such academic expressions. this shall be the so-called “international value” of these studies. references bai, p. zhang, j., & yao, j. (2021). is it reliable for a physical education teacher to be a head teacher? a mixed-method study. best evidence in chinese education, 7(2):949-960. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or019 blanchard, o., & shleifer, a. (2001). federalism with and without political centralization: china versus russia. imf staff papers, 48:171-179. https://doi.org/10.3386/w7616 cai, r., & zhang, x. (2021). an empirical study on the impact of individual local political elites and decision-making collective on educational fiscal expenditure in china. best evidence in chinese education, 7(2):961-985. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or023 qian, y., & weingast, b.r. (1996). china’s transition to markets: marketpreserving federalism, chinese style. journal of policy reform, 1(2):149-185. https://doi.org/10.1080/13841289608523361 shi, x. (2021). can a non-core subject teacher serve as a homeroom teacher? discussion on the dispute between core and non-core subject teachers https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or019 https://doi.org/10.3386/w7616 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or023 https://doi.org/10.1080/13841289608523361 vol.7, no.2, 2021 941 as homeroom teachers. science insights education frontiers, 8(1):989-1000. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.or003 correspondence to: alan c. k. cheung, ph.d. department chairperson and professor department of educational administration and policy the chinese university of hong kong hong kong 999077 china email: alancheung@cuhk.edu.hk conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.e004 https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.or003 how does physical exercise affect academic performance? the mediating role of non-cognitive abilities wenye li, 1 jijun yao, 1 shike zhou 2 1. nanjing normal university, nanjing 210023, china 2. jiangsu institute of education science, nanjing 210013, china abstract. previous studies have found that good physical exercise can promote academic performance, but the underlying mechanism behind this lacks large-scale empirical data. based on this, we used the 2020 jiangsu province academic quality monitoring data to construct an ols regression. then, the non-cognitive abilities variable was built with the neo-ffi theory, and the mediation effect diagram was drawn through the amos22.0 software. the study found that: (i) physical exercise brought academic improvement to elementary and middle school students. (ii) the influence mechanism of physical exercise was different between elementary school and middle school. students at the elementary school were directly and indirectly affected. (iii) in non-cognitive specific dimensions, openness played a significant and great mediating role. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 8(2):1103-1120. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.or046. how to cite: li, h., yao j., & zhou, s. (2021). how does physical exercise affect academic performance? the mediating role of non-cognitive abilities. best evidence in chinese education, 8(2):1103-1120. keywords: physical exercise; non-cognitive abilities; openness; mediating effect li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no.2, 2021 1104 literature review and questions nhancing the physique of the national citizen has always been a livelihood issue of the country’s focus. as an essential means, physical exercise has been highly valued at different times. since the launch of “sunshine sports” in 2007, the value of physical exercise has been universally recognized. however, the question parents and teachers are more concerned about is if physical exercise can promote the improvement of academic performance and that is still unclear. physical exercise can strengthen the body, but spend time on physical exercise instead of extracurricular learning, parents will inevitably worry that the physical exercise “occupies” the study time and causes children’s academic performance to decline. especially in the critical stage of entering higher education, many schools will even suspend physical exercise courses and increase academic courses. in recent years, the “quiet large class breaks” have also become a microcosm of the embarrassing position of physical exercise. physical exercise seems to be “unrelated” to improving academic performance, and there is a general situation of “emphasizing academics and neglecting sports” throughout china. in the embarrassing public opinion, what is the relationship between physical exercise and students’ academic performance? high-quality empirical research is urgently needed to find the answer to it. especially in the context of reducing student’s burdens and increasing students’ efficiency, what physical exercise can bring to education is related to every student, parent, and educator. the discussion on the relationship between physical exercise and students’ academic performance can be traced back to the 1950s. based on the sample data of students in third and fifth grades, gleason et al. (1958) found a weak correlation between physical exercise and students’ academic performance. subsequent studies have mostly adopted experimental research methods and found that physical exercise can promote academic performance to a certain extent. such studies were often based on physiology or psychology for theoretical construction. from the perspective of arousal theory, it was believed that the physical exercise that students engage in could effectively improve their brain’s execution level and make them have better task performance. how about the authors: wenye li, graduate student, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210023, jiangsu, china. e-mail: 841659607@qq.com shike zhou, senior teacher of middle school, jiangsu institute of education science, nanjing 210013, jiangsu, china. e-mail: jyszsk@163.com correspondence to: jijun yao, professor, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210023, jiangsu, china. e-mail: yaojijun_njnu@163.com funding: this research is the phased result of the “research on the relationship between physical exercise and student development” (no.: kycx21_1301) of the jiangsu province graduate research and practice innovation program. this study was supported by the jiangsu provincial superior discipline construction project (papd). conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. e mailto:841659607@qq.com mailto:jyszsk@163.com mailto:yaojijun_njnu@163.com li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1105 ever, the control of confounding variables in this kind of study was not comprehensive, and the attributes of a single discipline were evident. thus, it had failed to achieve the intersection and breakthrough of theories between disciplines. with the development of measurement technology and the continuous progress of cognitive psychology and neurobiology, the studies on the relationship between physical exercise and the academic performance had become more systematic and mature. on the basis of controlling some of the confounding variables, many researchers have found that students engaging in specific physical exercises can effectively improve their cognitive abilities or academic performance. the value of physical exercise in education quality and fairness has been effectively demonstrated. for example, fang liming, based on adolescent samples in the ceps database, used the psm method to control the endogeneity of the samples and found that physical exercise can not only improve the academic performance of adolescents but also effectively improve the academic performance of students from economically disadvantaged families and achieve educational equity. such findings have also been verified in the study of fang chao et al. (2021). quantile regression results found that physical exercise can reduce the difference between high and low quantile students and has a fair value that cannot be ignored. in addition, many researchers based on the sampling of regional samples also found that the frequency or duration of physical exercises of students was highly correlated with academic performance. the meta-analysis results also showed that allowing students to engage in physical exercise is conducive to improved academic performance. the studies, as mentioned above, have formed two sets of mechanisms of physiology and psychology in terms of the influence mechanism of physical exercise. the former emphasized the “strengthening” of physical exercise and believed that students improve their health through physical exercise and thus improve their academic performance. for example, zhang et al. (2016) found that physical exercise can improve the quality of sleep of students and improve the academic performance of high school students. the latter focuses on the “mental health” effect of physical exercise. it was believed that physical exercise effectively relieves students’ inner pressure and improves self-efficacy, which in turn enhances classroom performance and promotes academic performance. for example, the study of zhang et al. (2021) selected peer relationship and self-confidence as the mediating variables and found that physical exercise promoted the improvement of both and thereby improved academic performance. zhou (2018) used self-esteem as an intermediary variable and found that it played an essential role between physical exercise and academic achievement of college students. taken together, the existing research has provided sufficient evidence for the positive effects of physical exercise. however, there are still apparent shortcomings behind these pieces of evidence. on the one hand, the sample size was not enough, and high-quality, large-scale data analysis was still needed to verify this positive effect. on the other hand, many studies were not adequate in controlling confounding variables. they failed to control variables such as family background, which may cause bias in the regression results. in terms of influence mechanism, there may be multiple influence paths between physical exercise and academic performance. many studies often select a li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1106 single intermediary variable. most of them were psychological or physical variables related to cognitive ability but ignored the non-cognitive abilities highly correlated with students’ academic performance. as a concept corresponding to cognitive abilities that emerged during the development of human capital theory, non-cognitive abilities were often regarded as critical abilities in the 21st century (huang et al., 2017; xu, 2017). in empirical research, many empirical studies had also selected non-cognitive abilities as the core explanatory variable. however, the theoretical frameworks they were based on are relatively vague. they often defined self-efficacy, peer relationships, and other existences unrelated to cognition in a broad sense as non-cognitive abilities. these concepts did not have the attribute of “ability.” therefore, in terms of mechanism research, the number of existing studies on the mediating variables is insufficient. the theory is not yet systematic, and the exploration of non-cognitive abilities is not comprehensive. based on this, this study will adopt the more popular neo-ffi theory (neuroticism extraversion openness five factor inventory). we subdivided non-cognitive abilities into openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (costa et al.,1985; meng, 2003; wang, 1994). the following questions are verified and discussed by constructing the non-cognitive abilities variable and assuming it as a mediating variable between physical exercise and academic performance. 1. can physical exercise improve students’ academic performance? 2. can physical exercise promote students’ academic performance through noncognitive abilities? 3. which non-cognitive abilities does physical exercise mainly use to promote students’ academic performance? methodology research ideas this study first verified the relationship between physical exercise and academic performance by constructing a regression model and calculating regression coefficients. subsequently, intermediary variables are included to explore possible influence mechanisms and demonstrate the vital role of non-cognitive abilities in students’ academic performance. finally, the mediation effect is calculated, and the path coefficient diagram is drawn. the effect size of each path is compared to explore the role of each dimension in the non-cognitive dimension in more detail. variable selection core explanatory variables  physical exercise students need to answer the daily physical exercise frequency in this test. they choose from five options: “no”, “less than 1 hour”, “1-2 hours”, “2-3 hours” and “3-5 hours”. li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1107 in the elementary school sample, 26.9 percent of students failed to meet the one-hour exercise standard while in the middle school sample this accounted for 41.1 percent.  non-cognitive abilities this study used the neo-ffi theory to subdivide sub-cognitive ability into five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. among them, neuroticism is a negative personality, which has been transformed into an upbeat personality. openness mainly refers to students’ ability to accept new things and use methods to solve problems. conscientiousness primarily refers to the degree of effort that students have to accomplish their goals and whether they persist in the end. extraversion refers to the enthusiasm and vitality of students, higher extraversion indicates that students have better peer relationships. agreeableness refers to the ability of students to show altruistic behavior. finally, neuroticism refers to the power of students to control emotions. since the above five dimensions are all latent variables, it isn’t easy to measure intuitively. therefore, the five dimensions were all set with 3-4 questions for measurement, and the principal component method was used to fit the score. the elementary school and middle school samples were tested separately. the α indicators of the five dimensions were all in the interval of [0.6, 0.8], indicating that the data has good reliability. in terms of validity, the rmsea indicators of the five dimensions were all less than 0.07, meaning a good fit, and the cfi and tli are both greater than 0.9, and the validity is good. more statistics can be found in table 1.  explained variable the academic performance middle school students participating in were divided into chinese, mathematics, english, biology, geography, and physics; and the elementary school was divided into chinese, mathematics and english. considering the academic burden and other reasons, each student in the middle school only tested two subjects and the elementary school only tried one subject. considering that there are apparent differences between subjects, it is impossible to simply take the subject scores of the students as the total score. moreover, regression by the subject may cause the lack of a large area of samples. therefore, after collecting the data, we decided to fit a regression model based on other items in the questionnaire that may be related to the results; and then performed multiple imputations on the results of the test subjects that the sample did not take to generate the general scores. such methods are often used to deal with large areas of missing values in the sample. after getting the results of each subject, considering that the policies for the high school entrance examination in various regions of jiangsu province are different, and the examination methods of biology and geography are also different, the middle school’s general scores only used the total scores of chinese, mathematics, english and physics. in contrast, the elementary school used the total scores of chinese, mathematics and english. as a result, the average score of all subjects in middle school was 555.22, and the average score of all topics in elementary school was 515.19. li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1108  control variable to avoid missing variables cause biased estimation of regression coefficients, this study incorporated students’ family background variables, demographic variables, and school background variables into the regression model to control bias. in sociological research, students’ stock of family capital can influence students’ academic performance through intergenerational inheritance. these capitals cover three forms: economy, culture, and society. in this study, we averaged the number of students' reports about the items owned by student families and used it as proxy variables of economic capital. students needed to answer the number of particular items (such as televisions, computers, cars, etc.) owned by the family. a total of nine questions were set. in terms of society capital, using the “chinese occupation classification dictionary (2015)” as a reference, the parents’ occupations were assigned, sorted (scores of 1-8) and standardized, and the highest score of the parents was taken as the social capital in the family background. finally, the parents’ academic qualifications represented the cultural capital. first, the parents’ academic qualifications were converted into years of education and assigned values of 9, 12, 16, and 19. after standardization, the highest scores of both parents were taken as the cultural capital of the student’s family. in addition, the gender of students was 1 for girls and 0 for boys; the only child status was 0 for only children and 1 for non-only children. the school type was 1 for public and 0 for private. the school area was 1 for urban and 0 for rural areas. the specific sample descriptive statistics were shown in table 1.  model setting this research will first conduct descriptive statistics on samples of the fifth and eighth grades in jiangsu province, locate the physical exercise situation, and construct an ols regression model, including core explanatory variables, control variables, and mediation variables to analyze the positive effects of physical exercise and the role of noncognitive abilities in the impact mechanism. the specific model expression is as follows: among them, scorei is the average grade of the subject of the i-th student. β1 is the regression coefficient of the student’s physical exercise situation. β2 is the regression coefficient of students’ non-cognitive abilities. β3 is the regression coefficient of the control variable. finally, εi is the residual of the regression equation.  data source and processing this study used the 2020 monitoring data of students’ academic quality in compulsory education in jiangsu province. the project is carried out once every two years. two li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1109 table 1. descriptive statistics. elementary school mean standard deviation minimum maximum only child 0.63 0.48 1.00 2.00 pe time 2.88 0.80 1.00 5.00 public school 0.64 0.48 0.00 1.00 urban 0.87 0.34 0.00 1.00 female 0.48 0.50 0.00 1.00 economic capital 0.03 0.99 -3.04 4.21 social capital 0.69 0.29 0.00 1.00 cultural capital 0.49 0.33 0.00 1.00 openness 0.03 1.00 -4.19 0.80 responsibility 0.04 0.98 -3.88 0.89 extraversion 0.01 1.00 -4.26 0.79 pleasant 0.05 0.97 -4.55 0.71 neuroticism 0.03 0.98 -3.41 0.84 middle school mean standard deviation minimum maximum only child 0.55 0.50 1.00 2.00 pe time 2.62 0.66 1.00 5.00 public school 0.86 0.35 0.00 1.00 urban 0.66 0.47 0.00 1.00 female 0.47 0.50 0.00 1.00 economic capital 0.57 0.10 0.25 1.00 social capital 0.60 0.29 0.00 1.00 cultural capital 0.31 0.30 0.00 1.00 openness 0.00 1.00 -3.39 1.16 responsibility 0.01 1.00 -2.87 1.49 extraversion -0.01 1.00 -3.33 1.38 pleasant 0.04 0.94 -4.00 0.98 neuroticism -0.01 0.99 -2.41 1.38 stage stratified sampling was used to conduct a sample survey of students, teachers, and school leaders in 13 cities in jiangsu province. among them, a sample of students was randomly selected from the sampled schools, and a total of 213,334 questionnaires for fifth-grade students and 147,432 questionnaires for ninth-grade students were collected. after deleting the samples that failed the polygraph test and missing important information, a total of 156,657 valid elementary school questionnaires and 127,738 useful student questionnaires from middle school were obtained. results regression analysis result of physical exercise in this study, students’ average scores were selected as dependent variables, and model 1, model 2, model 3, and model 4 were constructed respectively. model 1 only incorpo li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1110 table 2. ols regression results. elementary school model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 (constant) 484.50*** 509.99*** 501.13*** 520.70*** (0.548) (0.786) (0.867) (0.893) physical exercise 10.78*** 10.14*** 8.69*** 3.47*** (0.184) (0.176) (0.176) (0.185) non-only child -23.48*** -20.74*** -19.81*** (0.302) (0.303) (0.305) public school -2.07*** 1.29*** 0.75 (0.307) (0.314) (0.318) urban 19.32*** 13.87*** 12.33*** (0.534) (0.529) (0.535) female 8.24*** 6.71*** 4.19*** (0.287) (0.285) (0.289) economic capital 11.49*** 10.29*** (0.154) (0.156) social capital 8.06*** 6.79*** (0.545) (0.553) cultural capital 11.06*** 9.51*** (0.498) (0.505) openness 10.34*** (0.242) responsibility 4.17*** (0.229) extraversion -0.21 (0.245) pleasant 5.76*** (0.213) neuroticism 0.22 (0.188) r² 0.03 0.11 0.17 0.27 f 3431.12 3236.64 3149.63 2832.05 middle school model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 (constant) 503.42*** 545.11*** 466.53*** 497.41*** (0.833) (1.032) (1.534) (1.533) physical exercise 4.51*** 3.70*** 3.50*** -3.58*** (0.309) (0.296) (0.292) (0.296) non-only child -20.90*** -13.41*** -12.42*** (0.396) (0.398) (0.39) public school -33.70*** -24.22*** -19.99*** (0.56) (0.556) (0.544) city 20.07*** 10.62*** 10.14*** (0.418) (0.423) (0.416) female 16.87*** 14.81*** 10.97*** (0.391) (0.384) (0.385) economic capital 81.31*** 59.93*** (2.168) (2.129) social capital 12.26*** 11.28*** li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1111 (0.816) (0.801) cultural capital 44.22*** 36.71*** (0.807) (0.793) openness 27.95*** (0.303) responsibility 9.27*** (0.284) extraversion -10.49*** (0.325) pleasant 4.44*** (0.319) neuroticism -7.23*** (0.23) r² 0.002 0.09 0.16 0.29 f 213.088 2288.96 2653.349 3159.02 note: () is the standard error of the coefficient; * represents the significance level, where * is p < 0.1, ** is p < 0.05, *** is p < 0.01. rated physical exercise variables; models 2 and 3 incorporated background control variables to estimate the positive effects of physical exercise; model 4 incorporated noncognitive abilities variables to build a full model, analyzed the positive impact, and initially discuss the impact mechanism of physical exercise. before regression, the white collinearity test was performed on the sample data. there was no collinearity problem between the variables, and there was no obvious heteroscedasticity. the regression coefficients and standard errors of the samples are shown in table 2. from the results in table 2, physical exercise had different effects in elementary schools and middle schools. in models 1-3, physical exercises all positively predicted the academic performance of elementary and middle school students. as the model variables increased, the regression coefficients decreased. the regression coefficient in the elementary school sample was always positive; in the middle school sample, after adding non-cognitive variables, the student’s academic performance was significantly negatively predicted by the physical exercise, the regression coefficient was 3.60, and the significance level reached 0.01. on the whole, regardless of whether there was a mediating effect, the positive impact of physical exercise existed in the elementary school stage. however, after controlling the influence of background variables and non-cognitive abilities in the middle school stage, the positive effect of physical exercise turned into an “inhibition” effect. each time a student’s physical exercise time was increased by one unit, their academic performance dropped by 3.60 points instead. regression analysis results of non-cognitive abilities in addition to the high correlation between physical exercise and students’ academic performance, this research also demonstrated the high correlation between noncognitive abilities and academic performance. first of all, from model 4 of the elementary school and middle school samples, we found that the three dimensions of openness, li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1112 conscientiousness and agreeableness all positively and significantly predicted students’ academic performance, which was consistent with the results of foreign empirical research. the effect sizes of the three dimensions were further calculated. in the elementary school sample, the effect sizes of the three dimensions were 0.195, 0.076 and 0.104, respectively, while the middle school sample were 0.379, 0.129 and 0.056, respectively. the above results showed that non-cognitive abilities could help students improve their academic performance. in its interior, the effects of each personality trait were different in different stages, but the openness was always in a higher position. that means students who is enthusiastic about new things and willing to challenge often promotes academic performance the most. regression analysis results of other variables in terms of background variables, while controlling for the influence of other variables, the results of all models showed that students with non-only-child status had lower academic performance than students with only-child status. this may be because onlychild families often have more investment space for students’ academic or nonacademic tutoring. in addition, the academic performance of urban students was higher than that of rural students, and the regression coefficient interval was located in [9.53, 19.99], indicating that the issue of regional education equity needs to be improved. previous studies had agreed that a good family background would improve students’ academic performance. in this study, the higher the stock of economic, social, and cultural capital of a student’s family, the higher their academic performance would be, consistent with previous research results. analysis of the impact mechanism of physical exercise from the regression coefficients of model 1 to model 4, the coefficient of physical exercise gradually decreased, especially after adding the five dimensions of non-cognitive abilities; the coefficients of elementary school and middle school decreased significantly, which preliminarily explained mediating effect statistically. in order to visually present the role of each non-cognitive dimension in the influence mechanism, amos22.0 software was used to construct an intermediary model to draw a path diagram. the regression path diagram is shown in figure 1. from the path diagram of the elementary school sample, the five non-cognitive dimensions would be significantly positively predicted by the physical exercise, and the regression coefficients were similar. all were significant at the level of 0.01, indicating that physical exercise can effectively shape all aspects of personality traits. the second half of the path was significant at the 0.01 level. the mediation effect calculation showed that the mediation effect of openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness was more prominent, which were 28.43%, 10.95%, and 14.00%, respectively. but unlike elementary schools, there were certain differences in the effects of physical exercise on the five non-cognitive dimensions in the middle school samples. figure 2 showed that in terms of regression coefficients, the entire five dimensions li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1113 figure 1. elementary school stage road map. figure 2. middle school stage road map. li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1114 could be affected by physical exercises, which were all significant at the level of 0.01. in the second half of the path, the entire dimension could predict academic performance while the extraversion and the neuroticism predict negatively. among them the openness could predict academic performance much more strongly than other dimensions. after calculating the mediation effect, the mediation effect of the openness was the largest, reaching 41.17%, second of which is extroversion, only reach 13.52%. conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism were 12.45, 6.44% and 8.61%, respectively. moreover, the direct effect is negative. the above results showed that students at the elementary school could directly improve academic performance through physical exercise and could also indirectly improve academic performance to a greater extent by shaping the personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. through shaping extraversion and neuroticism personality, physical exercise could indirectly promote academic performance to a lesser degree. however, middle school students are under the burden of academic burden, the relationship between academic performance and physical exercise was very delicate. on the one hand, physical exercise did not directly promote the improvement of academic performance. on the other hand, physical exercise could greatly indirectly promote academic performance by shaping openness personality whose mediating effect was more significant than the direct effect of physical exercise. discussion physical exercise can directly or indirectly promote the improvement of academic performance “sports have the power to change the world.” however, physical fitness is just the tip of the iceberg of the value of physical exercise. in the regression and mediating effect analysis of this study, physical exercise, whether in the elementary school sample or the middle school sample, was found to directly or indirectly improve academic performance. in the elementary school sample, physical exercise could reduce the burden and increase adolescents’ academic work efficiency and alleviate the educational equity brought about by the differences in students’ family backgrounds. this was consistent with the early research results of yin et al. (2014), focusing on the positive effects of long-term physical exercise. however, we have again demonstrated this view under the influence of other variables under better control. in addition, this study also found that the direct effect of physical exercise in middle school samples is negative, which is contrary to the conclusions of many studies (fang, 2020; fang et al., 2021; lu et al., 2014). the reason is that, on the one hand, we believe that this research has selected more intermediate variables and brought the variable of non-cognitive abilities into the regression model. this effectively stripped off the effect of physical exercise statistically and obtained more accurate coefficients (wen et al., 2004; wen et al., 2014). on the other hand, in theory, middle school students and elementary school students have differences in psychology, physiology, and cognition, or there may be li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1115 two different influence mechanisms. this ultimately leaded to the fact that physical exercise cannot directly promote students’ academic performance among middle school students. however, the mediating effect of non-cognitive abilities allows physical exercise to improve students’ academic performance indirectly. therefore, physical exercise seems to “squeeze” students’ academic time but the relationship between academic time and performance is not linear (shen, 2014; zou & tan, 2013). therefore, finding the best advantages of academic time and proper planning of time investment can maximize the marginal effect of chemical industry time and effectively exert the positive impact of physical exercise. therefore, the concept of family education should shift from the original “focusing on academics and neglecting sports” to “grasp both academics and sports”; to achieve mutual complement, reduce burdens and increase efficiency. differences exist in the impact mechanism of physical exercise between elementary school and middle school. as mentioned above, middle school and elementary school may have two different influence mechanisms. the academic performance of elementary school students is directly and positively promoted by physical exercise and can be positively promoted by physical exercise through the five non-cognitive dimensions. on the other hand, the improvement of the academic performance of middle school students depends on physical exercise through the indirect effects of openness and agreeableness. research on the role of non-cognitive abilities in the influence mechanism of physical exercise is scarce in china. the only study that failed to consider the multidimensional and complex concept of non-cognitive abilities, instead of using a single variable, the results obtained are not robust (dong et al., 2020). this study built the dimension of non-cognitive abilities based on the neo-fft theory and deeply analyzed the role of each sub-dimension in the influence mechanism. middle school students rely on indirect effects, and we believed it might be that middle school students have higher non-cognitive abilities than elementary school students. previous studies found that students of different ages have significant differences in the scores of the five dimensions (nie et al., 2011), which made the marginal effect of physical exercise on non-cognitive abilities decline. therefore, the promotion of academic performance will not be as apparent as the elementary school stage. but on the whole, there is a very high correlation between physical exercise and non-cognitive abilities. physical exercise effectively shapes students’ positive personality, helps students accept new things and better restraint ability, and finally, through these abilities, effectively promotes academic performance. open personality traits play a key role the immense theoretical contribution of this research is to compare the effects of the five dimensions of non-cognitive abilities rather than simply discussing whether noncognitive skills play a role. at present, the academic circle is still inconclusive as to li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1116 which dimension of the five personality can effectively promote the improvement of academic performance. under the premise of the independent variable of physical exercise, this study found that the mediating effect of openness personality is the greatest. this can show that physical exercise can help shape students’ openness personalities and it also shows that students with more assertive openness personalities are more likely to exert the positive effects of physical exercise. students with strong openness personalities can often use “wisdom” to summarize their behavior (liu, 2001), and they are willing to actively seek solutions to problems and win external support (an, 2017). specifically, in this study, students with open personality traits are less afraid of difficulties, have higher expectations of themselves, and can effectively use the learning methods learned in the classroom. these positive behaviors can effectively promote the improvement of academic performance. in physical exercises, especially in competitive sports activities, students have ample opportunities and possibilities to try new methods while striving to achieve competitive goals and develop a behavioral pattern that uses new methods rationally and is not afraid of difficulties. this experience will also be transferred to classroom learning to help them no longer be fearful of the challenges in the classroom learning so that they can communicate with teachers and parents, seek methodological support, and ultimately achieve the improvement of academic performance. in other words, physical exercise can improve academic performance because it has the effect of enhancing students’ classroom performance, such as enhancing attention, which is consistent with the conclusions reached by some foreign studies (grieco, 2009; mahar et al., 2006). study limitation and perspective this study demonstrated the positive effects of physical exercise and analyzed the mediating impact of non-cognitive abilities with the help of the neo-ffi theory. in response to the three problems established in the study, the following conclusions are drawn: physical exercise positively can improve students’ academic performance. furthermore, this positive effect is achieved by physical exercise through non-cognitive abilities. among them, the openness personalities shaped by physical exercise are the most important. but this study still has limitations. firstly, the measurement of neo-ffi theory is incomplete compared with the measurement in psychological research and includes fewer questions. secondly, the physical exercise variable is set as a level variable, not a continuous variable that can characterize the duration, which may make the research results miss some valuable findings, such as the optimal interval and nonlinear relationship of physical exercise. thirdly, the direct effect in the midlle school sample was negative, which is somewhat contradictory to previous studies. in addition to the mediating effect of non-cognition, we believe endogeneity is what makes this happen and some matching methods should be used in later studies. conclusion and suggestion li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1117 change ideas, and promote the development of both academics and sports health and education are both essential components of human capital, and the two should be equally important. this study verified the positive effects of physical exercise. educators need to realize that physical exercise has a role that other academic investments cannot replace as a health investment. therefore, we should abandon the educational concept of “emphasizing academics over sports,” leaving enough time for students’ physical exercises and providing necessary support. parents can regularly participate in physical conditioning with their children, enhancing the parent-child relationship and improving their academic performance. teachers can use sports activities or competitions to cultivate children’s competitive spirit to develop positive behavior patterns and personality qualities and thus have better classroom performance. pay attention to non-cognitive abilities and open the “black box” of physical exercise this research has discovered the mediating role of non-cognitive abilities in the influence of physical exercise, which shows that in the black box of physical exercise and academic performance, previous studies have indeed overlooked some key variables. as a critical skill, non-cognitive abilities will be one of the core qualities of future students. therefore, all educators and researchers should integrate students’ non-cognitive abilities into scientific research and classroom teaching and strive to find efficient and quick ways to improve non-cognitive abilities. pay attention to the cultivation of openness personality and realize efficient classroom learning open personality was found to play an essential role in the influence mechanism of physical exercise in this study, and it has a considerable effect on academic performance. therefore, in daily family education, parents should attach importance to communication with their children and allow children to be open to competition and difficulties. teachers should “teach students how to fish, not just give fish.” it is necessary to emphasize the importance of methods and let students develop the habit of using strategies to learn knowledge, which improves classroom efficiency and benefits students’ long-term development. li, et al. how does physical exercise affect academic performance? 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[chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2013. 03.006 received: 30 june 2021 revised: 22 july 2021 accepted: 22 july 2021 https://d.wanfangdata.com.cn/periodical/xlxdt201405001 https://d.wanfangdata.com.cn/periodical/xlxdt201405001 http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xlxb200405016.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xlxb200405016.htm https://doi.org/10.15992/j.cnki.31-1123/c.2017.04.004 https://doi.org/10.15992/j.cnki.31-1123/c.2017.04.004 https://doi.org/10.16835/j.cnki.1000-9817.2018.06.014 https://doi.org/10.16835/j.cnki.1000-9817.2018.06.014 https://doi.org/10.13749/j.cnki.cn62-1202/g4.2018.04.012 https://doi.org/10.13749/j.cnki.cn62-1202/g4.2018.04.012 https://doi.org/10.16469/j.css.2014.03.001 https://doi.org/10.16835/j.cnki.1000-9817.2018.12.013 https://doi.org/10.16835/j.cnki.1000-9817.2018.12.013 https://doi.org/10.16237/j.cnki.cn44-1404/g8.20161010.005 https://doi.org/10.16237/j.cnki.cn44-1404/g8.20161010.005 https://doi.org/10.16099/j.sus.2021.01.004 http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-zjtk201803019.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-zjtk201803019.htm https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2013.03.006 https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2013.03.006 originalarticle-jijunyao-bece_title_july2021 originalarticle-jijunyao--bece_maintextjuly2021 family background, parent involvement, and shadow education participation of middle school students: empirical analysis from ceps2015 data xiang gao, haiping xue capital normal university, beijing 100048, china abstract. using the 2015 data of the china education panel survey (ceps), the relationship between family socioeconomic background, parent involvement, and shadow education participation was explored through structural equations. the results showed that: parent involvement strengthened shadow education participation; parent involvement played a part in the mediating role in the influence of family socioeconomic background on shadow education participation. parent involvement activates the advantage of family socioeconomic background. families with high socioeconomic backgrounds are more active in participating in shadow education, and families of different strata are divided into opportunities for participation in shadow education. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 7(1):893-905. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.ar004. how to cite: gao, x. & xue, h. (2021). family background, parent involvement, and shadow education participation of middle school students: empirical analysis from ceps2015 data. best evidence in chinese education, 7(1):893-905. keywords: shadow education; parent involvement; family socioeconomic background; high-order mediation effect; structural equation model about the authors: xiang gao, ed.d. candidate, school of education, capital normal university, beijing 100048, china. email: 393156557@qq.com. correspondence to: haiping xue, professor, director, institute of educational economics and management, school of education, capital normal university, beijing 100048, china. email: xuehaiping_416@163.com. gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no.1, 2021 894 funding: this study is a phased achievement of the national natural science foundation of china’s general project “family capital, shadow education and social reproduction” (project #: 71774112). conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 895 n the 1960s, coleman and his colleagues published the “equal educational opportunity report.” the report found that family background is an essential factor that affects student development and academic performance, and is the regenerating source of educational inequality and even social inequality, and has a more significant impact than school (coleman, 1966). family background currently affects student development through two main paths: parental participation in education and providing children with differentiated educational opportunities. parents’ educational participation indicates that parents influence students’ learning and promote students’ development through direct participation in students’ learning guidance and supervision (epstein, 1986). in the case of the same school, parents provide differentiated educational opportunities for their children outside the school mainly by participating in “shadow education” (that is, extracurricular tutoring) to improve students’ educational competitiveness (zhang & bray, 2018). so what is the relationship between these two paths? what role does parent involvement play in the influence of family socioeconomic background on shadow education participation? literature review coleman, hill, bronfenbrenner, joyce epstein, and others have defined parent involvement (bronfenbrenner, 1979; coleman, 1988; epstein, 1987; hill & taylor, 2004). the more recognized definition is: parent involvement is also called parent involvement, that is, “parent involvement in the child’s education.” its purpose is for the excellent development and growth of children (conger et al., 2007). in the empirical analysis of the connotation and types of parent involvement in china and abroad, specific operational definitions of parent involvement will be made, such as parental supervision of learning, homework guidance, parental expectations and parent-child communication, and parent-teacher communication (morgan & sørensen, 1999). study on the influence of family background on shadow education participation studies abroad have found that the family socioeconomic background has an essential influence on shadow education. darby, tansel and bircan, bray and kwok used quantitative methods to analyze the effect of family factors on extracurricular tutoring (bray & kwok, 2013; southgate, 2009; tansel & bircan bodur, 2008). using qualitative interviews and observation and tracking methods, lareau found that middle-class children are more involved in organized extracurricular activities, including extracurricular tutoring activities (lareau, 2009). domestic scholars haiping xue, binli chen, hongli chu, manchao zeng, etc., used quantitative methods to analyze data and found their parents’ educational background, parents’ occupation, and family income have an impact on students’ participation in shadow education (xue, 2016; chen & bai, 2015; chu, 2009; zeng et al., 2010). xuelian gao used the method of fieldwork to find that urban children mainly participate i gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 896 in extracurricular tutoring in their spare time, and children from migrant workers’ families mainly take “free-range” (gao, 2017). research on the influence of family background on parent involvement the theory of social capital believes that the higher the family’s social and economic background, the higher the emphasis on education and active participation (masarik & conger, 2017). family stress theory (mccubbin et al., 1980) believes that families with low socioeconomic conditions usually do not have high parent involvement behaviors due to enormous economic pressure. the family absence theory believes families with low parent involvement are rooted in the class’s massive gap (he, 2008). global empirical studies have also found that family socioeconomic background strongly affected parent involvement (balli, 1996; bracey, 1996). domestic scholars xiaorui huang (huang & an, 2008), chonghan wu (wu, et al., 2017), guiqing an and yang yang (an, & yang, 2018) all believed that families with higher socioeconomic backgrounds have higher parents’ enthusiasm for participating in their children’s learning. research on the impact of parent involvement on shadow education participation at present, there are not many studies on the influence of parent involvement on shadow education participation. xiaoshan lin’s research found that the longer parents spend with their children, the more children’s expenditure and opportunities for out-of-school education consumption (lin, 2018). haiping xue studied structural equation modeling and found that parents’ educational expectations positively affect extracurricular tutoring (xue, 2017). jing li and haiping xue found that in academic tutoring, the longer parents spend with their children, and the more often they supervise homework each week, the more likely they are to participate in extracurricular tuition (li & xue, 2016). jiali li’s research found that parent-child companionship, parent-child activities, etc., can positively predict the participation probability of tutoring, while parent-child communication and family-school communication have little effect (li & xue, 2019). data source and variable description the data used in this study all come from the 2014-2015 china education panel survey (ceps). in 2015, ceps investigated the relevant situation of eighth-grade students in middle school. the variables used in the study are shown in table 1. results gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 897 table 1. description of variables in statistical analysis. variable type variable name variable description shadow education whether eighth grade students participate in shadow education 0=no, 1=yes family socioeconomic background parent’s highest education 1=primary school and below, 2=junior high school, 3=high school, 4=junior college, 5=undergraduate and above parents’ highest occupational stratification 1=lower level, 2=middle level, 3=upper level family’s financial situation 1=very difficult, 2=very difficult, 3=medium, 4=relatively rich, 5=very rich family supervise how often do parents check homework a week 1=no, 2=one to two days, 3=three to four days, 4=almost every day how often do parents guide homework a week 1=no, 2=one to two days, 3=three to four days, 4=almost every day parent involvement family communicate discuss school matters with parents 1=never, 2=occasionally, 3=always discuss with parents about classmates 1=never, 2=occasionally, 3=always discuss teacher matters with parents 1=never, 2=occasionally, 3=always discuss your concerns with your parents 1=never, 2=occasionally, 3=always home school communication number of parentteacher communication this semester 1=never, 2=once, 3=two to four times, 4=five times and more number of times teachers communicated with parents this semester 1=never, 2=once, 3=two to four times, 4=five times and more family expect parents’ expectations of their children’s education 1=graduated from junior high school, 2=high school, 3=associate, 4=undergraduate, 5=graduate and above parents’ confidence in their children’s future 1=not confident at all, 2=not very confident, 3=relatively confident, 4=very confident control variable gender 0=male, 1=female grades 1=bad, 2=lower middle, 3=medium, 4=upper middle, 5=very good the impact of family socioeconomic background and parent involvement on shadow education participation in order to verify the research hypothesis, take shadow education participation as the dependent variable, select three variables of family socioeconomic background and ten variables of parent involvement as independent variables, and use gender and performance as control variables to establish a binary logistic regression model as follows: y = f (i, s, f) gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 898 table 2. the influence of family socioeconomic background and parental participation on shadow education participation. variable model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 model 5 model 6 model 7 gender: female 0.25*** 0.29*** 0.22*** 0.25*** 0.29*** 0.29*** grades 0.06** 0.07*** 0.03 -0.04 0.05** -0.03 family socioeconomic background parents' education 0.45*** 0.44*** 0.42*** 0.42*** 0.40*** 0.44*** 0.38*** parent occupation 0.35*** 0.36*** 0.35*** 0.35*** 0.34*** 0.35*** 0.33*** economic status 0.29*** 0.28*** 0.26*** 0.26*** 0.26*** 0.27*** 0.24*** home supervision check homework 0.20*** 0.17*** guide homework -0.04 -0.07** family communication discuss school 0.13** 0.09* discuss with classmates 0.09* 0.06 discussion teacher 0.09* 0.03 discuss your mind 0.02 -0.03 family expectations parent expectations 0.13*** 0.12*** future confidence 0.23*** 0.15*** family-school communication active communication 0.16*** 0.12*** passive communication 0.00 0.00 constant term -3.86*** -4.11*** -4.38*** -4.65*** -5.16*** -4.44*** -5.70*** sample 9191 9191 9191 9191 9191 9191 9191 cox & snell r 2 0.12 0.123 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.13 0.14 nagelkerke r 2 0.17 0.170 0.18 0.18 0.18 0.18 0.20 note: *p means p < 0.1, **p means p < 0.05, ***p means p < 0.01. in the model, y represents whether the student participates in shadow education, i is an individual variable of the student, s is the family socioeconomic background, and f is parent involvement. in table 2, there was a significant positive correlation between parents’ educational background, parents’ occupational grade, financial status, and student participation rate in shadow education (model 1). the shadow education participation rate of girls was significantly higher than that of boys, and the higher the score, the higher the participation rate of shadow education (model 2). in model 3, students whose homework was checked frequently were more likely to participate in extracurricular tutoring. in model 4, “discussion school,” “discussion classmate,” and “discussion teacher” all had a significant favorable influence on students’ participation in shadow education. in model 5, “parent education expectations” and “confidence” had a positive and significant impact on shadow education participa gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 899 figure 1. the mediating effect model of parental participation in four dimensions. tion. this also verified previous literature results: the higher the parents’ expectations, the more confident they were in their children, and the more likely students were to participate in extracurricular tutoring. in model 6, “actively communicating with teachers” positively and significantly impacted students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. model 7 was a full-variable model; in addition to the index of homework guidance, most indicators of family socioeconomic background and parent involvement had a significant positive impact on shadow education. parent involvement had not completely replaced shadow education but had become the driving force for students to participate in extracurricular tutoring. analysis of the mediating effect of parent involvement in the influence of family socioeconomic background in shadow education participation gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 900 table 3. intermediary model fitting results of various dimensions of parent participation in affecting shadow education participation. fitting index cmin df cmin/df rmsea nfi rfi ifi tli cfi home supervision 564.375 18 31.354 0.057 0.955 0.930 0.956 0.932 0.956 family communication 870.167 33 26.369 0.053 0.960 0.945 0.961 0.947 0.961 family-school communication 739.436 18 41.080 0.066 0.927 0.887 0.929 0.889 0.929 family expectations 585.170 1 7 34.422 0.060 0.940 0.901 0.942 0.904 0.942 judgment criteria < 5.0 < 0.10 > 0.9 > 0.8 > 0.9 > 0.8 > 0.9 based on the above research review and binary logistic regression analysis, and then referring to the structural equation related method (hou et al., 2004), a mediating effect model between the three is constructed. the mediation effect of the four dimensions of parent involvement figure 1 presents the analysis of the effect of family supervision, family communication, family-school communication, and family expectations as intermediaries. the direct effects of family supervision, family communication, family-school communication, and family expectations on students’ participation in shadow education are 0.053, 0.056, 0.060, 0.088, respectively, and the t-test results are all significant. it can be seen that family expectations have the most significant impact on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring, followed by family-school communication, family communication, and family supervision. the formula for the total influence of family socioeconomic background on extracurricular tutoring participation is c=c’+a*b, where c’ is the direct influence of family socioeconomic background on extracurricular tutoring. the real influence is the sum of direct and indirect influences. the total effect of family socioeconomic background on tutoring through the four parent involvement dimensions is family supervision 0.398, family communication 0.401, family-school communication 0.396, and family expectations 0.398. the fitting results of the four-dimensional mediation model are shown in table 3. except for cmin/df > 5, all other fitting indexes of each parent involvement dimension reached an excellent level. the size of x2 (i.e., cmin/df) is related to the sample size n. when the sample size increases, x2 increases, so it is not limited to x2 as a discriminant index, but also other fitting indices (hou et al., 2004). the sample size of this gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 901 figure 2. the mediating role of parent involvement between family socioeconomic background and student shadow education participation. study is 9,191. it can be referred to other fitting indicators, and other observation data would fit better. analysis of the high-level mediation effect of parent involvement this study constructed a high-level mediation model in which family socioeconomic background influences student participation in shadow education. the mediation path model fits the data well: effective sample size n = 9,191, cmin/df = 29.416 > 5. due to the large sample size, it cannot be judged by cmin/df alone. it should also be combined with other fitting indexes and the rationality of the relationship between the variables, and whether the parameters’ estimation is appropriate (hou et al., 2004). approximate root mean square error rmsea = 0.056, normalized goodness of fit index nfi = 0.920, comparative goodness of fit index cfi = 0.922, non-standardized goodness of fit index tli = 0.904, and other fit indexes meet the criteria for judgment. these data indicate that the entire model fits well with the actual observation data. the model standardized regression path coefficient results are shown in figure 2. the family socioeconomic background has a direct effect of 0.323 on student participation in shadow education, an indirect effect of 0.077 (0.532*0.145), and a total effect gao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 902 of 0.400. accordingly, the family socioeconomic background directly affects whether students participate in extracurricular tutoring and indirectly affect parent involvement. the direct effect of parent involvement on extracurricular tutoring is 0.145. from the model results, parent involvement plays a part in an intermediary role in family socioeconomic background and shadow education participation. conclusions and discussion this study examined the relationship between family socioeconomic background and parent involvement in shadow education participation and reached the following conclusions: (i) parent involvement is a powerful driving force for students to participate in shadow education, and the active participation of parents strengthens the participation in shadow education. parent involvement has a significant positive impact on middle school student shadow education participation; that is, the higher the degree of parent involvement, the greater the chance of students getting shadow education. specifically, family expectations have the most significant impact on shadow education participation, followed by family-school communication, family communication, and family supervision. family expectations promote students to participate in tutoring most likely, mainly because parents hope to achieve social class upward mobility through education, and shadow education is one of the ways to improve educational competitiveness. (ii) parent involvement plays a part in an intermediary role in the influence of family socioeconomic background on shadow education participation. that is, family socioeconomic background affects the probability of students participating in shadow education through parent involvement. specifically, family expectations have the most excellent intermediary effect in the family socioeconomic background, affecting students’ participation in shadow education, followed by family supervision, family communication, and family-school communication. studies have proposed that parent involvement can activate the advantages of family background and empower children’s school education (lareau, 1987). therefore, parent involvement provides advantages for children’s school education and affects the chance of receiving shadow education. families of different classes have differentiated participation opportunities in shadow education: parent involvement activates the advantages of the family’s socioeconomic background, and families with high socioeconomic backgrounds often participate more actively in shadow education. the research conclusions include the family socioeconomic background, parent involvement, and shadow education in the chinese context, confirming lareau’s research in the united states. lareau described in “unequal childhood” that middle-class american parents are more actively involved in students’ study and life and achieve “cooperative training” by arranging organized extracurricular activities for students; however, the working class is more inclined to “stocking.”, that is, let children “achieve natural growth” (lareau, 2009). different social classes make the degree of parent involvement different. parents focus on activating resources based on class adgao & xue. family, parents, and shadow education in middle school. vol.7, no. 1, 2021 903 vantages, allowing their children to conform to educational organizations’ evaluation standards, and helping their children achieve success in school education (lareau, 2009). this study explored the impact of parent involvement on shadow education participation, and to a certain extent, improved lareau’s parent involvement theory. we reached relevant conclusions through quantitative analysis. however, it is impossible to specifically reveal how parent involvement activates family advantages, how different dimensions of participation affect extracurricular tutoring and the internal process of parents’ tutoring decision-making. if the above questions can be supplemented by qualitative research, the fundamental research will be more informative. references curcio, g., ferrara, m., & de gennaro, l. 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(2020). 家庭背景、家长参与和初中生影子教育参与: 来自 ceps2015 数据的实证 研究.教育学术月刊, 2020(9):3-11+71. http://www.cqvip.com/qk/96925x/201701/671297651.html http://www.cqvip.com/qk/96925x/201701/671297651.html https://doi.org/10.14121/j.cnki.1008-3855.2018.20.005 https://doi.org/10.14121/j.cnki.1008-3855.2018.20.005 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-shxj201804007.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-shxj201804007.htm http://www.cqvip.com/qk/83877x/201702/671372794.html http://www.cqvip.com/qk/83877x/201702/671372794.html https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1005-2232.2016.06.006 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1005-2232.2016.06.006 https://doi.org/10.14121/j.cnki.1008-3855.2019.02.005 https://doi.org/10.14121/j.cnki.1008-3855.2019.02.005 https://doi.org/10.2307/2112583 article-haipingxue-bece_title_29jan2021 article-haipingxue-bece_maintext29jan2021 transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic: an activity theoretic reflection clarence ng,1 peter renshaw2 1. australia catholic university, brisbane, qld 4072, australia 2. university of queensland, brisbane, qld 4000, australia abstract. “learning from home” was a collective response to school closure in australia amid the covid-19 pandemic. in this paper, we offer a description of the learning-from-home event, highlighting changes that were required of teachers, students and parents. drawing on engeström’s cultural-historic activity theory, we reflect on these changes and query the extent to which the changes amount to a transformative pedagogy recognizing home and community as a significant source of and place for learning. it is argued that cultural knowledge and family practices have not been sufficiently acknowledged and utilized in the current practices associated with the learning-from-home event. based on the notion of funds of knowledge, we argue that a transformative pedagogy should build purposeful connection between school curriculum, cultural knowledge and family practices. this approach is illustrated using an example of play-based learning where a parent engaged her year 4 daughter in a home café enabling informal learning that met the requirements of the school curriculum. this case invites further reflection on important questions related to what counts as learning and what worthwhile learning encompasses. best evid chin edu 2020; 5(2):635-648. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.or023. how to cite: ng, c., renshaw, p. (2020) transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic: an activity theoretic reflection. best evid chin edu, 5(2):635-648. keywords: covid-19; online learning; pedagogy; educational change; activity theory; funds of knowledge. ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 636 introduction learning from home” has made it possible for australian students to continue their education despite school closure amid the covid-19 pandemic. ‘learning from home’ encompasses different forms of flexible learning arrangements, including online learning, using paper-based learning packages or a combination of both online learning and paper-based materials. in this paper, we reflect on pedagogical changes associated with ‘learning from home’ arrangements in response to the coronavirus outbreak in australia during the period between march and may 2020. we draw on engeström’s third generation activity theory that situates pedagogy as part of an evolving activity system (engeström, 1987, 2001, 2007). pedagogy is defined, not as a set of teaching skills, but as a structured process wherein acts of teaching are mediated by a set of rules, interactions, and use of tools for achieving valued outcomes. this definition highlights the social and contextual nature of pedagogy. it aligns with vygotsky’s sociocultural understanding of learning and teaching, which renshaw (1998, p.83) considered important, as ‘it situates learning (and teaching) as an aspect of interrelated historical, cultural, institutional, and communicative processes’. adopting this contextualized perspective, we consider pedagogical changes associated with the learning-from-home event, which, owing to its unprecedented scale, can be taken as an example epitomizing, what renshaw (1998, p.83) described as, ‘novel forms of collective action and community participation that the technologies support’. in this reflection, we highlight the question of novelty in relation to pedagogical transformation amid the learning-from-home event, examining the extent to which this novel form of collective action has triggered ‘novel ways of acting, feeling and thinking’ about pedagogies. in the sections that follow, we describe first how education authorities in australia responded to the pandemic and in what ways ‘learning from home’ were taken as a temporary solution to school closure. based on cultural-historic activity theory (chat), we then argue that due attention has not been given to utilizing home resources (in addition to computing and internet technologies) and parental involvement as core components of a transformative pedagogy addressing educational exigencies due to the pandemic. at the time of writing, australian jurisdictions were re-opening schools. although the learning-from-home phenomenon is not perennial, home resources, parental involvement and student agency are important features that can remain and be incorporated into teachers’ pedagogical repertoire. the covid-19 pandemic provided a rare opportunity to reflect on current practices and reconsider significant pedagogical elements that could transform the learning and teaching processes. about the author: peter renshaw, professor, school of education, university of queensland, brisbane, qld 4072, australia. email: p.renshaw@uq.edu.au. correspondence to: clarence ng, associate professor, institute for learning sciences &; teacher education, australian catholic university, level 4, 229 elizabeth street, brisbane, qld 4000, australia. email: clarence.ng@acu.edu.au. conflict of interests: none. “ ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 637 covid-19 outbreak in australia and school closure in australia, school closures began in late march 2020, following a wave of pandemictriggered restrictions including social distancing requirements, business closures, travel bans, and compulsory quarantine of travelers returning from overseas. despite school closure, scott morrison, the prime minister, insisted that learning should be continued. ‘one thing that i know teachers are united on, with their parents, is we do not want one of those things to be the loss of a child's education, giving up a whole year of their learning’ (sbs news, 15 april 2020). education authorities in different australian jurisdictions supported this stance wherein the concern about ‘a loss of learning’ justified creative arrangements to enable ‘learning from home’. complicating this novel education scene was that children of essential workers, such as medical professionals, were allowed to attend school, resulting in two cohorts of students – those who learnt from home and those who attended school. in this discussion, our concern was about the majority group of students who continued education using the mode of ‘learning from home’. the term ‘learning from home’ refers to different kinds of flexible learning arrangements that schools and teachers used to assist students to continue education at home. these flexible arrangements include online learning, using of pre-set learning packages, televised lessons, and their combinations. teachers put together learning materials enabling learning through paper-based and online-based modes over a short period of time while the threat of coronavirus infection intensified. this involved redesigning lesson plans and resources, careful structuring of learning activities, and developing new assessment tasks for online and self-guided or parent-guided learning. it was indeed a professional feat as australian teachers made this possible within a short time amid the outbreak, which has inevitably fomented teachers’ concerns about unexpected workloads (heaney & breen, 2020). recognising the immensity of tasks associated with ‘learning from home’, education authorities across the country have provided urgent support and advice in relation to sample lesson plans, design of online learning activities and learning packages, and guidelines for delivering online lessons or ‘learning from home’ (see an example of departmental guidelines from queensland, https://education.qld.gov.au/curriculum/learning-at-home; see examples of learning packages from new south wales, https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/ learning-from-home/learning-at-home/learning-packages). in queensland, the department of education partnered with different tv networks to deliver televised lessons for lower primary and pre-school students in order to assist parents with ‘learning from home’, especially those who did not have it skills or were disadvantaged due to cultural, economic and linguistic constraints. parental guidelines were provided to encourage parents to minimize distraction, provide learning spaces, and manage screen time and online safety for their children (see an example of parental guidelines from victoria, https://www.education.vic.gov.au/parents/learning/pages/home-learning.aspx). in many cases, parents were expected to play the role as a monitor to ensure that online lessons and learning activities were completed in accordance to a set plan (see abc news, https://education.qld.gov.au/curriculum/learning-at-home https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/learning-from-home/learning-at-home/learning-packages https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/learning-from-home/learning-at-home/learning-packages https://www.education.vic.gov.au/parents/learning/pages/home-learning.aspx ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 638 2020a). students’ engagement and attendance through online learning were monitored (kelly, 2020). in some cases, students were told that their parents would be informed if they did not finish all the learning tasks diligently. for students who did not have computing devices for online learning or who did not have internet access at home, the departments of education and charitable organizations across the country offered internet dongles and mobile devices to many disadvantaged students. nevertheless, the issue of digital divide remained the most pressing concern amid the pandemic. in particular, the negative impact on disadvantaged students was pronounced, as ‘only 68% of australian children aged 5 to 14 living in disadvantaged communities have internet access at home, compared to 91% of students living in advantaged communities’ (graham & sahlberg, 2020). ‘learning from home’ has indeed magnified some perennial educational problems in australia, such as digital gap, educational inequalities, and literacy underachievement. to evaluate the effects of school closure on students from vulnerable backgrounds, the federal government called for a series of quick research and expert reports (e.g. lamb, 2020; masters, 2020) to examine critical issues such as digital divide, educational inequality and achievement gaps. these reports highlighted risks for vulnerable students from various disadvantaged backgrounds of falling further behind in academic achievement compared to their advantaged counterparts during the pandemic (duffy, 2020). a significant decision made by the federal government, in response, was to cancel the national test of literacy and numeracy (naplan) that was originally scheduled to conduct in may 2020. importantly, the learning-from-home initiative has revealed core elements of education in australia. first, teachers were recognized and celebrated for their crucial role in educating children (abc news, 2020b). such recognition is in marked contrast to a decade of policy focus on top-down accountability that fostered mistrust of the teaching profession. teachers’ professionalism, generosity and care for the students were widely acknowledged and celebrated in the media during school closure. second, the cancellation of the national test of literacy and numeracy amid the pandemic indicates that national tests such as naplan have limited value in progressing learning for individual students. in this unprecedented time, the most important task was to enable meaningful learning to continue, but not testing, though an important concern was how best to assess year 12 students and facilitate selection for university education. third, home remains the most important place for learning to occur. in this sense, the government has rightfully sought expert advice on facilitating ‘learning from home’ for vulnerable students from disadvantaged backgrounds. this of course highlighted the problem that some homes are less conducive to learning than others. due attention, however, has not been given to positioning home, a significant place of education, as a solution or part of the solution to complex educational issues. the pandemic has inadvertently set a spotlight on ‘home’ as a significant source of and place for learning. this means that any meaningful solution needs to consider influences derived from home and ways that the home can be incorporated in the solution designed to overcome the problem of school closure. ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 639 figure 1. a triangular representation of an activity system. (adapted from engeström, 1987, p.78) reflecting on pedagogy for “learning from home” using activity theory the pandemic has made it possible to experiment with online delivery of school education at a large scale in a short period of time. as education researchers, we are interested in reflecting on the systemic change in practice and exploring how the pandemic might facilitate a rare opportunity for transforming pedagogies. the key questions are: what has been changed? were these changes transformative? these questions are important as we may face a second wave of infection and there is a need to prepare for a n o t h e r u n p r e d i c t a b l e e v e n t t h a t m a y l e a d t o s c h o o l c l o s u r e . we draw on engeström’s cultural-historic activity theory (chat) to assist our reflection and exploration. chat is used because it conceptualizes pedagogy not as a set of teacher skills but as contextualized actions and practices in an activity system. importantly, chat alerts us to take a holistic perspective to pedagogy by examining it as an emergent process derived from the interaction between components of an activity system as a whole. chat draws attention to the dynamic link between what teachers are trying to achieve, what they do, how students learn and resist learning, how other subject object outcome communityrules division of labour mediational tools ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 640 stakeholders contribute to learning/teaching, and how norms and rules are implemented and resisted. figure 1 shows a triangular representation of a typical activity system that engeström used to highlight essential nodal components of an activity system. these nodal components include subject, object, tools, rules, division of labour and a community. human actors (subjects) interact with each other using relevant cultural tools in their participation in an ‘activity’ in order to achieve a shared goal (an object) which is arguably the most important element separating one activity system from another. actors’ interaction and mediated use of tools are governed by norms and values (rules) agreed between the members (community) who share a common interest on the object and play different roles within an activity system (division of labour). it should be noted that the whole activity system is always in a dynamic state fraught with contradictions, as members interact with each other to achieve a goal that might be understood in different ways. an activity system is therefore “the minimal meaningful context” for understanding human actions and development (kuutti, 1996, p.28). using chat, we are able to avoid a reductionistic treatment of pedagogy, as it draws our attention to multivoicedness (different members), historicity and continuity (enduring institutional goals and practices) in pedagogical construction and development. pedagogical change may involve a new educational goal, use of new technologies or a new curriculum, new rules (e.g. pre-requisite for university entrance), new partners who assume a particular role, and the dynamic interaction between new and extant elements in a pedagogical activity system. pedagogical change, therefore, is an uncertain venture wherein contradictions and tensions abound, as teachers, students and other members interact and adjust with each other during the introduction of a new pedagogical element. negotiation is inherent to the process of pedagogical change and resolving successfully contradictions and tensions is critical for genuine pedagogical transformation (ng, 2009). from a chat perspective, major pedagogical changes during the learningfrom-home event involve the following areas: 1. mode of delivery changes from face-to-face interaction to online delivery or working remotely on pre-packaged materials; 2. lesson context changes from classroom-based activities to home-based activities; 3. teacher’s role changes from classroom instructor to online instructor and designer of pre-packaged/online curriculum materials; 4. student’s role changes from learning in a face-to-face interactive context in the classroom to learning individually using self-contained materials or participating remotely on online platforms; 5. parent’s role expands to encompass supporter, monitor and regulator of child’s online learning or other forms of ‘learning from home’ activities; 6. multimodal literacy strategies are required for effective interactions between peers, and between students and teachers during online learning. to examine the extent to which the classroom-based pedagogical system has been transformed, it is not sufficient to examine changes at a particular node (see figure ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 641 1). any pedagogical change needs to be considered in the context of interconnected relationships between individual nodes within an activity system. therefore, pedagogical change during the pandemic is not just a question of students’ access to the internet and the quality of internet connection at home. additional questions include: are students prepared for online learning? what forms of support are available from teachers, peers and parents? what forms of interaction are promoted on online platforms? what kinds of learning outcomes are privileged in online materials? from a teacher’s perspective, the question goes beyond the quality of re-designed learning materials provided to students via an online platform. additional considerations include whether teachers have the required knowledge and skills to assume the role of online instructor and what capabilities they have developed to teach effectively in an online environment. more importantly, as ‘learning from home’ assumes parental involvement, the extent to which teachers understand how to involve parents in online learning and home-based learning is crucial for successful delivery of ‘learning from home’. from a parent’s perspective, the key concern is not just whether internet and computing devices are provided to their children. it is also important to examine whether parents feel comfortable to take on new roles as a monitor and supporter of online learning or home-based learning. parents’ knowledge and skills of online learning and their understanding of school curriculum are critically important to supporting their children’s online learning and other forms of ‘learning from home’ activities. furthermore, worries and concerns from teachers, students and parents about these changes need to be dealt with. taken together, successful and transformative change is not simply a matter of putting materials online or ensuring students’ online attendance as scheduled. has the pandemic enabled the emergence of a new form of pedagogy stretched across home-school contexts and mediated by online technologies and materials? the key to answering this question is to examine the object within an activity system, which, as explained above, is an important element that separates different activity systems. this is because it is through the object that different component elements are designed and related to each other. importantly, the object signifies what is worthwhile pursuing and what is being valued as an outcome in an activity system. it seems to us that during the ‘learning from home’ period, the object of teaching and learning remained unchanged (though setting up online platform and developing learning packages can be taken as a transient object at the initial stage of school closure). teachers and schools still focused on the extant curriculum goals. for example, scholars (see https://www.dese.gov.au/covid-19/schools) who were commissioned by the australian government to write short research reports on the effects of home-based learning during the pandemic, framed their responses in terms of ‘loss of learning’ and ‘widening gaps’. they deployed metrics to describe the loss in terms of the number of months or terms of a normal school year (see for example, lamb, 2020; masters, 2020). this reveals that for policymakers the learning-from-home event was an aberration from the standard form of schooling. this of course became problematic. worries and tensions were unavoidable as teachers, principals and parents wondered how ‘learning from home’ could ensure steady progress of learning as set out in the national curriculum https://www.dese.gov.au/covid-19/schools ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 642 (abc news, 2020a; heaney & breen, 2020). unsurprisingly, in many cases, ‘learning from home’ involved an identical lesson schedule and similar teaching routines used in classroom-based instruction, which of course, made it hard for students to maintain engagement when they were expected to sit through a day’s lessons in front of a computer or a mobile device, though younger children might have had more freedom regarding how they engaged in a lesson under the supervision of their parents (abc news, 2020a). parents responded anxiously to the narrative of loss of learning measured against preset curriculum standards. asking parents to monitor students’ engagement in online learning or completing pre-set learning activities at home, as reported repeatedly in the media, created anxieties and increased conflicts with their children (fisher, 2020). migrant parents faced additional challenges due to cultural differences, language barriers and limited knowledge about the australian educational systems (yang et al., 2020). our view is that the legitimate and significant role of ‘home’ as a source of and a place for learning has not been acknowledged sufficiently in the learning-from-home initiative. below we discuss this case of missed opportunity based on the notion of funds of knowledge (gonzalez et al., 2006). a missed opportunity the pandemic offered a rare opportunity for reconsidering pedagogy and change. in addition to critical issues such as teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) and effective use of social media and internet resources, an important point of consideration is the extent to which resources and practices derived from home and relevant communities can be incorporated into the learning and teaching processes in order to develop a transformative pedagogy. from a chat perspective, home-based and/or community-based resources and practices can be taken as cultural tools for learning. linking the school curriculum with valued knowledge and practice at home and in the wider community can create a problem space for negotiating a shared object or valued outcome in a pedagogical activity system. this is a problem space because teachers’ epistemological beliefs about valued knowledge and how best to teach it will be challenged when deliberate connection is made to link school curriculum with cultural knowledge and practices derived from home and wider communities. in this form of transformative pedagogy, students are no longer receivers of knowledge controlled by the teacher; they too are legitimate knowers with access to, and experience of cultural knowledge and practices. parents can be expected to play an important role as an expert knower assisting their children to make sense of knowledge about a school subject from a cultural perspective, sharing their experiences and understanding. related to this proposal is the concept of and research on funds of knowledge (fok). fok is “a systematic and powerful way to represent communities (including home) in terms of resources, the wherewithal they possess and how to harness these resources…” (gonzález et al., 2006, p.x). fok includes, but is not limited to, language practices, social relationships, knowledge about culture, histories and local environments and a set of strategies for getting things done. this concept bridges the gap between school and home and enables theorization of pedagogy based not on the teacher’s ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 643 own knowledge of the curriculum but also ‘the lives of ordinary people, their everyday activities and what has led them to the place they find themselves’ (gonzález et al., 2006, p.1). importantly, this approach ‘allows for variability within populations’ and ‘the infinite variations that social agents are able to negotiate within a structure’ (gonzález et al., 2006, p.43). in other words, fok acknowledges diversity, respects agency and values localized knowledge. more significantly, gonzález emphasizes that fok is formed and transformed within sociohistorical circumstances and constructed through discourses. from this perspective, any form of ‘learning from home’ needs to consider (i) in what ways localized knowledge can be connected with school curriculum; and (ii) how to utilize fok to promote a dialogue in order that school learning and family practices are related in sensible and meaningful ways. in this way, students and their families are positioned as knowledgeable partners in the course of delivering ‘learning from home’. this will also help bridge the divide between school and home, and avoid a deficit view of learning, especially for students coming from culturally and linguistically diverse communities or economically disadvantaged families. in this context, rodriguez (2103) alerted us to the issue of power imbalance in advancing fok pedagogical designs. more recently, llopart and esteban-guitart (2017, 2018) have reviewed fok pedagogical designs that addressed power relationship and purposefully connected cultural knowledge and family practices to school curriculum. an illustration at this point we want to illustrate how fok can be part of the learning-from-home process using a news article reported in the abc news, dated 27 april 2020 (parker, 2020). in this article, an australian parent, named rachel parker, recounted her worries about ‘learning from home’ and how she greeted with tears what her year 4 daughter, lila, called the ‘mummy school’. rachel, lila and other family members experienced the rigidness of ‘learning from home’ as lila shouted ‘shut up’ to all her family members at the commencement of her online lesson. though the news article did not depict a detailed account of all the worries that lila and the family had experienced as a result of ‘learning from home’, rachel’s thought of needing to ‘get out of here’ and to take a walk with lila in the nearby park epitomized her frustration. as the pair walked through the park, rachel engaged lila in an educational chat about different creatures they encountered. they saw flying bugs and rachel raised a question about ‘what are they? will they bite?’. they saw other dogs and lila asked the owner ‘do they shed?’. they were puzzled to see a truck with a barrel of chemicals and a spray gun and wondered what it did. lila thought it might be related to the outbreak. rachel and lila continued to talk about what they had seen as they returned home. the day continued for lila and the family, not following the scheduled online lessons, but through a pretend play of running a home café for the family members. lila initiated the home café after watching a youtube video of a girl who started a restaurant in her driveway during the pandemic. lila, as the chef, created a menu for her mother to read. playing the role as a waitress, lila took order from rachel and her elder ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 644 sister, calculated the price and served them in a physical setting observing social distancing rules. lila assigned rachel to play different roles including servant, cleaner and it helpdesk. rachel, in her role as an it employee, helped lila re-design the menu using the photos of food and drinks they took, showed her how to use word and email, and how to use different word functions to type and price new items. the pair discussed operating costs, pricing, and discounts. they watched youtube videos on decimals, fractions and percentages in order to work out discounts for the family members. they also decided to donate the profits to a hospital for purchasing surgical masks. as a customer, rachel wrote a review of the café for lila to read. rachel, in her reflection, considered lila’s learning during the day met the year 4 english curriculum that requires students to create texts using software and multimodal sources. it also covered the year 4 mathematics curriculum of learning fractions and decimals and using them in relevant contexts. she concluded that her experience of ‘learning from home’ could serve as a reminder that ‘we might use parts of our ordinary lives as the canvas to paint a simple picture of learning through play at home’. from a fok perspective, this play-based case illustrates that home is an important source of and place for learning. home furniture, kitchen equipment, home space, and computer and internet resources were re-organized and redeployed to enable play-based learning of a home café. notably, the short walk in the park and an engaging talk about creatures they encountered set the scene for lila to free up her creative mind and for rachel to see alternative learning possibilities. rachel, as the parent, played an important role enabling, facilitating and participating in meaningful learning that met lila’s needs and simultaneously addressed the requirements of the school curriculum. this was a stark contrast to the role of monitoring children’s learning and ensuring time-on-task that the school expected parents to take. creativity, flexibility and involvement are keys to success, as demonstrated in lila’s play-based learning. a rather different picture would have evolved if rachel had insisted lila to follow the school’s rigid schedule of learning which specified the exact time that lila was required to work on literacy, mathematics and other subjects on a daily basis. this case outlines a transformative pedagogy utilizing home resources and parental involvement based on play-based scenarios. teachers, of course, need to understand and gather students’ fok before they can incorporate cultural knowledge and family practices as part of a transformative pedagogy. fok researchers have achieved this through ethnographic studies involving home visits and interviewing parents (e.g. gonzález et al., 1995; kiyama, 2010). other researchers have explored students’ fok through classroom discourse and interaction (e.g. barton & tan, 2009; moje et al., 2004). another important consideration is how to connect family practices to school curriculum. addressing this issue, llopart and esteban-guitart (2017) have reviewed an array of studies to show how student-produced artefacts such as photographs, texts and digital productions can be utilized to develop a pedagogy building on students’ cultural knowledge and experiences. critical to school-home connection is the question of what can be counted as learning. in the case of lila’s play-based learning, rachel considered play-based learning favourably, while lila’s teenager sister held a different view and ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 645 commented that it was not ‘real learning’. this tension could be generative if it opened up the problem space for reconsidering the object of a pedagogical activity system, i.e. what counts as valued knowledge and outcomes. due attention should be given to the issue of power asymmetry inherent in this tension, as students and parents are always positioned at the receiving end of education (rodriguez, 2013). the case of lila’s playbased learning, aligned with fok studies reviewed by llopart and esteban-guitart (2018), speaks against treating students and parents from a deficit perspective. as shown in lila’s case, curriculum knowledge can be developed through meaningful activities at home (e.g. calculating discounts using fractions for family members) where students and parents are legitimate knowers. connecting school curriculum with family practices can only be taken as an effective design principle for developing transformative pedagogies when cultural knowledge and family practices are rightfully respected and utilized to enrich school learning. conclusion in this paper, we have reflected on ‘learning from home’ as a novel collective response to the pandemic in australia. we focused on pedagogy as the main issue because pedagogy is at the heart of all forms of learning, whether it occurs in the classroom, at home or on online platforms. under the sway of neoliberal policies current pedagogical practices have become closely aligned with reductive accountability metrics. a good example is the concern about a loss of learning during the pandemic. in response, ‘learning from home’ that was supposed to be a flexible means to meet students’ diverse needs, was taken as a conduit for the curriculum using rigid daily routines and schedules. we argued that this was a missed opportunity for transforming extant pedagogies and redesigning how home and parents could contribute to the pedagogical process. ‘we are in this together’ is a narrative widely used in the australian media urging mutual support and care during the pandemic. if we are truly in this together, then the ‘we’ needs to include everyone. following this narrative of togetherness, a transformative pedagogy, responding to the exigencies of a shared challenge posed by the pandemic, calls for a focus on diversity and cultural resources at home and in different communities. losing sight of support on learning derived from home resources and parental involvement may result in a form of ‘learning from home’ that is decontextualized, rigid and disengaging. by understanding learning that diverse students may engage in outside the classroom and by creating ways for these lived experiences of learning to be woven into the curriculum and classroom activities, we may be able to transform our pedagogy with a focus on multiple contributors and partners within a reconfigured activity system, bringing partners together, working collaboratively towards a shared goal and outcome of education. in doing so, such a transformative pedagogy hinges not just on how well teachers are prepared or knowledgeable about the curriculum, but also how students and parents can be a curriculum partner bringing their resources and knowledge to enliven a curriculum text in their own lived environment. the pandemic provides a chance for us to reflect on a transformative pedagogy. engeström’s chat alerts us to the importance of developing a shared vision based on ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 646 broadened understanding of knowledge and learning; where students, parents and teachers together negotiate the curriculum; and where multiple voices and localized practices are valued. in this way, we propose a vision of connected learning linking school and home at the post-pandemic world. essentially, this form of new learning is agentic, intergenerational, participatory and multicultural in nature. references abc news. 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(2020, april 17) migrant parents in australia face challenges posed by home learning model amid coronavirus pandemic. abc news. retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-0417/migrant-parents-face-challengesduring-coronavirus-homelearning/12154036. ng & renshaw. transforming pedagogies in australian schools amid the covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 648 received: 16 june 2020 revised: 18 june 2020 accepted: 18 june 2020 originalarticle-clarence-bece_title_15july2020 originalarticle-clarence-bece_maintext15july2020 who are being bullied? – an empirical study on the influence factors of school bullying among chinese middle school students yongmei hu, jiazhe li beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. this study used a large-scale random sampling survey data called regional assessment of education quality (raeq) organized by collaborative innovation center of assessment toward basic education quality in 2014. the school bullying phenomenon is described from the perspective of middle school students who were bullied. regression is used to estimate the effects of academic achievement, self-esteem, interpersonal relationship and pro-social behavior on the different types of school bullying. and the differences between urban and rural areas among the influence factors were also compared. the conclusions are as follows. first, the average frequency of verbal bullying is the highest, relational bullying is in the middle level, and physical bullying is the lowest. second, boys are more likely to suffer school bullying weighted more in verbal and physical bullying. third, those who are singleparent, migrant, left behind and rural origin are more vulnerable to various types of bullying. interestingly, students from single-parent families are more likely to suffer relational bullying, while migrant and rural children are more likely to get verbal bullying. fourth, the level of selfesteem has a u-shaped relationship with the frequencies of all kinds of school bullying, and it is more significant and clear in the relational bullying. fifth, interpersonal relationship, including parent-child, peerpeer, and teacher-student relationship can affect the school bullying significantly, and the peer relationship has a bigger effect on the relational bullying for urban students compared with rural ones. therefore, parents, teachers and schools should pay more attention to and even interfere with the potentially bullied students to prevent and control school bullying. best evid chin edu 2019; 2(1):171-192. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1039 keywords: middle school students; school bullying; relational bullying; verbal bullying; physical bullying; seemingly unrelated regression hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 172 introduction o the frequently occurred school bullying all over the world, some countries have taken relevant preventive measures. for example, norway has established a no-tolerance program and published the anti-bullying declaration. australia has established a special government organization to help schools solve the problem of bullying, and observe the third friday of march every year as the national “antibullying day”. the united states and japan have also enacted anti-bullying laws and implemented a comprehensive anti-bullying policy. in china, the chinese government takes into account of the importance to solve the problem of school bullying. in april 2016, the office of the state council’s education steering committee issued the notice on the special governance of school bullying. in november 2016, the ministry of education and the central comprehensive management office issued the instructions on prevention and control of bullying and violence among elementary and middle school students. in april 2017, the general office of the state council issued the instructions on strengthening the construction of safety risk prevention and control system in kindergartens and elementary and middle schools. in march 2018, during the two sessions of china (the national people’s congress, npc, and the chinese people’s political consultative conference, cppcc), when interviewed by xinhua net and the chinese government network in a program called the voice of ministers, the minister of education baosheng chen said that the same as the fair and quality education for migrant and left behind children being cared for, and less school bullying is one of the top ten expectations for the education. school bullying has become an urgent problem for the basic education in china. however, china has not yet conducted a comprehensive and systematic investigation of school bullying, and we still do not have accurate, comprehensive, authoritative and systematic data with in-depth professional research (chu, 2017). in view of these, we tried to answer following questions on the basis of the database of middle school students established by the program of regional education quality and health examination organized by national innovation center on assessment of basic education quality in 2014: 1) who is being bullied? 2) what student individual factors do affect school bullying? 3) what are the differences between urban and rural students suffering from school bullying? the eventual purpose was to provide suggestion on decision-making reference for preventing and controlling school bullying in middle school students. correspondence to: yongmei hu, professor, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: huym0718@bnu.edu.cn about the author: jiazhe li, doctorate candidate, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: lijz1106@126.com funding: “2011 plan” of beijing normal university, entitled “research and development of related factors affecting student development” (no.: 370331321). conflict of interests: none. t hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 173 literature review the concept and types of school bullying studies on school bullying around the world began in the 1970s. dan olweus, a psychologist at the university of bergen in norway, known as the father of school bullying research found that bullying is the main form of aggressive behavior among adolescents on campus in elementary and middle schools in both norway and sweden. he believed that school bullying means the victim is deliberately, repeatedly and continuously encountered negative behavioral attack by one or more students, causing physical or psychological harm or discomfort (olweus, 1994). chinese scholar wenxin zhang also believed that bullying is a special type of attack that often occurs among children, especially in elementary and middle school students. at present, the general concept of school bullying has not yet been identified though, researchers have basically reached a consensus regarding the types of school bullying, including relational bullying, verbal bullying and physical bullying 1 . in recent years, there has also been a new form of cyber bullying, which uses modern information network technologies such as telephone, sms, wechat and email to intimidate, insult, threaten and even spread false rumors, and upload pictures or videos which shame the victim publicly. hotspots of related chinese and international research li et al. (2017) used knowledge graph and other methods to analyze the literature during 2007-2016 on school bullying published in science citation index expanded (scie) and social science citation index (ssci) of the web of science database. it found that the research hotspots of school bullying in international academic journals majorly focus on the essence and forms of school bullying, the incidence, harmfulness, causes and solutions of school bullying and so on. chinese researchers have already introduced the experience of school bullying prevention in foreign countries. for example, huang (2017) made a comprehensive analysis of the school bullying governance systems of seven developed countries including the united states, britain, australia, sweden, norway, japan and south korea. he concluded that the common features include strengthening the responsibilities of all parties, focusing on process monitoring, building various platforms to prevent and control school bullying, and paying attention to the governance of cyber bullying etc. therefore, the causes and influencing factors have become hotspots in school bullying research, and it has strong practical significance in preventing and controlling school bullying. the theoretical basis and research hypothesis of preventing and controlling school bullying american sociologist c. w. mills put forward a theory regarding significant characters including parents, teachers, and peers, who appear gradually in the process of individual’s socialization. with the increase of children’s age, the dominant type of significant hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 174 characters generally changes from parents, teachers, and peers to other surrounding people. for middle school students, their interpersonal communication refers to the psychological and behavioral communication between themselves and the surrounding people such as parents, teachers and classmates. the main interpersonal relationships for middle school students are parent-child relationship, teacher-student relationship, and peer-peer relationship. parents, teachers and peers are often reliable subjects who can provide students effective help when they encounter difficulties. close parent-child relationship can help children alleviate the trouble of school bullying; and the more harmonious the teacher-student and peer-peer relationship, the less likely they are to be bullied (gage, et al., 2014). huang (2017) found that parental emotional support, teacher support negatively correlated with school bullying based on the data of pisa 2015 china. ma (2016) found that students who are difficult to integrate into the class and have a poor level of peer relationship are vulnerable to school bullying. ji et al. (2012) also found that peer relationship during children’s late childhood has a positive predictive effect on bullying attacks. children with weak skills on social interactions are vulnerable to being marginalized and being bullied in their peer group (faris et al., 2014). therefore, we believe that the three above-mentioned interpersonal relationships have an impact on school bullying in middle school students. in addition, related studies have found that children’s prosocial behavior is related to their level of interpersonal relationships that can significantly improve the peer acceptance level (ferguson et al., 2012). therefore, good interpersonal relationship can make it easier to succeed in academic and less likely to be bullied. based on this, we hereby proposed the following research hypotheses to be tested in middle school students: hypothesis 1: the better the parent-child relationship, the lower the probability of school bullying. hypothesis 2: the better the peer relationship, the lower the probability of school bullying. hypothesis 3: the better the teacher-student relationship, the lower the probability of school bullying. hypothesis 4: the higher prosocial behaviors, the lower probability of being bullied on campus. individual characteristics of students who suffer from school bullying lifestyle theory introduced by hindelang in 1978 said some of the behaviors or life characteristics of the individual will increase the likelihood of being violated (zhang et al., 2016). accordingly, students’ characteristics and behaviors will have an impact on the incidence of bullying. studies have found that boys are more likely to be bullied than girls (craig et al., 2009; elgar et al, 2013). huang (2017) found that the proportion of boys who suffer from various types of school bullying is greater than that of girls; children with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to be subject to discrimination and ridicule; the influence of gender and family socioeconomic status (ses) on the school bullying cannot be ignored. therefore, our study takes these two factors as control variables. hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 175 there is little research on the difference of school bullying between urban and rural students. we only found two chinese empirical studies currently by huang and colleagues. they found that school bullying does not significantly differ between urban and rural schools. the variable urban-rural (ur) is not significant for students who often suffer from school bullying (huang, 2017; huang et al., 2018). however, these two studies did not estimate the effect of ur variable on students’ suffering from different types of school bullying. our study will further examine the difference and influencing factors of urban and rural middle school students who suffer from different types of school bullying. therefore, we proposed the following assumption: hypothesis 5: whether students coming from urban middle school have no significant predictive effect on suffering from school bullying. related to the variable ur, teng et al. (2018) also found that boys whose parents work outside are more seriously bullied based on a survey of more than 100,000 elementary and middle school students across china. some researchers believe that rural left-behind children, urban migrant children and children from single-parent families may be vulnerable to school bullying due to the indifference of family relationships or their parents’ inability to give them enough care and love for work reasons (zhou, 2017). in addition, some studies have found that bullied students usually have lower levels of self-esteem, which affects the probability of bullying (malecki et al., 2015; gu et al., 2003). ma (2016) believed that students with poor academic performance may be ridiculed by teachers because they are not valued by teachers, and may be subject to discrimination and bullying by classmates. lei et al. (2004) also found that students’ academic performance is negatively correlated with school bullying, i.e. the better their academic performance, the lower the probability they will suffer from school bullying. in sum, although some researchers believe that whether students are migrant or left-behind, whether they are from single-parent families, their self-esteem and other personality traits and academic achievements may affect their possibility of being bullied at school. however, there is still a lack of empirical research with systematic design from the perspective of individual characteristics of students. in addition, the analysis of the difference between urban and rural middle school students regarding the influence factors of suffering from different types of school bullying still needs to be further explored. therefore, our study will conduct an empirical study on various factors that may affect school bullying on the individual level of the student, in order to explore the key factors affecting the various types of school bullying. the previous studies, especially chinese research on school bullying, were mostly based on theoretical analysis. the number of empirical studies using quantitative methods is limited, and the sample size and sample representativeness of such studies were debatable. relevant conclusions require further testing from high-quality research using large-scale random sample. in addition, many international studies have begun to pay attention to whether the same variable has different effects on different types of school bullying. as studies have found that girls are more vulnerable to relationship bullying and verbal bullying (veenstra et al., 2005), while boys are more likely to be physically bullied (peets et al., 2006). in china, such kind of research is relatively lackhu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 176 ing, it is important to know that a more detailed study of the impact of the same variable on different types of school bullying will help to achieve the goal of accurately preventing and controlling bullying in china. based on this, our study will use a large-scale random sampling survey data called regional education quality and health examination organized by national innovation center on assessment of basic education quality in 2014 to estimate the effect of whether the middle school students are from urban schools, whether they are migrant children, left-behind children, and whether they are from single-parent families and their academic performance, personality quality, interpersonal relationship, prosocial behavior and other variables to suffering from different types of school bullying and the heterogeneity of urban and rural middle school students, and test whether there is a significant difference with the effect of the same variable on different types of school bullying. it should be pointed out that our study uses the large-scale middle school students’ survey data to compare the difference in school bullying between urban and rural middle school students. at the same time, it also provides empirical data for the problem of migrant, left-behind, single-parent children’s school bullying. in the choice of methods, to overcome the limitations of ordinary least square (ols), the seemly unrelated regression model was used to estimate the effects of various influencing factors. of course, due to the limitations of database design, the definition of migrant and left-behind children is not restricted with academic definitions that may affect the accuracy of results to some extent. in addition, this study has not made a quantitative causal analysis of school bullying. however, we still provided a relatively reliable conclusion for exploring the factors affecting school bullying at the individual level and the precise prevention and control of school bullying. methods our data come from a project called regional education quality and health examination organized by national innovation center on assessment of basic education quality in 2014. the project implemented full surveys in ximeng, zhengzhou and futian, and implemented three-stage pps tests in zhejiang, zhuzhou, luoyang, shenzhen, and shijiazhuang, china. specifically, in the first phase, the stratified pps method is used to select counties and districts. in the second phase, the stratified pps method is used to select schools. the third phase uses random equidistant sampling to select students. in the test, ninth grade students participated in language, mathematics, english, science, and humanities tests 2 and filled in relevant questionnaires such as mental health, moral behavior and influencing factors. a total of 178,606 ninth grade students participated in the survey, including 94,525 boys, accounting for 52.92%, with 5.48% higher than girls. the students in the city, county, and rural areas accounted for 67.64%, 24.73%, and 7.63%, respectively. the proportion of students enrolled in rural schools is relatively low, which may be related to the adjustment of the layout of rural middle schools, the gradual decline of the number of rural middle school, and the entry of many rural stuhu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 177 dents into urban middle schools in the context of urbanization in china to a certain extent. based on existing literature (fu et al., 2013; malecki et al., 2015; huang, 2017; chen et al., 2017), we mainly examined the influence of academic achievement, family characteristics, personality quality, interpersonal relationship, prosocial behavior and other variables on school bullying. it is proposed that the use the following econometric model to explore the key factors affecting middle school students’ bullying: the dependent variables in the model, bully are all kinds of school bullying, including relational bullying, verbal bullying, and physical bullying. the bullying/victim questionnaire compiled by olweus is recognized as a good measurement tool. chinese scholar wenxin zhang translated and revised olweus’s questionnaire. the project, regional education quality and health examination, adapted wenxin zhang’s revised bullying questionnaire to measure the frequency of students suffering from verbal bullying, relational bullying and physical bullying at school. relational bullying includes two items: “rejected by people” and “being swearing in the back”. verbal bullying includes two items: “being teased” and “being threatened”. physical bullying includes three items: “being deliberately attacked, kicked, pushed, or bumped”, “own things are intentionally damaged”, and “being robbed or extorted property”. compared with the related items in pisa, the project of regional education quality and health examination added the item “being robbed or extorted property” to the measurement of school bullying. after internal consistency analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, we found that the reliability and validity index of the school bullying scale is good, which meets the quality requirements of the measurement tool for the scale. the description of the independent variables in the model is shown in table 1. among them, the variables, selfesteem, peer, teastu, parentchild, prosocial all involve corresponding scales: self-esteem refers to a positive or negative attitude of an individual as an independent person. this attitude is an overall emotional evaluation of one’s own value, strengths and importance. it is an important component of self-experience. regarding the measurement of self-esteem, the early self-esteem scale compiled by rosenberg was widely used. yifu yu and xin yu (1993) translated and revised this scale into chinese version in 1993. the project of regional education quality and health examination further revised the chinese version of the self-esteem scale. the final scale includes “i feel that i am a valuable person, at least on the same level as others”, “i feel that i have many good qualities”, “in the final analysis, i tend to feel that i am a loser”, “i can do things well like most people.” “i don’t think i have a lot of pride.” “i have a positive attitude toward myself.” “overall, i am satisfied with myself.” “i hope i can win more hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 178 respect for myself”, “i often feel that i am useless”, “i always think that i have nothing” these 10 items, using “completely inconsistent, inconsistent, more consistent, and fully consistent” four-level scoring. parent-child relationship refers to the interaction between parents and children. the china children and adolescents psychological development survey project team has revised and adapted the network of relationships inventory (nri) scale compiled by furman & buhrmester in 1992 to form a parent-child relationship scale with 8 dimensions and 23 items and the reliability and validity of the scale is good. considering table 1. the descriptions of variables. type variable descriptions dependent variables relbully mean of the two items of “rejected by people” and “being swearing in the back”, ranging from 1-5. phybully mean of the two items of “being deliberately attacked, kicked, pushed, bumped” and “own things are intentionally damaged”, ranging from 1-5. verbully mean of the two items of “being teased” and “being threatened”, ranging from 1-5. core independent variables learn continuous variable. mean of the standardized language, mathematics, english, science and humanities grades. single categorical variables, 1 means coming from single-parent family; 0 means not coming from single-parent family. migrant according to the item “do you move from rural to other places with your parents or other relatives?”, if the answer is “moving from rural to this city/county” or “moving from other cities/counties to this city/county”, it will be defined as “migrant children”. categorical variables, 1 means migrant children; 0 means not migrant children. leftbehind according to the item “are your parents not working locally for a long time?” and the item of the school’s location, non-urban (rural, county) children at least one of whose parents do not work locally are defined as left-behind children. categorical variables, 1 means left-behind children; 0 means not left-behind children. ur according to the item of the school’s location, 1 means urban; 0 means non-urban (including rural and county). selfesteem 3 continuous variable. all items in the scale are synthesized and standardized with loads as weights. parentchild 3 continuous variable. all items in the scale are synthesized and standardized with loads as weights. peer 3 continuous variable. all items in the scale are synthesized and standardized with loads as weights. teastu 3 continuous variable. all items in the scale are synthesized and standardized with loads as weights. prosocial 3 continuous variable. all items in the scale are synthesized and standardized with loads as weights. control variables gender categorical variables. 1 means male; 0 means female. ses continuous variable. mean of the standardized maximum parental education level, highest parental status and family ownership. hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 179 the length of the questionnaire and the limited time, the project of regional education quality and health examination delete some items on the scale, and finally select the items with higher loads in each dimension to form a scale of 11 items, “do you feel satisfied with your relationship with your parents?”, “are you happy with your parents?”, “will you share your secrets and personal feelings with your parents?” “do you have any disagreements or quarrels with your parents?”, “do you and your parents argue or blame each other?”, “would you be upset when you are together with your parents?” “do parents help you solve problems when you have problems?”, “do parents like or praise what you do?”, “do you and your parents get bored with each other?”, “do your parents love you?”, “do you have some fun together with your parents?”, using “never, occasionally, sometimes, and often” four-level scoring. peer relationship mainly refers to a kind of interpersonal relationship established and developed in the process of communication between individuals of the same age or the similar level of psychological development (zou et al., 1999). the project of regional education quality and health examination revised the chinese version of children’s loneliness scale (cls), reflecting the peer relationship with children’s loneliness. the final scale includes 10 items in total, “i am very happy when i am with my classmates”, “my classmates often bully me”, “i am very satisfied with my relationships with my classmates”, “i often have disputes with my classmates”, “when i need it, i can find friends, “i have many good friends”, “classmates like me very much”, “i feel lonely in my class”, “i can hardly let other children like me”, “i feel that no one cares about me in some activities”, using “completely inconsistent, inconsistent, more consistent, and fully consistent” four-level scoring. the teacher-student relationship mainly refers to the relationship between teachers and students in the school. it is the psychological relationship between teachers and students with emotion, cognition and behavioral communication as the main form of expression. considering the length of the questionnaire and the limited time, the project of regional education quality and health examination revised the teacher-student relationship scale compiled by zhiyong qu. the final scale includes 15 items, “the teacher treats me fairly”, “the teacher is very concerned about me”, “the teacher and i are good friends”, “the teacher cares about every student”, “the teacher allows us to have different opinions”, “the teacher listens to my opinions patiently.”, “the teacher does not ridicule me, does not dig at me. “, “when i make a mistake, the teacher will ask for the reason”, “the teacher does not ask me to accept his or her opinion”, “i admire my teacher very much”, “ the teacher encourages me and praises me.” “i am willing to tell my teacher about what in my heart.” “when i encounter difficulties other than learning, i will think of asking for help from my teacher.” “i am willing to show my strengths in front of the teacher.” “the teacher trusts me very much”, using “completely inconsistent, inconsistent, more consistent, and fully consistent” four-level scoring. prosocial behavior refers to behaviors that bring certain benefits to others. these behaviors can make the relationship between the two parties more harmonious (kou et al., 2007). yasong du, a member of shanghai mental health center revised chinese hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 180 version of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (sdq) compiled by american psychologist goodman r. in 1997. based on this, the project of regional education quality and health examination formed a scale of 1 dimension with 5 items, “i try to be friendly to others”, “i often share things with others (such as food, games, pens, etc.)”, “if someone is hurt, sad or uncomfortable, i am willing to help him or her”, “i will be friendly to people who are younger than me.” small children”, “i often volunteer to help others”, which use “inconsistent, somewhat inconsistent and fully consistent” as the three-level scoring. the scales of school bullying, self-esteem, parent-child relationship, peer relationship, teacher-student relationship, prosocial behavior involved in this study have good reliability and validity. the specific indicators are presented in table 2. results basic situation of school bullying among middle school students as can be seen from figure 1, among all forms of bullying, the frequency of “being robbed or extorted property” occurs at the lowest (6.64%). and for comparing with pisa results, this item was removed from the analysis below. “being teased” occurs most frequently (58.28%), which is different from chen et al.’s research results using pisa data. they found the lowest incidence of school bullying in these four provinces and cities in china was the form of threat of verbal bullying, and the most frequent occurrence is the deliberate destruction of private property (chen et al., 2017). however, our results are basically consistent with the results of the china school bullying survey report issued by the school safety professional committee of the china emergency management association. it said that the incidence of verbal bullying is significantly higher than other bullying behaviors. at least 38.55%, 58.28%, and 43.34% of middle table 2. the results of reliability and validity of scales. scale # of items crobach’s α x 2 df x 2 /df cfi tli rmsea n school bullying 6 0.841 2,325.89 5 1,664.02 0.994 0.982 0.052 170,555 self-esteem 10 0.837 50,419.47 31 1,626.43 0.912 0.872 0.098 170,787 parent-child relationship 11 0.832 57,837.8 38 1,522.05 0.921 0.885 0.094 170,466 peer relationship 10 0.842 37,767.3 30 1,258.91 0.933 0.900 0.086 170,779 teacherstudent relationship 15 0.940 96,787.97 88 1,099.86 0.938 0.925 0.080 170,758 prosocial behavior 5 0.805 1,982.83 5 396.57 0.992 0.984 0.048 170,638 hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 181 figure 1. the proportion of middle school students suffering from various forms of school bullying. school students have suffered physical bullying, verbal bullying and relational bullying, respectively (zhang, 2017). this result was slightly higher than the results of other studies, such as zhou et al. (2017) found that 40.7% of elementary and middle school students in beijing had experience of being called nicknames, and 18.6% of students had experience of being isolated by classmates with a data of 12 high schools, middle schools and elementary schools in beijing. according to a survey conducted by the china youth research center of 5,864 elementary and middle school students in 10 provinces and cities in china, 32.5% of students have suffered from school bullying (liu et al., 2015). by calculating the average frequency of all kinds of school bullying, we found that middle school students have the highest frequency of verbal bullying ( = 1.81, σ = 0.96). the average frequency of suffering from relational bullying is in the second rank ( = 1.70, σ = 1.04). they have the lowest average frequency of physical bullying ( = 1.59, σ = 0.98). the highest average frequency of verbal bullying is consistent with the results of liu et al. (2017). it may be due to the verbal bullying is not easy to be discovered by teachers and parents. once a student uses insulting vocabulary to swear or ridicule classmates, if the student bullied chooses to be silent, it will encourage the bullying behavior; if the student bullied responds to it, it may cause more slick words to bully. hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 182 factors affecting school bullying of middle school students in order to explore which students were more likely to be bullied, we uses seemingly unrelated regression to explore how individual academic performance, interpersonal relationships, prosocial behavior, self-esteem, migrant or left-behind status, and singleparent families influence different types of school bullying in the context of controlling gender and family socioeconomic status. considering the influence of variables such as academic performance, interpersonal relationship, social behavior, and self-esteem on the relational bullying, physical bullying and verbal bullying, there may be some connection between the equations, such as the correlation between the disturbances. in order to improve the estimation efficiency and test whether the variables have different effects on the types of bullying, we adopted seemingly unrelated regression estimation. in addition, considering the correlation between the variables like self-esteem, prosocial behavior and peer relationship, two models are also used in the seemingly unrelated regression estimation: model 1 does not include self-esteem and prosocial behavior variables, and model 2 does not include peer relationship variable. the residual correlation matrix coefficients of the three types of school bullying equations in model 1 are between 0.508 and 661, and the bp test results reject the null hypothesis (h0: the residuals of the equations are independent of each other, p = 0.000). the residual correlation matrix coefficients of the three types of school bullying equations in model 2 are between 0.552 and 688, and the bp test results reject the null hypothesis (h0: the residuals of the equations are independent of each other, p = 0.000). so it is more appropriate to use seemingly unrelated regression estimation in both model 1 and model 2. in terms of interpersonal relationship, all three relationships including parentchild, peer-peer and teacher-student could significantly affect the frequency of suffering from school bullying (see table 3). this conclusion is in line with the theoretical assumptions of the theory and supports the hypotheses 1-3 of this study. through seemingly unrelated regression estimation, we found that the influence of peer relationship and teacher-student relationship on the suffering from different types of school bullying is different, but there was no significant difference between the influences of parentchild relationship on both physical and verbal bullying. in the micro-social structure of the campus field, middle school students only form a small group due to similar behavioral characteristics or spatial proximity. some students suffering from school bullying may be difficult to be recognized and accepted by other students, and are isolated or marginalized in school and class activities. therefore, a good peer relationship can reduce the frequency of various types of school bullying, and the impact of the relational bullying is the largest, followed by verbal bullying. we supposed that the most common occurrence of school bullying is relationship bullying. that is, bullies will first isolate and exclude bullied students, and then cause verbal bullying. in more serious cases, physical bullying will occur. therefore, the absolute value of the effect of peer relationship has the greatest impact on relational bullying in the three types of bullying, and the effect on physical bullying is the minimal. the absolute value of the effect of teacherstudent relationship also has a similar order, that is, the effect of the relational bullying hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 183 is relatively the largest, and the effect of physical bullying is the minimal. in a good parent-child relationship, parents’ full emotional support for their children will make children feel being cared for, gain a sense of security, and have the courage and healthy personality to face problems, thus avoiding suffering from relational bullying, verbal bullying and physical bullying from classmates. as for why parent-child relationship has no significant difference in the effect of physical bullying and verbal bullying, it is likely that the frequency of verbal bullying and physical bullying is relatively low in families with good parent-child relationships, so the effect value is similar. therefore, according to the standardized parent-child relationship score, we define the score greater than 0 as a good parent-child relationship. we found that the average frequency of verbal bullying with good parent-child relationship ( =1.67, σ = 0.88) is significantly lower than the overall average at 0.001 level ( =1.81, σ = 0.96). the average frequency of physical bullying with good parent-child relationship ( =1.45, σ = 0.87) is also significantly lower than the overall average at 0.001 level ( =1.59, σ = 0.98). it can be seen that the average frequency of verbal bullying and physical bullying with good parent-child relationship is relatively low, which confirms our conjecture to some extent. the prosocial behavioral does not have a significant impact on various types of bullying (p > 0.1), which rejects the hypothesis 4. we supposed that the possible reason is that the influence of prosocial behavior on school bullying is indirect. the prosocial behavior may affect the level of interpersonal relationship, which may affect the probability of suffering from school bullying. some studies have found that prosocial behavior may influence peer acceptance (ferguson et al., 2012). the academic performance has almost no impact on various types of school bullying (β = 0. 000, p < 0.01). but the impact of gender on three types of school bullying is significantly different. although boys are more likely to be bullied than girls, whether it is relational bullying, physical bullying or verbal bullying, the difference is more significant in both physical and verbal bullying. this is basically consistent with the existing data (barboza et al., 2009; huang, 2017; zhou et al., 2017). we supposed that due to historical and cultural factors, violence may be appreciated and even worshiped in the male group, such as the ancient colosseum in the western society and the liangshan heroes in china. the male group is more likely to incite and conflict than the female group. therefore, the male student is more likely to be the victim of physical bullying, and the combination of multiple bullying behaviors during the bullying process may also cause the male to be a victim of verbal and relational bullying. the single-parent family status has a significant impact on relational bullying but different in the physical and verbal bullying, of which showed no significance. on the whole, students from single-parent families are more likely to suffer from various types of school bullying. the possible reason is that the middle school students coming from single-parent families are prone to be lonely because of their emotional indifference with one of their parents. they are easily mistaken by their classmates and then suffer from relational bullying. in addition, students from non-single-parent families may be immature on cognitive and emotional development and have low empathy level on others. the peers who are growing in single-parent families are understood as differhu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 184 ent types of groups, which lead to rejection, ridicule, even insults or other bullying behaviors (chan et al., 2015). compared with other types of school bullying, migrant children are more vulnerable to verbal bullying. but left-behind children have almost the same impact on suffering from different types of school bullying. migrant and left-behind children are more vulnerable to various types of bullying, which is basically consistent with the conclusion of zhou et al. (2017). they found that migrant students were more likely to be bullied than local students in beijing. left-behind and migrant children may be excluded to the edge of society due to unfair social and educational system design (zhou et al., 2017). wang (2016) found through qualitative research that left-behind children suffering from school bullying may be relevant to reduced sense of security caused by lack of parental care, a sense of peer attachment and manifestation of autonomy. self-esteem has significant differences in the impact of various types of bullying, and has a greater impact on relational bullying. studies have found that adolescents with low levels of self-esteem are more likely to suffer from school bullying (malecki et al., 2015; gu et al., 2003). we found that the level of self-esteem of middle school students and the frequency of suffering from various types of school bullying showed a u-shaped relationship. the low level of self-esteem may reduce individual’s selfevaluation and self-worth, and make middle school students unable to defend their legitimate rights and even their personal dignity when faced with possible bullying behaviors. instead, they will simply confess and eventually lead to their continuous suffering from bullying. but if the middle school students’ self-esteem or self-evaluation is too high, they may lead to dissatisfaction or over-sensitivity to other people’s evaluation when in interacting with others, thus suffering from more school bullying, especially relational bullying. therefore, it is necessary for middle school students to maintain a moderate level of self-esteem to avoid school bullying. to examine the robustness of seemingly unrelated regression estimation as showed in table 3, we changed the functional form to perform an unrelated biprobit regression. the results are shown in schedule 1. most of the model coefficient results are consistent with the regression results appeared in table 3, except that girls are more likely to suffer from relational bullying than boys. this result is consistent with the results of jing et al. (2009). it can be seen that the coefficient estimation of each model in table 3 are relatively stable. heterogeneity analysis of school bullying among urban and rural middle school students from the simple description of the statistics, compared with rural middle school students ( =1.81, σ = 0.98), urban students ( =1.78, σ = 1.02) suffered significantly lower frequency of verbal bullying. however, urban students ( =1.71, σ = 1.10) were more significantly likely to suffer from relational bullying (t = -4. 146, p < 0.01) than rural students ( =1.68, σ = 1.02). there was no significant difference in the frequency of physical bullying among urban and rural students (t = -1.139, p > 0.1). in order to explore the difference in the impact on school bullying among urban and rural students, hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 185 table 3. the results of seemingly unrelated regression estimation of middle school students’ school bullying influence factors. rb pb vb rb v.s. pb rb v.s. vb pb v.s. vb (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) gender 0.039± 0.006‡ 0.079± 0.006‡ 0.325± 0.005‡ 0.35± 0.006‡ 0.292± 0.005‡ 0.323± 0.006‡ 2807.9‡ 2313.5‡ 2258.4‡ 1948.2‡ 57.5‡ 36.1‡ ses 0.05± 0.004‡ 0.034± 0.004‡ 0.04± 0.004‡ 0.03± 0.004‡ 0.011± 0.003‡ 0.001± 0.004 9.03‡ 1.54 127.24‡ 85.64‡ 102.32‡ 97.74‡ learn 0.0‡ 0.0‡ 0.0‡ 0.0‡ 0.0‡ 0.0‡ 256.8‡ 303.4‡ 74.0‡ 83.3‡ 88.0‡ 112.3‡ parent child -0.083± 0.003‡ -0.154± 0.003‡ -0.064± 0.003‡ -0.113± 0.003‡ -0.062± 0.003‡ -0.114± 0.003‡ 36.3‡ 165.0‡ 48.4‡ 169.2‡ 0.9 0.04 peer -0.415± 0.003‡ -0.279± 0.003‡ -0.311± 0.003‡ 2054.8‡ 1246.7‡ 169.8‡ teastu -0.027± 0.003‡ -0.110± 0.004‡ -0.027± 0.003‡ -0.085± 0.003‡ -0.034± 0.003‡ -0.096± 0.003‡ 0.05 60.7‡ 6.0† 21.1‡ 9.9‡ 16.6‡ selfesteem -0.168± 0.005‡ -0.103± 0.004‡ -0.134± 0.004‡ 233.4‡ 66.8‡ 81.7‡ selfesteem2 0.009± 0.0‡ 0.006± 0.0‡ 0.008± 0.0‡ 113.1‡ 30.4‡ 44.9‡ prosocial -0.005± 0.003 -0.003± 0.003 -0.001± 0.003 0.6 2.4 0.8 single 0.058± 0.012‡ 0.078± 0.013‡ 0.029± 0.012† 0.048± 0.012‡ 0.016± 0.011 0.035± 0.012‡ 5.7† 6.0† 13.4‡ 12.9‡ 2.1 1.6 migrant 0.009± 0.006 0.034± 0.006‡ 0.022± 0.006‡ 0.04± 0.006‡ 0.033± 0.006‡ 0.051± 0.006‡ 4.2† 1.1 17.6‡ 9.2‡ 5.4† 5.1† leftbehind 0.027± 0.016* 0.032± 0.018* 0.051± 0.016‡ 0.05± 0.017‡ 0.058± 0.015‡ 0.057± 0.017‡ 2.7 1.8 3.9† 2.6 0.3 0.3 constant 1.824± 0.022‡ 1.714± 0.025‡ 1.894± 0.021‡ 1.843± 0.023‡ 1.971± 0.021‡ 1.885± 0.023‡ r2 0.211 0.093 0.160 0.101 0.181 0.106 rmse 0.903 0.973 0.880 0.912 0.854 0.894 chi2 29218.2‡ 10627.4‡ 20906.0‡ 11674.7‡ 24120.5‡ 12291.8‡ rb: relational bullying; pb: physical bullying; vb: verbal bullying on the left side of the table is the influence coefficient of variables on different types of school bullying and the robust standard error is in parentheses. the right side of the table shows the chi-square statistic of whether the coefficients of the same variable are equal on the two equations when the dependent variable is any two different types of school bullying. *p<0.1, † p<0.05, ‡ p<0.01. data were mean ± sem. we add urban and rural variable ur and their interaction variables with intervening variables like peer relationship, parent-child relationship, teacher-student relationship, prosocial behavior based on the original model. meanwhile, considering the correlation between ur and variables like the migrant or left-behind children, we no longer include the variables like migrant or left-behind children in the model. similarly, considering the high correlation between self-esteem, prosocial behavior and peer relationships, two models are also used in the process of seemingly unrelated regression estimation. model 1 does not include variables like self-esteem, prosocial behavior and the interaction term between ur and prosocial behavior. model 2 does not include the peer relationship and its interaction with ur. the residual correlation matrix coefficients of the three types of school bullying equations in model 1 are between 0.540 and 703, and the bp test results reject the null hypothesis (h0: the residuals of the equations are independent of each other, p = 0. 000). the residual correlation matrix coefficients of the three types of school bullying equations in model 2 are between 0.584 and 728, and the hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 186 schedule 1. the unrelated biprobit regression results of whether middle school students suffering from school bullying. model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 model 5 model 6 rb pb rb pb rb vb rb vb pb vb pb vb gender -0.12± 0.008 ‡ 0.412± 0.008‡ -0.086± 0.008‡ 0.42± 0.008‡ -0.122± 0.008‡ 0.299± 0.008‡ -0.087± 0.008‡ 0.314± 0.008‡ 0.409± 0.008‡ 0.302± 0.008‡ 0.417± 0.008‡ 0.317± 0.008‡ ses 0.01± 0.005† 0.015± 0.005‡ -0.003± 0.005 0.006± 0.005 0.011± 0.005† -0.059± 0.005‡ -0.003± 0.005 -0.067± 0.005‡ 0.013± 0.005† -0.058± 0.005‡ 0.003± 0.005 -0.066± 0.005‡ learn 0.0 0.0‡ 0.0* 0.0‡ 0.0 0.0‡ 0.0* 0.0‡ 0.0‡ 0.0‡ 0.0‡ 0.0‡ parentchild -0.111± 0.005‡ -0.089± 0.005‡ -0.165± 0.005‡ -0.137± 0.005‡ -0.112± 0.005‡ -0.067± 0.005‡ -0.165± 0.005‡ -0.109± 0.005‡ -0.09± 0.005‡ -0.067± 0.005‡ -0.137± 0.005‡ -0.110± 0.005‡ peer -0.407± 0.005‡ -0.329± 0.005‡ -0.407± 0.005‡ -0.345± 0 .005‡ -0.33± 0.005‡ -0.345± 0.005‡ teastu -0.098± 0.005‡ -0.078± 0.005‡ -0.159± 0.005‡ -0.128± 0.005‡ -0.100± 0.005‡ -0.087± 0.005‡ -0.16± 0.005‡ -0.135± 0.005‡ -0.080± 0.005‡ -0.086± 0.005‡ -0.130± 0.005‡ -0.135± 0.005‡ selfesteem -0.152± 0.006‡ -0.114± 0.006‡ -0.153± 0.006‡ -0.156± 0.006‡ -0.115± 0.006‡ -0.155± 0.006‡ selfesteem2 0.009± 0.0‡ 0.007± 0.0‡ 0.009± 0.0‡ 0.009± 0.0‡ 0.007± 0.0‡ 0.009± 0.0‡ prosocial -0.049± 0.005‡ -0.047± 0.005‡ -0.05± 0.005‡ -0.047± 0.005‡ -0.048± 0.005‡ -0.047± 0.005‡ single 0.043± 0.017† 0.039± 0.017† 0.05± 0.017‡ 0.053± 0.018‡ 0.044± 0.017† 0.006± 0.017 0.05± 0.017‡ 0.026± 0.018 0.040± 0.017† 0.004± 0.017 0.054± 0.018‡ 0.026± 0.018 migrant 0.006± 0.008 0.022± 0.008‡ 0.031± 0.008‡ 0.043± 0.009‡ 0.007± 0.008 0.033± 0.008‡ 0.031± 0.008‡ 0.05± 0.009‡ 0.021± 0.008† 0.034± 0.008‡ 0.041± 0.009‡ 0.051± 0.009‡ leftbehind 0.099± 0.023‡ 0.07± 0.023‡ 0.099± 0.024‡ 0.054± 0.024† 0.099± 0.023‡ 0.06± 0.024† 0.099± 0.024‡ 0.046± 0.024* 0.072± 0.023‡ 0.06± 0.032† 0.054± 0.024† 0.047± 0.024* constant -0.013± 0.032 0.059± 0.032* -0.113± 0.032‡ -0.002± 0.033 -0.017± 0.032 0.334± 0.032‡ -0.117± 0.032‡ 0.2± 0.033‡ 0.062± 0.032* 0.349± 0.032‡ -0.001± 0.033 0.209± 0.033‡ sample size 111,065 104,853 111,065 104,853 111,065 104,853 wald chi2 21891.11‡ 13234.82‡ 19626.48‡ 11109.46‡ 17169.09‡ 10734.55‡ rb: relational bullying; pb: physical bullying; vb: verbal bullying *p<0.1, † p<0.05, ‡ p<0.01. data were mean ± sem. bp test results reject the null hypothesis (h0: the residuals of the equations are independent of each other, p = 0. 000). so it is more appropriate to use seemingly unrelated regression estimation in both model 1 and model 2. table 4 shows the influence of gender, ses, learn, selfesteem, peer, teastu, parentchild on suffering from different types of school bullying among middle school students, which is basically the same as in the table 3. however, the prosocial has a significant negative impact on suffering from verbal bullying with the significance level of 0.1 (β = -0.014, p < 0.1). that is, the higher the level of prosocial behavior of middle school students, the lower the probability of suffering from verbal bullying that supporting the hypothesis 4 to some extent. in addition, significant difference was observed in the impact of single-parent status on the types of school bullying. middle school students from single-parent families are more likely to suffer from various types of school bullying. we paid particular attention to the impact of the variable ur and its interaction with other variables on various types of school bullying among middle school students and whether such influences are significant are presented in table 4. the results showed that the variable ur only had predictive effects on the verbal bullying at the hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 187 table 4. heterogeneity analysis results of school bullying influence factors among urban and rural middle school students. rb pb vb rb v.s. pb rb v.s. vb pb v.s. vb (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) gender 0.062± 0.008‡ 0.097± 0.009‡ 0.355± 0.008‡ 0.380± 0.008‡ 0.309± 0.008‡ 0.337± 0.008‡ 1479.5‡ 1288.7‡ 1112.5‡ 991.0‡ 59.2‡ 48.0‡ ses 0.044± 0.005‡ 0.028± 0.006‡ 0.04± 0.005‡ 0.03± 0.006‡ 0.018± 0.005‡ 0.007± 0.005 0.47 0.06 26.8‡ 17.1‡ 30.6‡ 29.7‡ learn -0.0± 0.0‡ -0.0± 0.0‡ -0.0± 0.0‡ -0.0± 0.0‡ -0.0± 0.0‡ -0.0± 0.0‡ 83.0‡ 91.9‡ 34.3‡ 33.0‡ 18.9‡ 26.6‡ parentchild -0.086± 0.008‡ -0.161± 0.009‡ -0.063± 0.008‡ -0.122± 0.008‡ -0.053± 0.008‡ -0.115± 0.008‡ 8.8‡ 23.9‡ 18.9‡ 36.1‡ 2.6 1.4 peer -0.405± 0.008‡ -0.291± 0.008‡ -0.322± 0.008‡ 220.7‡ 124.9‡ 25.8‡ teastu -0.006± 0.008 -0.091± 0.009‡ -0.012± 0.003 -0.074± 0.009‡ -0.022± 0.008† -0.085± 0.008‡ 0.7 4.5† 4.5† 0.6 2.5 3.2* selfesteem -0.161± 0.006‡ -0.100± 0.006‡ -0.125± 0.006‡ 111.9‡ 42.3‡ 30.2‡ selfesteem2 0.009± 0.001‡ 0.006± 0.001‡ 0.008± 0.000‡ 49.0‡ 13.6‡ 19.4‡ prosocial -0.013± 0.008 -0.010± 0.008 -0.014± 0.008* 0.14 0.03 0.45 single 0.077± 0.017‡ 0.099± 0.019‡ 0.051± 0.017† 0.075± 0.018‡ 0.053± 0.016† 0.076± 0.017‡ 2.43 2.06 2.20 2.13 0.02 0.00 ur 0.004± 0.009 0.006± 0.010 -0.013± 0.009 -0.014± 0.009 -0.053± 0.008‡ -0.051± 0.009‡ 4.3† 5.2† 49.8‡ 46.8‡ 37.0‡ 31.2‡ ur×parent child 0.012± 0.010 0.005± 0.010 -0.001± 0.010 -0.002± 0.010 -0.007± 0.009 -0.007± 0.010 1.99 0.58 4.49† 1.69 0.68 0.41 ur×peer -0.026± 0.010† -0.009± 0.010 -0.001± 0.009 3.06* 7.47‡ 1.34 ur×teastu -0.011± .010 -0.007± 0.011 0.003± 0.010 0.008± 0.010 0.002± 0.009 0.010± 0.010 2.42 2.55 2.36 3.37* 0.01 0.06 ur×prosocial 0.018± 0.010* 0.013± 0.010 0.014± 0.009 0.33 0.16 0.06 constant 1.989± 0.032‡ 1.939± 0.036‡ 2.029± 0.032‡ 2.016± 0.034‡ 2.151± 0.031‡ 2.109± 0.033‡ r2 0.214 0.092 0.169 0.104 0.186 0.106 rmse 0.923 0.994 0.914 0.951 0.879 0.922 chi2 14941.11‡ 5377.88‡ 11166.85‡ 6152.90‡ 12555.25‡ 6300.59‡ rb: relational bullying; pb: physical bullying; vb: verbal bullying on the left side of the table is the influence coefficient of variables on different types of school bullying and the robust standard error is in parentheses. the right side of the table shows the chi-square statistic of whether the coefficients of the same variable are equal on the two equations when the dependent variable is any two different types of school bullying. *p<0.1, †p<0.05, ‡p<0.01. data were mean ± sem. significance level of 0.01 (β = -0.05, p < 0.01), which had no significant effect on the physical and relational bullying. in other words, rural students are more likely to suffer from verbal bullying than urban students. this may be related to the small size of rural schools and the influence of rural culture. rural students are more familiar with each other and between families. they are also more likely to be exposed to impolite language in rural cultures. it is easy to make fun of classmates and teasing classmates. in addition, the interaction between ur and peer relationship (β = -0.026, p < 0.05) can significantly affect the frequency of relational bullying, but it has no significant effect on physical and verbal bullying. to a certain extent, compared with rural middle school students, peer influence has a greater impact on relational bullying among urban students. therefore, we should pay attention to the phenomenon of verbal bullying among hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 188 rural students, and also pay attention to guiding urban students to build a harmonious peer relationship. conclusions and suggestions the governance path of school bullying needs to be dealt with by the after-thought crisis to early intervention and prevention. based on the previous analysis, the main conclusions and recommendations of this study are as follows: first, chinese middle school students have suffering from the highest frequency of verbal bullying, followed by relational and physical bullying. compared with the visible physical bullying, teachers and parents may hardly hear verbal bullying and hardly feel relational bullying among students. and both are more difficult to be perceived and monitored by educators and parents, but they can produce long-term harm to students’ bodies and minds. therefore, on the one hand, schools can monitor through the installation of “electronic eyes” in the public domain of the campus. on the other hand, teachers should pay attention to the daily communication with students and learn from the information reflected by the students whether anyone in the class suffering from relational or verbal bullying, so that the facts can be confirmed early and can take necessary preventive measures. for example, psychological and behavioral interventions can be carried out in students who have already committed bullying, and bullying behaviors should be interrupted in time to avoid more harm to the students that will influence their future personality, psychological and prosocial behavior. at the same time, it is necessary to protect the bullied and give necessary psychological counseling to prevent the bullied from psychological shadow. second, boys are more likely to suffer from school bullying than girls, and the difference between boys and girls in school bullying are more manifested in physical and verbal bullying. as boys are more prone to incitement and conflict, parents and teachers should pay more attention to the daily performance and behaviors. for parents of boys, they should pay more attention to the abnormal behaviors, such as homelessness, sleepy nightmares and reluctance to attend class reunions etc. if boys have such behaviors, parents should communicate with them in time to see if they are being bullied at school. teachers should strengthen the education of rule awareness for students, especially boys. we can learn from the olweus bullying prevention program (obpp) (lazarus et al., 2012) to clearly define bullying behavior and clearly indicate to them which behaviors are not allowed. meanwhile, teachers should try to cultivate students to form a harmonious peer relationship, and prevent small contradictions or flights among students especially the boys from developing into school bullying. third, students from rural area, from single-parent families, or with migrant or left-behind status are more vulnerable to suffering from different types of bullying. especially those coming from single-parent families are more likely to suffer from relational bullying. rural and migrant children are more vulnerable to verbal bullying. but left-behind students have almost suffered the same from different types of school bullying. therefore, for middle school students coming from these four high-risk families, hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 189 schools should establish care archives as soon as possible. teachers should focus on them to ensure their safety during school time. in addition, schools and families should strengthen anti-school bullying cooperation, popularize both bullying and anti-bullying knowledge through parent meetings, hand out anti-school bullying manuals to parents and strengthen communication between parents and teachers, particularly the head teachers need to keep in touch with parents of above-mentioned risk families and encourage them to keep intimate contact with their children through telephone and internet etc., and to give their children more care and help them improve their social skills, and to restore and rebuild self-esteem, confidence and trust. fourth, the relationship between the level of self-esteem and the frequency of different types of school bullying is u-shaped, and this effect is more significant in relational bullying. therefore, in order to establish a good relationship between middle school students and their peers, and avoid suffering from relational bullying, it is necessary to maintain a moderate level of self-esteem. students with low level of self-esteem are too negative or even inferior to their own estimation. schools and teachers should encourage them to actively participate in group activities, participate in interpersonal relationship and show themselves boldly through group or individual counseling. parents should also evaluate children correctly, trust them fully and encourage them to express themselves in the crowd to help them to build up confidence. for those whose self-esteem level is too high or even conceited, schools should pay attention to fostering their sense of cooperation and help such students treat other students with modesty and sincerity. learning to accept and respect others should be encouraged to be the acceptable and recognizable deeds. fifth, the parent-child, peer-peer and teacher-student relationships will significantly affect the frequency of suffering from school bullying among middle school students, and the peer relationship has a greater impact on urban students suffering from relational bullying. therefore, it is necessary to give more care and help to students who are relatively “weak” in social communication. parents should enhance communication with their children, promptly ask their children about the interpersonal relationship at school and listen to the information disclosed by children during the complaining process. and they should communicate with school teachers in time, understand if the children are bullied at school and find bullying behaviors as early as possible to stop them. in addition, parents can guide their children to learn how to protect themselves and take appropriate self-defense measures, such as teaching children to resist and defend their dignity and rights. at the same time, teachers should give each student support and care fairly and can also guide students, especially those from urban area, to establish a peer support system to fight against school bullying and form an anti-bullying class atmosphere. for instance, drawing from the finnish school anti-bullying program, through anti-bullying courses and empathy training with the theme of interpersonal relationship and group pressure, we can strengthen students’ anti-bullying attitude, increase their sympathy for vulnerable groups and take advantage of the role of bystanders 4 to reduce incidence of school bullying. hu & li. influence factors of school bullying in chinese middle school vol.2, no. 1, 2019 190 notes 1. relational bullying is mainly caused by people who bully others manipulates the interpersonal relationship to make the victim be isolated and feel not recognized by the group or feel excluded. verbal bullying means that people bully others by verbal intimidation, scolding, humiliation, ridiculing or degrading, which produce psychological harm to the bullied. although the wound is not visible to the naked eye, sometimes the psychological damage caused by it is more serious than physical injuries. in addition, verbal bullying behavior is usually accompanied by relational bullying, and both initiate physical bullying. physical bullying refers to physical violence, looting or being stolen, or forced to do things that you do not want to do. it is the most easily identifiable form in the clinic and is one of the forms that educators concern the most. 2. all the testing tools of the project called regional assessment of education quality (raeq) were compiled by chinese national subject education experts organized by collaborative innovation center of assessment toward basic education quality, beijing normal university. the quality of the test tools meets the measurement requirements of large-scale testing. 3. the load of each item in the self-esteem scale is 0.678, 0.679, 0.615, 0.662, 0.488, 0.708, 0.712, 0.451, 0.686, and 0.679. the load of each item in the parent-child relationship scale is 0.79, 0.819, 0.6, 0.349, 0.411, 0.52, 0.635, 0.668, 0.521, 0.647, and 0.747. the load of each item in the peer relationship scale is 0.635, 0.509, 0.702, 0.494, 0.684, 0.726, 0.657, 0.718, 0.661, and 0.668. the load of each item in the teacher-student relationship scale is 0.743, 0.753, 0.763, 0.783, 0.728, 0.81, 0.69, 0.726, 0.684, 0.79, 0.815, 0.692, 0.693, 0.649, and 0.785. the load of each item in the pro-social behavior scale is 0.699, 0.756, 0.812, 0.742, and 0.741. 4. the role of bystanders means that once the bullying takes place, bystanders’ silence, acquiescence, approval and participation in bullying will encourage the bullying behaviors. but if the bystanders object and stop the bullying behaviors, it will affect the progress of the bullying to a certain extent. when school bullying occurs, the companions of the bully are usually present. if they can play a role of 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(1999) research on adolescents’ communication goals and peer relationships. psychological development and education, 2:2-7. received: 18 april 2019 revised: 23 april 2019 accepted: 09 may 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in j capital normal univ (soc sci ed) 2018; 6:171-185. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 胡咏梅, 李佳哲. 谁在受欺凌? — 中学生校园欺凌影响因素研究. 首都师范大学学报 (社会 科学版) 2018; 6:171-185. article-jiazheli-bece_title_31may2019 article-jiazheli-maintext-bece_31may2019 the correlation of expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance: based on the empirical study in western poor rural china lili li, hongyu guan, scott rozelle shaanxi normal university, xi’an, shaanxi 710119, china stanford university, stanford, ca 94305-6055, usa abstract. as a means to alleviate poverty, the chinese government has been investing in education by increasing financial resources for schools. however, scholarship on the relationship between school resources and student academic performance has not reached a consensus. this study examines the relationship between school-level expenditures, a key aspect of school resources, and student academic performance. using data collected in 94 rural primary school in designated poverty areas of western rural china, the empirical study found that school expenditures on students and teachers account for only 12% of total expenditures, while expenditures on school administration is as high as 72%. expenditures on students and teachers (software) are positively correlated with student academic performance. however, expenditures on school administration (hardware) were negatively correlated with academic performance. these findings have strong implications for the structure of school spending and rural education. best evid chin edu 2019; 2(1):145-155. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1031 keywords: expenditure in school level; academic performance; hardware; software; rural correspondence to: lili li, center for experimental economics in education, shaanxi normal university, xi’an, shaanxi 710119, china. email: lilili2996113@126.com. about the author: hongyu guan, center for experimental economics in education, shaanxi normal university, xi’an, shaanxi 710119, china. email: hongyuguan0621@gmail.com. scott rozelle, the freeman spogli institute for international studies, stanford university, stanford, ca 943056055, usa. email: rozelle@stanford.edu. funding: higher education discipline innovation and enlightenment program (no. b16031); outstanding doctoral dissertation supported project of shaanxi normal university (no. x2015yb08). conflict of interests: none. li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 146 research background and problem ince the 18th national congress of the communist party of china (cpc), the party central committee, with general secretary jinping xi as the core, made a series of profound expositions and comprehensive deployment of poverty alleviation and development work, and clearly defined poverty-alleviation via education as an important way to block the transmission of poverty from generation to generation. with the implementation of a series of policies on poverty-alleviation via education, enormous achievements have been made in education investment paired with an increasing growth of the investment in government finance, school and society (china education daily, 2017). as the key training target for education poverty alleviation and compulsory education, the educational resources and investment obtained in rural povertystricken areas was an achievement of breakthrough growth. according to the statistics, during the period of the 12th five-year plan, 90% of the central government educational funds for transfer payment were used in the central and western regions, part of which was mainly used in poor rural areas (zhu, 2016). although the funds invested in schools in poor rural areas was continued to increase, many scholars have shown that there is an imbalance in the allocation of educational resources. when the investment is uneven, the government obviously focuses on the proportion of investment in hardware. a lot of work has been done in transforming schools with weak strengths and narrowing the gaps in school hardware facilities, but not enough attention has been paid to the construction of “software” in schools (cheng, 2015). in the process of education poverty alleviation and development, although many schools in poverty-stricken areas have been built into “the most beautiful buildings in the rural region”, the quality of education is difficult to improve; there are still serious problems in the allocation of educational resources in poverty-stricken areas (li and xing, 2018). in fact, the scholarship has paid attention to the educational investment on school level and has identified its relationship with academic performance. the earliest research can be traced back to james coleman’s coleman report in 1966, which reportedly has little to do with school resources and students’ academic performance (coleman et al., 1966). this conclusion has aroused widespread controversy, leading many scholars to devote themselves to study the impact of school resource allocation on students’ academic performance. three major factors of school expenditure (including school expenditure, and the scale of teachers and classes) are considered as important parts of education investment (hanushek, 2002). studies of the relationship between school expenditures and students’ achievements has also presented an inconsistent conclusion: increasing educational facilities was not enough to improve students’ academic performance demonstrated by the research results of angrist and lavy in 1999; but dewey et al. (2000) found that the increase of school expenditures can do improve students’ academic performance. why did research on the relationship between school expenditure and academic performance not reach a consistent conclusion? the reasons are as follows: first, differs li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 147 ent scholars use different variables, and the second, statistical methods are also diverse. in addition, students’ academic performance may be affected by factors such as family background, in addition to the influence of school resource allocation. if ignore these variables, the final result will be biased. at the same time, few people have conducted research and analysis on the relationship between different aspects of school expenditure and students’ academic performance. the goal of this paper is to analyze the expenditure on school level and to explore the relationship between different aspects of school expenditure and students’ academic performance. the rest of this paper is organized as follows. the next section of the paper describes our sample selection, data, and empirical methods. the third section presents the results. the final section discusses and concludes. method sampling the data were collected from the project “survey on basic situation of primary schools in poor rural areas” conducted by the center for experimental economics in education of shaanxi normal university. the project was carried out in may, 2015, and implemented among the rural schools in the four provinces of q, n, g and s in northwest china. stratified random sampling is used to select a total of 94 rural schools among 38 poverty-stricken counties of four provinces. there are 46 schools from g province, 16 from n, 14 from q and 18 from s. a total of 6,497 students are randomly selected from 1-2 classes in the fourth and fifth grades of each school. in the survey, half of the students in each class are randomly selected to take standardized math test, and the other half take standardized chinese test. the distribution of the sample in each province is shown in table 1. the sample size was large and the coverage was wide. therefore, the data obtained were representative. table 1. distribution of study sample. # of schools # of students # of students taking chinese test # of students taking math test total 94 6,497 3,278 3,219 province g 46 2,366 1,204 1,162 n 16 1,955 977 978 q 14 1,230 622 608 s 18 946 475 471 gender male 3,295 1,642 1,653 female 3,202 1,636 1,566 grade 4th grade 3,136 1,587 1,549 5th grade 3,361 1,691 1,670 data source: authors’ survey (2015) li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 148 data collection the survey was consisted of three parts: the expenditures at school level; basic information of schools, teachers, students, and parents; students’ mathematics and chinese standardization tests. this corresponds to the independent variables, control variables and dependent variables in this study, which are described in three parts as follows. expenditures at school level (independent variable) in the questionnaire of schools’ basic information, we interviewed the principals towards 10 expenditure items at school level, including: public utilities expenditure, office supplies expenditure, teaching supplies expenditure, teacher welfare expenditure, teacher training expenditure and canteen worker salary expenditure, non-teacher staff salary expenditure, student learning materials expenditure, student scholarship expenditure and the expenditure on school maintenance. on the basis of the expenditure items, we divided it into four aspects: “expenditure on students”, “expenditure on teachers”, “expenditure on schools (administrative affairs)” and “other expenditure”. among them, “student learning material expenditure” and “student scholarship expenditure” are classified as “expenditure on students”; “expenditure on teacher training” and “expenditure on teacher welfare” are categorized as expenditure on teachers; “public utilities expenditure” “office supplies expenditure” “school maintenance expenditure” and “teaching supplies expenditure” are classified as expenditure on schools (administrative affairs); “canteen worker salary expenditure” and “non-teacher staff salary expenditure” are classified as other expenditures (see table 2). at the same time, the expenditures on students and teachers are regarded as the expenditures on “software” of schools in this paper, and the expenditures on school (administrative affairs) as the expenditures on the “hardware” of schools. table 2. items and aspects of expenditure at school level. expenditure aspect expenditure item expenditures at school level expenditure on students student learning material expenditure student scholarship expenditure expenditure on teachers expenditures on teacher training expenditures on teacher welfare expenditure on schools public utility expenditure office supplies expenditure school maintenance expenditure teaching supplies expenditure other expenditure canteen worker salary expenditure non-teacher staff salary expenditure data source: authors’ survey (2015) li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 149 data on schools, teachers, students and parents (control variables) in the questionnaire, we also collected the data at the levels of schools and teachers. the school level variables mainly include: the number of students in the school, the studentteacher ratio, and the service time of the school to the farthest village; variables at the teacher level mainly include: gender of teacher, whether the first degree is college, teaching age, and whether they are working at a public school, including chinese teacher and math teacher. a large number of studies have shown that the variables selected above about school and teacher has impact on students’ academic performance (todd & wolpin, 2007; sun et al., 2009; xue and wang, 2009). in the questionnaire of basic information of students and their parents, we collected variables that are at student level, including age, gender, ethnicity, grade and boarding status. at the same time, the socioeconomic characteristic variables of the parents are also collected, including: their education, whether they are migrant workers, household assets. it is found that the socioeconomic characteristics variables of individuals and families selected above have great impact on students’ academic performance (fryer & levitt, 2004). standardized math and chinese tests (dependent variables) data on the standardized math/chinese scores were collected from math/chinese tests administered as part of the survey. each student in the sample took a standardized math or chinese test. we selected a set of standardized chinese and math test for students to measure their academic performance. standardized chinese and math tests are designed to be consistent with the syllabus and have been tested for several times so as to better gauge chinese students’ academic performance. in this study, the scores of chinese and math are used as dependent variables; in general, the score is well represented. because of the different subjects tested and the difficulty of the questions between different grades, the measurement methods commonly used in previous studies, such as “parents’ evaluation of children’s academic performance” (xue, 2014) and the grades reported by students themselves (dang, 2007), may cause biased. standard chinese or math scores are the result of standardizing the raw scores of chinese or math test. this comparison is performed in two grades, making the score comparable across grades. if the standard score is higher than 0, it means that the student’s chinese or math score is higher than the average score of the student. sample characteristics the descriptive statistical results of sample are shown in table 3. model li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 150 table 3. variable description and descriptive statistics. variable level variable variable description mean sd student and parent level age year 11.5 1.09 gender 1 = female; 0 = male 0.49 0.50 ethnicity 1 = han; 0 = minorities 0.66 0.47 grade 1 = 5th grade; 0 = 4th grade 0.51 0.50 boarding status 1 = board at school; 0 = not board at school 0.24 0.43 education of father 1 = junior high school and above; 0 = below junior high school 0.45 0.50 education of mother 1 = junior high school and above; 0 = below junior high school 0.28 0.45 father migrated 1 = yes; 0 = no 0.54 0.50 mother migrated 1 =yes; 0 = no 0.28 0.45 household assets standardized household assets 0.04 1.10 chinese teacherlevel gender 1 = male; 0 = female 0.42 0.49 first degree is college 1 = yes; 0 = no 0.64 0.47 teaching age 1 ≥ 10 yrs; 0 < 10 yrs 0.50 0.50 work at a public school 1 = yes; 0 = no 0.87 0.34 mathematics teacher-level gender 1 = male; 0 = female 0.58 0.49 first degree is college 1 = yes; 0 = no 0.56 0.50 teaching age 1 ≥ 10 yrs; 0 < 10 yrs 0.52 0.50 work at a public school 1 = yes; 0 = no 0.89 0.31 school-level number of students in school unit 401 424 student-teacher ratio % 17.0 20.0 the time from school to the farthest village minutes 60.3 36.8 data source: authors’ survey (2015) based on the above analysis, the econometric model to analyze the impact of different aspects of school expenditure on students’ academic performance is as follows: yis = βo + β1 expends + γ xi + η ss + α ts + εi where yis is the standardized math or chinese score of student i at school s, expends refers to the variable of expenditures in different aspects at school level, which represents the expenditures on students, teachers and school (administrative affairs) and other aspects, respectively. xi represents the variables of student and family, including the age, gender, ethnicity, grade, boarding status, education level of parents, whether parents are migrated and family assets. ts represents the variables at school level, including the number of students in the school, the ratio of students to teachers, and the service time from the school to the farthest village. ss refers to the variables at the teacher level, including the gender of the chinese or math teacher, whether the first degree is college, teaching age and whether they are working at a public school. holding student/household/teacher/school characteristics constant and controlling for county fixed effect, β1 represents the effect of expenditures in different aspects on students’ academic performance (indicating that if the expenditure in a certain aspect li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 151 increases from 0 to 1, the student’s chinese or math score will change by the standard deviations of β1). results the proportion of expenditure in each aspect at school level in the survey, the research team carefully recorded the expenditure amount of each aspect at school level. based on the expenditure amount of each aspect and the amount of total expenditure, the proportion of each aspect and its expenditure is obtained by calculating. among the expenditures of each aspect, the ratio of expenditure on students is the lowest, 4%; the ratio of expenditure on schools (administration) is up to 72%; the ratio of expenditure on teachers is 8%, and other expenditure is 15%. it can be seen that expenditure on students and teachers is very low, but expenditure on school hardware (school administration) is very high. the relationship between expenditures of each aspect at school level and students’ chinese academic performance as shown in table 4, holding student/household/teacher/school characteristics constant and controlling for county fixed effect, there is a positive correlation between the expenditures on students and teachers and students’ standardized chinese scores. while the expenditures on school (administrative affairs) are negatively correlated with students’ chinese standardization scores; other expenditures have nothing to do with students’ standardized chinese scores. table 4. the correlation between expenditures in each aspect at school level and students’ chinese academic performance. standardized chinese score (1) (2) (3) (4) expenditures on students 1.34***(0.42) expenditures on teachers 0.83**( 0.34) expenditures on schools -0.34***(0.16) other expenditures -0.12(0.22) controlling for child and parent characteristics yes yes yes yes controlling for chinese teacher characteristics yes yes yes yes controlling for school characteristics yes yes yes yes county fixed effects yes yes yes yes n 3,278 3,278 3,278 3,278 r 2 0.27 0.27 0.27 0.27 notes: robust standard error adjusted for clustering at the school level are reported in parentheses *significant at 10%; **significant at 5%; ***significant at 1% data source: authors’ survey (2015) li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 152 specifically speaking, if the expenditure on students increases from 0 to 1, the students’ chinese scores will be increased by 1.34 standard deviations, it can also be said that if the expenditure on students increases by 1 percentage point, the students’ chinese scores will be increased by 0.0134 standard deviations, the increase of scores is statistically significant at the 1% level. if the expenditure on teachers increases from 0 to 1, students’ chinese scores will be increased by 0.83 standard deviations (if the expenditure on teachers increases 1 percentage, it will lead to an increase of 0.0083 standard deviations on students’ chinese scores), the increase in scores is statistically significant at the 5%; if the expenditure on school increases from 0 to 1, the students’ chinese scores will be decreased by 0.34 standard deviations (if the expenditures on school increases by 1 percentage point, it will cause a decrease of 0.0034 standard deviations on students’ chinese scores), the reduction of score is statistically significant at the 1% level; other expenditure have nothing to do with students’ chinese scores. the relationship between expenditures of each aspect at school level and students’ math academic performance as shown in table 5, holding student/household/teacher/school characteristics constant and controlling for county fixed effect, expenditures on students and on other aspects are positively correlated with student’s standardized math scores; expenditures on school (administrative affairs) are negatively correlated with the student’s standardized math scores; the expenditures on teachers have nothing to do with the student’s standardized math scores. table 5. the correlation between expenditures in each aspect at school level and students’ math academic performance. standardized math score (1) (2) (3) (4) expenditures on students 2.00***( 0.47) expenditures on teachers 0.46( 0.36) expenditures on schools -0.57***(0.17) other expenditures 0.39*(0.23) controlling for child and parent characteristics yes yes yes yes controlling for math teacher characteristics yes yes yes yes controlling for school characteristics yes yes yes yes county fixed effects yes yes yes yes n 3,219 3,219 3,219 3,219 r 2 0.20 0.20 0.20 0.20 notes: robust standard error adjusted for clustering at the school level are reported in parentheses *significant at 10%; **significant at 5%; ***significant at 1% data source: authors’ survey (2015) li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 153 specifically, if expenditure on students increases from 0 to 1, the student’s math score will increase by 2 standard deviations. it can also be said that if expenditure on students increases by 1 percentage point, the student’s math score increases by 0.02 standard deviations, the increase of scores is statistically significant at the 1% level; if the other expenditures increase from 0 to 1, the student’s math score will increase by 0.39 standard deviations (if other expenditure increases 1 percentage, it will lead to an increase of 0.0039 standard deviations on students’ math scores), the increase in scores is statistically significant at the 10%; if the expenditure on school increases from 0 to 1, the students’ math scores will be decreased by 0.57 standard deviations (if the expenditures on school increases by 1 percentage point, it will cause a decrease of 0.0057 standard deviations on students’ math scores), the reduction of score is statistically significant at the 1% level; expenditure on teachers have nothing to do with students’ math scores. the relationship between the expenditures on software and hardware and students’ academic performance taking the expenditures on students and teachers as the expenditure on “software” and the expenditure on school (administrative affairs) as the expenditure on “hardware”, we make a further analysis of the relationship between the expenditures on “software” and “hardware” and students’ chinese and math academic performance. the results show that, as shown in table 6. expenditures on “software” has a significant positive impact on students’ chinese and math scores, while the expenditures on “hardware” has a huge negative impact on that. among them, if the expenditure on “software” increases from 0 to 1, students’ chinese score will be increased by 1 standard deviation, and students’ math score will be increased by 0.91 standard deviations, the increase of scores is statistically significant at the 1% level. if expenditure on “hardware” increases from 0 to 1, students’ chinese and math scores will be decreased by 0.34 standard deviations and 0.57 standard deviations respectively, the reduction of scores is statistically significant at the 1% -5% levels. conclusions and suggestions this study used representative data to explore the current state of expenditure on school level in poor rural primary schools and correlation to students’ academic performance. according to results, primary schools in poor rural areas are over-emphasizing the expenditure on school administration (“hardware”), up to 72%, while expenditure on students and teachers (“software”) accounted for only 12%. the results showed that in terms of expenditures on “software”, both expenditures on students and teachers are significantly positively correlated with students’ chinese and mathematics performance, but the “hardware” expenditures of school administration are significantly negatively correlated with students’ chinese and mathematics performance. based on the results, we propose corresponding countermeasures and recommendations. li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 154 table 6. the correlation between expenditures on schools’ software and hardware and students’ academic performance. standardized chinese score standardized math score (1) (2) (1) (2) expenditures on software 1.00***(0.26) 0.91***(0.27) expenditures on hardware -0.34**(0.16) -0.57*** (0.17) controlling for child and parent characteristics yes yes yes yes controlling for chinese/math teacher characteristics yes yes yes yes controlling for school characteristics yes yes yes yes county fixed effects yes yes yes yes n 3,278 3,278 3,219 3,219 r 2 0.27 0.27 0.20 0.20 notes: robust standard error adjusted for clustering at the school level are reported in parentheses *significant at 10%; **significant at 5%; ***significant at 1% data source: authors’ survey (2015) to improve and optimize the school expenditure and increase the expenditures on students and teachers at present, the expenditure structure at school is of “material-oriented” model, that means investment in schools’ “hardware” is higher, and investment in school’s “software” is lower. however, there is a positive correlation between the expenditure of the school “software” and students’ academic performance. in terms of this, we need to change the existing expenditure of “material-oriented” model, and increase the proportion of expenditures on students and teachers, which is to make the transformation of the investment mode of “material-oriented” to “people-oriented” so as to stimulate the creativity of students and teachers, and jointly improve the creative vitality of talents. targeted measures should be taken in the process of education poverty alleviation in the process of implementing the strategy of targeted education poverty alleviation, attention should be paid to the “precision” and “accuracy” of fiscal policies. in order to achieve targeted poverty alleviation via education, on the one hand, the object should be targeted, and the resources of education poverty alleviation should be effectively allocated to the people who have urgent needs: the investment of software supporting service for students and teachers should be improved to maximize the efficiency of resource allocation. on the other hand, the measures should be taken precisely: improve the teaching ability of teachers in poor areas through a variety of ways to promote the professional development of teachers; the financial aid to students is transformed from li, et al., expenditure on school level and students’ academic performance vol.2, no. 1, 2019 155 indemnificatory to all-round pattern, so that students and teachers in poor areas can be assisted in the aspects of ideology, abilities and growth (liu & liu, 2018). references cheng, y. (2015). analysis of the current development status and problems of rural education. modern econ information, 9:457. [chinese] hu, y., du, y. (2009). empirical research on the educational production function of rural primary schools in western china. edu res, 7:58-67. [chinese] li, x., xing, z. (2018). research on the educational poverty alleviation theory and practice of china in its crucial stage. edu econ 34(1):42-47. [chinese] liu, h., liu, h. (2018).education precision poverty alleviation: time tracking, object confirmation and main countermeasures. chin edu j, 7:29-35. [chinese] sun, z., liu, z., sun, b. (2009). families, schools, and children’s school achievement: a study based on rural regions in china gansu province. j beijing normal univ (soc sci ed), 5:103-115. [chinese] xi, j. (2015). the fight against poverty and the tough battle has already sounded. the whole party and the country are determined to work hard. people’s daily, november 29th, 2015 (001). [chinese] xue, h., wang, d., wu, x. (2014). the impact of private tutoring on left-behind students’ academic achievements in chinese compulsory education. peking univ edu rev, 12(3):50-62. [chinese] zhang, c. (2017). in the past 5 years, chinese education has delivered brilliant answers. china education news, october 18th, 2017 (004). [chinese] zhu, z. (2016) .solidly promote education out of poverty, and focus on blocking the intergenerational transmission of poverty. admin manag reform, 7:4-10. [chinese] angrist, j.d., lavy, v. (1999). using maimonides’ rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement. quarterly j eco, 114(2):533-575. coleman, j.s., campbell, e.q., hobson, c.j., mcpartland, j., mood, a.m., weinfeld, f.d., york, r.l. (1966). equality of opportunity. washington: u. s. government printing office. dewey, j., husted, t.a., kenny, l.w. (2000). the ineffectiveness of school inputs: a product of misspecification? eco edu rev, 19:27-45. dang, h. (2007). the determinants and impact of private tutoring classes in vietnam. eco edu rev, 26:684-699. fryer, jr. r.g., levitt, s.d. (2004). understanding the black － white test score gap in the first two years of school. rev eco stat, 86(2): 447-464. hanushek, e.a. (2003). the failure of input － based schooling policies. eco j, 113(485):f64-f98. todd, p.e., wolpin, k.i. (2007). the production of cognitive achievement in children: home, school, and racial test score gaps. j human capital, 1(1):91-136. received: 10 april 2019 revised: 23 april 2019 accepted: 05 may 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in j east chin normal univ (edu sci) 2018; 36(6):100-106,158. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 李莉莉, 关宏宇, 罗斯高. 学校层面的支出和学生学业表现的相关关系—基于西部贫困农村 地区的实证研究. 华东师范大学学报(教育科学版) 2018; 36 (6):100-106, 158. article-lilili-bece_title_31may2019 article-lilili-maintext-bece_31may2019 bece. newsletter bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1350 parental involvement, confidence in the future, and adolescent development: a comparative analysis of native and migrant adolescents by wu, w., & li, j. l. correspondence to: li, j. l., shanghai normal university, china. e-mail: eduhappycharlie@shnu.edu.cn he study, published in education & economy, is based on coleman’s social capital theory, and takes the 7th graders at the baseline and 8th graders in the second-phase survey in the follow-up educational survey in china as analysis sample. it uses seemingly unrelated regression (sur) analysis to study the impact of parental involvement on native and migrant adolescents’ cognitive ability, psychology and behavior. the sub sample regression analysis and z-test are used to explore the impact of family participation in education on the development of native and migrant adolescents. finally, through the chain mediating effect analysis, this study examines the potential mediating effect of confidence in the future on parental involvement and adolescent development. the results are summarized as follows.  sur analysis results indicate that parental involvement is closely related to adolescents’ cognitive, psychological, and behavioral development. parent-child communication positively predicts adolescents’ cognitive ability and reduces psychological and behavioral problems. parental supervision can also reduce children’s psychological and behavior problems. home-school contact negatively predicts adolescents’ cognitive ability and positively predicts their psychological and behavioral problems, which might be a result of adolescents’ reactive behavior and resistance to excessive parental intervention.  the results of sample regression analysis and z-test show that parental involvement has a remarkable impact on the development of both native and migrant adolescents, and there is no significant difference in the impact effect. there are some differences in the effect of parental involvement only among migrant adolescents. parent-child communication can reduce the psychological and behavioral problems of both local and migrant adolescents, but it can only improve the cognitive ability of local adolescents; t mailto:eduhappycharlie@shnu.edu.cn bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1351 home-school contact negatively predicts the cognitive ability of native adolescents and has no significant impact on that of migrant adolescents.  chain mediated effect analysis results indicate that parental involvement significantly affects adolescents’ and parents’ confidence in the future. parents can participate in adolescents’ education through parent-child communication, parental supervision, and home-school contact to exert positive impact on native and migrant adolescents’ confidence in the future. given the above analyses, the study suggests that more attention should be paid to the role of parental participation and the guiding role of schools in parental participation given full play; foreign experience in providing educational compensation programs to vulnerable families, especially migrant families can be used as reference; advancing supporting reforms and lowering the threshold of urban compulsory education will also help change the pessimistic attitude of disadvantaged parents towards their children’s future. source: education and economy, 2021(5):66-76. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.1, 2021 931 an empirical research on the employment of chinese university and college new graduates under the impact of covid-19 by li, t., sun, x., wu, z., & shan, n. correspondence to: li, t., doctoral candidate, china institute of rural education development, northeast normal university, china. email: lit456@nenu.edu.cn nder the impact of the pandemic, the employment status of recent graduates is unprecedentedly difficult. recently, a study published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences) investigated the employment situation of college graduates in china under the pandemic. using the method of random sampling, the research group distributed electronic questionnaires to the fresh graduates, employers, and universities in 34 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in china, from april to june 2020. as a result, 13,738 valid samples of students, 419 samples of employers, and 55 samples of colleges and universities were collected. according to the data analysis, the employment situation of the recent graduates shows:  half of the after-tax salary centralizes among 3,001 to 5,000 cny, also the satisfaction and stability of attendance were relatively high.  the difficulty for unemployed graduates increases. the pandemic did not significantly change the graduates’ career expectations, while the mainstream is entering the enterprises, and the desire to take part in the civil servant examination is strong, what’s more, the workplace and salary amount attract the most attention. meanwhile, the expected career types do not adapt to the jobs available, and salary expectation is generally high.  regarding the evaluation of employment guidance services in universities, the feedback was generally positive. however, difficulties such as lack of full-time teachers, and insufficient professional knowledge still exist. based on the analysis above, the following research took the factors of physiology, family, organization, and individual as independent variables, and set the employment condition as dependent variables, and finally using the u vol.7, no.1, 2021 932 logistic regression to further explore the core factors affecting employment. the results are as follows:  gender difference shows a strong impact on the employment situation. the employment rate of the female students is much lower than that of the male, which only accounts for 0.596 of the latter.  as for the family influences, the non-needy students are easier to be recruited than the needy students, which reached 1.266 times.  considering the organizational and academic factors, students graduate from science and engineering universities, first-class universities, and those who graduate with “double tops” disciplines have an advantage over others, and students graduate with a degree in the humanities suffer the most.  when it comes to the students themselves, the higher education background, the better academic performance, and the greater english proficiency representing the higher employment rate; therefore, it is recommended that the unemployed recent graduates should lower their expecting salary to increase the possibility of being hired, because volunteering to expect for less payment seems to be the most significant intervening variables; also, the higher expense they spend on job-seeking brings about the higher employment rate. the author concluded the four considerable relevant issues that require urgent attention: 1). the unemployment situation of recent graduates from rural areas; 2). targeted poverty alleviation for needy graduates; 3). the hidden and inevitable employment discrimination; 4). practical assistance for graduates to start-up business as a result to improve the overall employment condition. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2020; 38(10):110-126. bece. newsletter vol.10, no.2, 2022 1419 can increasing teaching rewards improve teaching quality? an empirical study of 63 universities across the country by li, n., & tao, z. y. correspondence to: nan li, capital university of economics and business. email: linan@cueb.edu.cn lthough teaching and scientific research are both important tasks for college and university teachers, the phenomenon of emphasizing scientific research over teaching prevails. in the evaluation system, universities tend to give more weight to scientific research. as a result, teachers’ scientific research achievements are linked with their appointment, assessment, promotion, and salaries; insufficient attention to teaching leads to low teaching quality. this study explores the effect of teaching incentives on teaching quality improvement by comparing the teaching incentives in different universities. ordinary least squares are used to estimate the effect of teaching incentives on academic evaluation of teaching performance. the results are as follows.  the number of teaching rewards itself does not have a significant effect on students’ evaluation of teachers’ performance.  when teaching is rewarded more than scientific research, teachers will invest more time and energy in teaching, and the number of teaching awards will increase, which will raise the student evaluation scores. when the weight of teaching in the academic title evaluation increases, teachers will pay more attention to teaching for the purpose of being promoted, which in turn will increase the student evaluation scores. given the above results, the study makes several recommendations. scientific research has been taking a dominant position in teachers’ careers in most universities. if we do not change the research-oriented culture, simply increasing teaching incentives will not promote the teaching quality. only when teaching has a higher position than research can teaching quality be improved. additionally, the ‘quality’ of teaching should be emphasized rather than the ‘quantity.’ increasing the weight of teaching in the academic title system is an effective way to improve the quality of teaching. source: open education research, 2021; 2021(6):53-60. a mailto:linan@cueb.edu.cn whether the school self-developed e-learning platform is more conducive to learning during the covid-19 pandemic? daxiang dai, 1 xuyue xia 2 1. tangquan middle school, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china 2. nantong university, nantong 226000, jiangsu, china abstract. the school self-developed e-learning platform can provide students with real and non-real-time learning resources based on its personalized learning properties like self-owned teaching conditions and levels. meanwhile, it is beneficial to students’ independent study and academic performance. during the covid-19 pandemic, schools in china adopted e-learning platforms to conduct online teaching, whereas the efficacy of these online teaching platforms was not definitely known. it is necessary to review their effectiveness, especially for those developed by schools themselves. a total of 417 of 7th and 8th graders from two middle schools in nanjing, jiangsu province were enrolled with 208 in the experimental group and 209 as the comparisons. the primary outcome of the study was students’ academic performance. the results demonstrated that: (i) the online platform-based self-learning was conducive to students’ grades; (ii) school self-developed e-learning platform was more effective in improving student achievement than other nonschool self-developed ones. best evid chin edu 2020; 5(1):569-580. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar030. keywords: covid-19; e-learning platform; learning effect; middle school about the author: daxiang dai, advanced teacher, tangquan middle school, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china. email: 447604856@qq.com; correspondence to: xuyue xia, master’s candidate, school of educational science, nantong university, nantong 226000, jiangsu, china. email: 616636896@qq.com. conflict of interests: none. dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 570 ith the rapid development of communication and information technology, china has been giving more expectations to education informatization, and set up higher requirements for the construction of educational resources (chen, 2019). in 2012, the ministry of education of china (2016) clearly stipulated in the “ten-year development plan for educational informatization (2011-2020)”, i.e., build an educational cloud resource platform, bring hundreds of companies and 10,000 teachers and students together to develop excellent resources. in the same year, china held the first national education informatization tv and telephone working conference, which clearly defined the purpose as “three connections and two platforms” (three connections mean schools connected with broadband network, classes connected with high-quality resource, and people can communicate in network learning space; the two platforms refer to the connection between public service platforms for educational resources and public service platforms for educational management and future development of chinese education informatization (liu, 2012). in june 2016, the “the 13th five-year plan for education informatization” issued by the ministry of education clarified the focus of education informatization, which was to achieve the coordinated development of public service platforms and strengthen the ability of information service in teaching and management: innovation of the construction and application model of “day day up” platform, for serving classroom learning to supporting network-based extensive learning, improving the application level of education informatization, and deepening the integrated development of information technology and education (the ministry of education of china, 2016). on april 13, 2018, the education informatization 2.0 act issued by the ministry of education proposed three transformation: (i) from dedicated resources to large resources; (ii) from improving students’ application ability to information technology to technological literacy improvement; (iii) from application integration development to innovation integration development. by 2022, china proposed to reach the development goals of “three comprehensiveness, two height, one largeness”. the “one largeness” herein refers exactly to the establishment of a large platform of “internet + education” (the ministry of education of china, 2016). under this background, students’ learning cloud platforms have been springing up in china. tangquan middle school in nanjing, jiangsu of china has been exploring an independent learning model for students based on the internet environment. after years of practical accumulation, a unique network teaching platform model has been formed and achieved remarkable results. during this covid-19 pandemic, our school actively responded to the call of “school is out, but class is on”, and all students have adopted our self-developed network platform for self-study. to further discuss the effectiveness of the school’s network platform, we proposed to obtain scientific evidence through a rigorously designed experimental study to evaluate its use. the origin of the experiment the education and learning cloud platform is the development of cloud computing in the field of education (lv et al., 2017). it is the basic structure of future education w dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 571 informatization, and develops along with technology. it includes all hardware computing resources. after virtualized these resources, they can provide a good platform for educational institutions, educators and students (zhang & wu, 2010). the school selfdeveloped learning platform refers to a platform developed by three parts of schools, teachers, and parents together with a full consideration of both school and student conditions, so as to provide an equal and free learning environment (lin, 2016). under the normal teaching conditions, no significant change occurred in many cases, i.e., e-learning platforms were only used as assistant means of teaching and supplementary means of learning, although the government advocated helping students learn through the internet and issued a series of related policy documents (as mentioned in the introduction) to change the learning method and enhance the learning efficacy (ni et al., 2010). therefore, it was difficult to see whether e-learning platforms were conducive to learning. at the end of 2019, covid-19 pandemic broke out. due to its impact, teachers could not teach normally. therefore, the ministry of education of china issued the document regarding “school is out, but class is on” in january 2020, which clearly stated that providing a variety of high-quality online teaching resources through coordinating and integrating national, local and school-related teaching resources that are available for selection (the ministry of education of china, 2020). in response to the call of the ministry of education, local government in jiangsu had issued relevant countermeasures and built an “internet + education” model (jiangsu provincial people’s government, 2020), and in zhejiang, the government issued “guidelines for the comprehensive implementation of online teaching in elementary and middle schools during the postponed period of spring semester” (the department of education of zhejiang province, 2020), etc. it was proposed that all elementary and middle schools should implement online teaching by following the requirement of “school is out, but class is on”, and encourage students to use the online learning platform during the pandemic. in order to better understand the use of the online platform, the teaching and research office of zhejiang province organized a survey of middle and high school students that had a total of 558,982 participants. the survey showed that 96.0% of the students were involved in the online teaching activities organized by the school, and about 88.6% of them considered that they really wanted to participate in online courses and receive teacher’s guidance (teaching and research office of the department of education of zhejiang province, 2020). in addition, the education bureau of zengcheng district of guangzhou province also conducted a survey on the online teaching for 155 schools. the study included 125,047 students, and 60% of them expressed experienced a good learning of the platform (southern metropolis daily, 2020). in term of the online learning, other countries have already implemented earlier than china. caleb phillips in boston, usa first suggested a private correspondence course through email, although the first electronic distance education could be tracked back to 1920s that was performed through radio. the emergence of the internet had caused a transformation of the distant education (clark, 2020). the clinton administration of the usa announced in 1996 that it would broadly establish education on the dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 572 internet, they set the goal as before 2000, every classroom and every library should be connected to the internet (zhang & wang, 2008). since then, studies started to observe the effectiveness of e-learning. erik et al. (2008) found that as long as teachers had a better understanding of students, they could adapt online courses to the needs of students and maximize their success in online learning. klaus (2003) believed that elearning platform was an integrated educational technology with e-learning. through it, learners can participate in the construction of learning and can make progress in exploration and discussion in order to achieve a multi-angle and comprehensive understanding of knowledge (garrison & terry, 1998). in china, lin (2019) pointed out that the online learning platform has the following benefits: (i) it provides a technical foundation for cooperative learning. (ii) it makes teaching more targeted on the contents. (iii) it reduces the peer pressure and improve student participation. further, lu (2020) believed that the combination of online learning platforms and classroom teaching had greatly stimulated students’ learning initiative, effectively improved their ability to use words, and gradually realized the student-centered transformation of classroom teaching. wan (2016) believed that the elearning platform developed by the school itself had a positive effect on biology class. for example, in terms of the learning situation, it had reliable and accurate data; in terms of homework, it can be more targeted, reduce unified test papers, and carry out targeted personalized guidance; in terms of increasing interest, some students were more willing to complete homework on the internet, they felt very cool. therefore, the online learning platforms have become the main tool for many schools to implement the reform of autonomous learning for students. meanwhile, the school self-developed e-learning platforms achieved teacher-oriented teaching and student-oriented learning. in comparison, the public e-learning platforms lack of personalized property that only rely on the so-called standardized resources and tools. in previous studies, factors like teacher guidance and the help of educational institutions were not ruled out. at the same time, no practical evidence shown whether the school self-developed learning platform was more conducive to learning. so this study observed the online learning platform developed by tangquan middle school in nanjing, jiangsu province as the primary intervention variable, and discusses the following questions: (i) can the use of modern educational technology promote learning? (ii) is the school self-developed online learning platform more conducive to learning over the public-developed ones? methods purpose as mentioned earlier, the use of e-learning platforms for teaching is a widespread phenomenon in elementary and middle school in china currently and is considered as an effective means to achieve student-centered learning. however, due to the difference in learning conditions in different schools in various regions, not all schools can use the same platform, i.e., some use public platforms, but some use independently developed dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 573 by schools themselves. under this background, the main purpose of this study was to investigate whether the e-learning platform developed by schools is conducive to student learning. subjects we selected 7th and 8th graders 1 from two schools in nanjing, jiangsu province as the subjects. two hundred fifteen students from tangquan middle school were set as the experimental group and another 210 from another middle school were set as the control. in the experimental group, the school used its own educational cloud platform for teaching, while in the control group they used the public service platform of jiangsu education resource as online teaching. in order to better control the influence of students’ preconditions and pre-test differences on the results; we first controlled variables such as the students’ family background etc. after obtaining the pre-test results, we matched the data for the experimental and the control, and matched the participant sample according to the students’ total scores of chinese, mathematics, and english. after deleting the samples with missing testing, finally obtained 7th grade with the experimental group 98 samples and the control group 100 samples, 8th grade with the experimental group 110 samples and the control group 109 samples. the two schools participating in the study were all public schools with good reputation. there are no significant differences between them in terms of teachers, students, and school hardware conditions. primary outcome the experimental test tool was a unified standardized test prepared by the teacher development center of pukou district, nanjing. the staff who prepared the testing is rich in teaching experience, so it can guarantee the testing had good reliability and validity. the preand post-test of the three courses of chinese, mathematics and english were unified. these scores were the primary outcomes for evaluating the effectiveness of the self-developed online platform versus the public ones. intervention in china, learning platforms are roughly divided into three categories. the first category is developed by the ministry of education or other local governments; the second category is developed by different companies; and the third category is developed by schools. although the national and local governments and companies had put a lot of effort into the development and construction of the platforms, the first and second types are difficult to realize personalized learning for each student. the intelligent cloud network learning platform developed by the school was the primary intervention of this study. it mainly included five parts: smart teaching, smart learning, smart growth, smart management, and smart training. these were different from the content of the online platform used in the control group. the obvious dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 574 difference was that the core content provided by the smart teaching platform by tangquan middle school was the teaching resources developed by the school; the most important thing was the preparation of personalized teaching plans according to factors such as students’ learning status and cognitive level. the control group used the public service platform of jiangsu educational resources, and the teaching was conducted as live broadcasting following the exam outline, it did not have any school self-developed resources. during the covid-19 pandemic period, tangquan middle school in nanjing established a special working task. the school leaders and all teachers were carefully planned and arranged. before the lesson, the room-teacher published the schedule on the teaching platform, other teacher issued the resource list and learning requirements, which guided students to preview and upload the preview results in time. after the class, the teacher reviewed and graded the homework, and did q & a with individual counseling on the platform in time (dai & lin, 2020). procedure this experiment was planned from the end of january 2020, officially started at the beginning of february and ended at the end of april 2020. at the planning stage, the two schools first identified the participating students, and through matching and comparison, to ensure that the basic situation were the same and no significant difference between them; second, coordinated the teaching content and progress, and trained the teachers for both groups to ensure that the use of the online learning platform met the study requirements; at last, prepared the materials and determined the specific flow of the study. from the beginning of february to the end of april 2020, it was the experimental implementation phase, which lasted 13 weeks. during this stage, the two schools taught according to the platforms they chose. before and after the experiment, preand post-tests were taken. for the experimental group, the teachers can accurately take good control of the learning situation, and put different requirements for different students according to their learning ability to carry out personalized teaching. results a total of 208 samples from the experimental group and 209 from the control group were valid for analysis. prior to the study, in order to ensure the consistency of the learning level of the students in the two groups, a unified test was taken. the analysis of the test results is shown in table 1. before the study, all participating students from both schools used classroom to learn. for the three courses analyzed, independent sample t test was performed using spss20.0. the t value of the mathematics was the smallest, 0.591 versus 0.314, and the t value of the chinese was the largest, 0.806 versus 1.013. there was no significant difference in the three courses between the two grades indicating both groups were comparable. dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 575 after weeks learning, statistically significant differences were observed in all three courses for the scorings (p < 0.05). in this analysis, the test effect was expressed as a standardized mean difference (cohen’s d) as: 0.2-0.5 means small difference, 050.8 indicates medium difference, > 0.8 means big difference. from this data, chinese and english of the 7th graders had a moderate effect size (0.5 ≤ d < 0.8), and mathematics showed small effect amount (0.2 ≤ d < 0.5). for all three courses, the 8th graders showed small effect size (0.2 ≤ d < 0.5). from the point of difference between the pre and post-test scores of both groups, the difference of the post-test effect is much larger than that of the pre-test, indicating that the difference between the two groups is significantly increased (table 2). discussion can modern educational technology promote learning? the integration of modern educational technology and education has always been a topic of great concern. sivin-kachala jay (1994) observed the impact of modern educational technology on students’ learning methods and academic performance pointed out that modern educational technology had a great influence on students’ learning methods and achievements. the correct and reasonable use of educational technology in teaching can better stimulate students’ interest; it can broaden their horizons, increase their knowledge, and cultivate their innovative ability. zhao (2015) mentioned that the use of modern educational technology can improve the quality and effectiveness of information input, strengthen the authenticity of communication and feedback, and create more opportunities for researchers, a good opportunity to study the language learning process. from these, it is easy to see that the combination of modern educational technology and education can effectively promote students’ academic performance. at the same time, china has always maintained a supportive attitude towards the application of modern educational technology. in order to advocate it, the government had successively issued “the ten-year development plan for educational informatization (20112020)”, “the 13th five-year plan for educational informatization” and “the educational informatization 2.0 act” and a series of policies (the ministry of education of china, 2012, 2016, 2018). under the guidance of these series of documents, china had achieved the construction of education informatization 1.0, that is, the construction of “three connections and two platforms”. it was precisely because the national education informatization had achieved certain results that when the state issued the “school is out, but class is on” through the online e-learning platform” (the ministry of education of china, 2020). through our data, we believed that internet education technology has been becoming a common way of changing school education, and it will change students’ learning behavior and promote the innovation of education methods. this to large extent guarantee the performance of “school is out, but class is on” during the covid19 pandemic. dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 576 table 1. pre-test scores. grade course group mean sd t p cohen’s d 7th chinese exp. (n=89) 75.051 5.844 0.806 0.421 0.115 ctrl. (n=100) 74.145 9.499 mathematics exp. (n=89) 75.286 10.404 0.591 0.555 0.084 ctrl. (n=100) 74.190 15.179 english exp. (n=89) 74.296 10.831 0.783 0.435 0.111 ctrl. (n=100) 73.095 10.761 total exp. (n=89) 224.633 17.856 1.067 0.287 0.152 ctrl. (n=100) 221.430 23.890 8th chinese exp. (n=89) 75.186 8.104 1.013 0.312 0.137 ctrl. (n=100) 73.862 11.032 mathematics exp. (n=89) 78.236 18.963 0.314 0.753 0.042 ctrl. (n=100) 77.505 15.261 english exp. (n=89) 77.359 10.195 0.880 0.380 0.119 ctrl. (n=100) 75.922 13.720 total exp. (n=89) 230.782 29.340 0.899 0.370 0.122 ctrl. (n=100) 227.289 28.138 note: exp.: experimental group; ctrl.: control group. table 2. post-test scores. grade course group mean sd t p cohen’s d 7th chinese exp. (n=89) 71.184 8.791 4.577 0.000 0.651 ctrl. (n=100) 63.360 14.511 mathematics exp. (n=89) 70.398 13.014 3.416 0.001 0.486 ctrl. (n=100) 63.180 16.480 english exp. (n=89) 70.898 13.823 3.543 0.000 0.504 ctrl. (n=100) 62.655 18.524 total exp. (n=89) 212.480 24.517 5.493 0.000 0.781 ctrl. (n=100) 189.195 34.231 8th chinese exp. (n=89) 71.991 9.243 3.499 0.001 0.473 ctrl. (n=100) 61.766 29.208 mathematics exp. (n=89) 74.473 27.489 2.159 0.032 0.292 ctrl. (n=100) 66.583 26.575 english exp. (n=89) 73.536 13.297 2.437 0.016 0.329 ctrl. (n=100) 65.041 34.026 total exp. (n=89) 220.000 30.262 3.602 0.000 0.487 ctrl. (n=100) 193.390 71.276 note: exp.: experimental group; ctrl.: control group. dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 577 is the school self-developed online learning platform more conducive to learning? most domestic researches in china tend to study the adaptability of e-learning platforms, the construction and application strategies (chen, 2019; zhu, 2020), and rarely study the conducive effect on students’ learning. ye (2019) proposed a hybrid teaching based on cloud platforms. it was no longer centered on teachers and teaching materials. teachers no longer had a single evaluation of learning, so they can understand students comprehensively and provide targeted guidance to promote the positive development of their learning. liu (2020) showed that the emergence of a new learning approach such as an online platform had enhanced the diversity and flexibility of learning and improved the traditional classroom teaching, and constructed an independent learning environment for students. outside of china, studies on whether online learning platforms conducive to students’ learning were also carried out. wang et al. (2002) studied the impact of learning effectiveness of giving advice to learners in the online learning environment, and concluded that giving learners guidance and advice at the right time could help improve the quality of learning. zhou et al (2020) believed that students’ selfdirected learning were conducive to the improvement of their academic performance. yao et al. (2020) found that the effect of live teaching was better than the recorded teaching. professor john palfrey of harvard law school (2003) commented on the blog as one of the e-learning platforms: “blog makes communication between teachers and students more convenient and effective, and achieves unprecedented effect in teaching and learning.” robinson (2008) studied the effectiveness of network platforms for learning at a technical level, and proposed that asynchronous communication technology could let learners have more time to learn critically and reflectively, which was more conducive to promoting the development of their higher-level thinking skills in the use, analysis, summarization and evaluation of knowledge. therefore, it is easy to see that compared with the traditional classroom teaching mode, in which the teacher is the main body of the teaching activity and the student are in a passive state of receiving knowledge that ignores their characteristics of active cognition and the individual differences and needs (ye, 2019), whereas e-learning platform is conducive to learning by providing students with more specific, suitable learning choices, and especially the school self-developed online learning platform is more conducive to learning than the public-developed ones. the value and deficiency of the experiment in previous studies, the effectiveness of the online learning platform was established in normal teaching activities, and this study was conducted under the background of the covid-19 pandemic, so it excluded the factors for teacher guidance and counseling in educational institutions, and its results have positive significance for the upcoming usage of online teaching platforms for future teaching. however, we need to point out the limitations of this study. first, this study was that the sample size was not that big. second, because the students study at home, dai & xia. school self-developed e-learning platform during covid-19 pandemic. vol.5, no. 1, 2020 578 the related variable could not be completely controlled. so in future studies, further improvement in the accuracy of the study design is necessary. conclusion this study showed that (i) under the environment of “school is out, but class is on”, it is feasible for students to learn independently, and (ii) the school self-developed elearning platform based on its personalized learning resources can significantly improve students’ academic performance. based on these, we suggest that schools and teachers should use online teaching platforms selectively. with the development of online teaching platforms, there are many online teaching platforms available on the market, so schools and teachers should choose them carefully. in sum, the e-learning platform should be based on the school’s learning situation and fully considered the differences in student learning have more significant impact on students’ performance. therefore, when schools and teachers do the online teaching, they should consider the actual situation of the school and choose the optimal one that is suitable most to students. note: 1. the 7th and 8th graders are the last two years of the middle school. how to cite: dai, d., xia, x. 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(2020) weihai smart education cloud platform network learning space construction and application research. chin edu informat, (01): 68-71+77. received: 03 april 2020 revised: 17 april 2020 accepted: 29 april 2020 article-daxiangdai-bece_title_12may2020 article-daxiangdai-bece_maintext12may2020 online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period: based on 33,240 online questionnaire surveys across china dongdong wang, 1,2 huaibo wang, 3 wei zhang, 1 hairong wang, 1 xiaoping shen 1 1. beijing national center for open & distance education co., ltd., beijing 100081, china 2. northeast normal university, changchun 130024, jilin, china 3. beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. during the covid-19 pandemic, the ministry of education of china issued a call for “school is out, but class is on”. various regions responded to and issued relevant policies to use internet educational resources to carry out teaching activities. in this context, we conducted a network questionnaire survey on district and county education administrators, school administrators, teachers, students, and parents nationwide. it aimed to understand the online teaching situation and the attitudes of different subjects towards online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period. based on this, we summarized the problems existing in online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period and put forward countermeasures to better serve online teaching, to ensure the healthy development of online teaching after the pandemic, and to provide a reference for coordinating national forces to carry out online teaching in response to unforeseen public crises in the future. best evid chin edu 2020; 6(1):753-767. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar061. how to cite: wang, d., wang, h., zhang, w., wang, h., & shen, x. (2020). online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period: based on 33,240 online questionnaire surveys across china. best evidence in chinese education, 6(1):753767. keywords: covid-19; “school is out, but class is on”; online teaching wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no.1, 2020 754 about the authors: dongdong wang, senior engineer, beijing national center for open & distance education co., ltd., beijing 100081, china; and ph.d. candidate, department of education, northeast normal university, liaoning, china. email: wangdd@mail.open.com.cn. huaibo wang, national engineering laboratory of intelligent technology and application of internet education, distance education research center, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: huaibo_wang@163.com wei zhang, beijing national center for open & distance education co., ltd., beijing 100081, china. email: zhangwa@mail.open.com.cn hairong wang, beijing national center for open & distance education co., ltd., beijing 100081, china. email: wanghr@mail.open.com.cn correspondence to: xiaoping shen, beijing national center for open & distance education co., ltd., beijing 100081, china. email: shenxp@mail.open.com.cn. conflict of interests: none. © 2020 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 755 introduction ue to the continued covid-19 pandemic, the ministry of education of china issued the “notice on the delay of the start of the spring semester 2020” on january 27, 2020, requesting that the start of the spring semester be appropriately postponed, and encouraging all regions to use the internet and information-based education resources to provide students learning support to ensure “school is out, but class is on” (the ministry of education of china, 2020b). to this end, schools at all levels have been developing plans and conducted online teaching. many experts and scholars also voiced the first time, such as zhu et al. (2020) proposed an all-media learning ecological solution; jiao et al. (2020) analyzed the typical cases of online teaching of “school is out, but class is on”, to put forward relevant suggestions for online teaching for different practice subjects. to understand the implementation status of “school is out, but class is on”, the “school is out, but class is on” charity alliance led by beijing national center for open & distance education co., ltd., united with the national engineering laboratory for intelligent technology and application of internet education, and jointly developed a survey questionnaire and conducted a nationwide survey based on the “teacher training” cloud platform to understand the status quo and find problems to better serve the specific implementation of online teaching. this provides a reference for coordinating the nation’s efforts to conduct online teaching under the unforeseen public crisis in the future. the status quo of “school is out, but class is on” under pandemic prevention and control policy guarantee and guidance since the announcement of the delayed start of the spring semester, the corresponding “school is out, but class is on” work implementation plan has been successively issued from the central to the local to the school. on january 29, 2020, the education department of hubei province, the pandemic disaster-stricken area, issued the guiding opinions of the provincial education department on the implementation of network teaching during the pandemic prevention and control of the province’s primary and secondary schools. in terms of teaching resources and other aspects, it provides comprehensive guidance for online teaching (hubei provincial department of education, 2020). on january 30, the wuhan municipal education bureau issued the “notice of the city education bureau on delaying the start of spring 2020 school work” (wuhan municipal education bureau, 2020a), and the supporting release of “wuhan city elementary and middle schools during the fight against covid-19 pandemic “online teaching implementation plan” (wuhan municipal education bureau, 2020b), made more detailed planning on online teaching related content. on february 12, the “notice on work arrangements for “school is out, but class is on” in the office of the ministry of education and the ministry of industry and information technology of the ministry d wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 756 of education on the extension of the school start period of elementary and middle schools” (the ministry of education of china, 2020a) was published, further regulating the content of student learning, organization and coordination, connection between inside and outside class. as of early february, all parts of china have completed the formulation of supporting documents for online teaching, which provides guarantee and convenience for teachers and students participating in online teaching, and provides a policy basis for home-school communication and collaborative teaching. platform selections and teaching mode judging from the policy documents of the education departments in various regions, the main sources of online platforms are (i) national public service platforms for educational resources, provincial and local public service platforms for resources. (ii) education authorities at all levels organize the openly available network resource platforms in a targeted manner and guide schools to choose according to their needs. (iii) resources and platform donations spontaneously carried out by educational institutions. there are four commonly used online teaching and service modes: (i) “tv teaching video” mode. it is organized by the provincial and local education authorities or audio-visual halls and broadcast live through tv stations or dedicated digital tv channels. (ii) “live class” mode. teachers are encouraged to design their courses based on actual conditions and conduct live broadcasts through the online platform. (iii) “classes communicate with each other” mode. provincial and local education authorities coordinate the organization of courses organized by local excellent teachers according to the subject catalog, which is regularly based on local education platforms, and carry out online tutoring and online q & a. (iv) “optional resources + online question answering” mode. the school uniformly selects teaching resources, compiles guides, and pushes them to students for independent study through websites, class exchange groups, etc. teachers answer questions through common tools such as qq and wechat. systemic service support online teaching is not a simple “classroom shift”. it requires teachers and instructional designers to build front-end curriculum resources, as well as strong back-end service teams to provide technical and service support. specifically, education authorities and schools should actively strengthen guidance and supervision, and adjust implementation paths on time based on online teaching practices. relevant domestic internet service agencies, cloud service providers, and other enterprises in china actively responded to provide service support for the stable operation of online teaching cloud platforms, ensuring smooth network and stability of online use by large-scale users. all educational institutions should do a good job of allocating various resources such as software and hardware facilities, basic networks, teacher resources, professional counseling, etc., optimize personnel deployment, and fully guarantee the smooth implementation of “school is out, but class is on”. more importantly, under pandemic prevention and control, the implementation of large-scale group online teaching nationwide requires the wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 757 establishment of one or more professional teams that provide common support services to allow teachers to focus on teaching and improve organizational efficiency and teaching effectiveness. survey of online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period to gain a deeper understanding of the current status of online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period, this study surveyed the “questionnaire star”. the items in the questionnaire include basic information, existing preparations for dealing with “school is out, but class is on” online teaching, and knowledge and attitude towards online teaching. the questionnaire was distributed from february 5th to 11th, 2020. a total of 33,240 valid questionnaires were recovered, including 907 district and county education manager questionnaires, 777 school education manager questionnaires, teacher questionnaires 2,401, student questionnaires 17,025, and parent questionnaires 12,130. sample overview of district and county education administrators the statistical results of the 907 district and county education managers questionnaires show that the district and county education managers participating in the survey come from 28 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in the country, and most of them are staff members and below (88.31%). the specific job distribution is shown in figure 1. overview of the sample of school administrators the statistical results of 777 school education administrator questionnaires show that 72.33% of the school education administrators participating in the survey came from primary schools, and 15.06% came from junior high schools. in terms of geography, the school education managers participating in the survey are mainly in the western region and the northeast region, of which 317 people in the western region (sichuan, chongqing, guizhou, yunnan, shaanxi, etc.), about 40.8%; the northeast region (heilongjiang, jilin, liaoning, etc.) with 291 people, about 37.45%; eastern region (beijing, tianjin, hebei, shanghai, jiangsu, etc.) 102 people, about 13.13%; central region (shanxi, anhui, jiangxi, henan, hubei, etc.) 66 people, about 8.49%; another 1 person (about 0.13%) is from hong kong, macao, and taiwan. in terms of school size, most of the school administrators participating in the survey came from medium-sized schools, of which 37.58% came from schools of more than 1,000 people, and only 10.55% came from schools of less than 100 people (figure 2). as far as administrative duties are concerned, 75.55% of the school administrators participating in the survey are grassroots managers, 9.14% are principals or executive vice principals, 5.66% are deputy principals in charge of teaching, and 9.65% are deans of academic affairs. wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 758 figure 1. distribution of the district and county education administrative officials. figure 2. school size and proportion wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 759 teacher sample overview the statistical results of a total of 2,401 teacher questionnaires show that the teachers participating in the survey come from 31 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions in china and the majority are female teachers. the ratio of men to women is about 1:2. there were 1,294 (53.89%) young teachers (under 34 years old), 840 (34.99%) middle-aged teachers (35-48 years old), and 267 (11.12%) old-age teachers (over 49 years old). 58.34% are urban school teachers, 39.62% are rural school teachers, and about 2% are teaching site teachers. 83.42% are elementary and middle school teachers (elementary teacher 52.98%, middle teacher 30.44%), 8.37% are kindergarten teachers, 6.54% are high school teachers, and 1.67% are vocational teachers (figure 3). therefore, more than half of the teachers participating in the survey were chinese and mathematics teachers (52.2%), followed by english and phonetic beauty teachers, and relatively few teachers in other disciplines. student sample profile the statistical results of 17,025 student questionnaires show that the students participating in the survey come from 32 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions across the country, with 8,139 males (47.81%) and 8,886 females (52.19%). more than half (75.14%) students come from urban schools, 22.1% of students from rural schools, and only 2.76% of students from teaching points. most of them are elementary school students (56.16%), middle school students (28.09%), and high school students (15.21%), followed by secondary vocational school students (0.54%). overview of parent samples the statistical results of 12,130 parent questionnaires show that the majority of parents participating in the survey are women, and the ratio of men to women is about 1:2. elementary school students had the most parents (69.1%), followed by middle school students (18%). in terms of age distribution (figure 4), most parents are 30 to 39 years old. in terms of the area where the children attend school, 43.1% of parents in the eastern region, 26.7% in the northeast region, 19% in the western region, 11.1% in the central region, and 0.1% in other regions. about 77.6% of parents were from urban schools and 22.4% were from rural schools. attitudes of different subjects towards online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period district and county education managers: encourage and support the statistical results of 907 district and county education managers’ questionnaires showed that 54.8% of district and county education managers encouraged the develop wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 760 figure 3. proportion of the courses. figure 4. parents’ age. wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 761 ment of online teaching related to teachers; 42.56% did not restrict the specific forms of online teaching; 49.17% chose to introduce high-quality online teaching resources; 43.2% developed a management system for online teaching. it is worth mentioning that the district and county education administrators also realized that online teaching is suitable for personalized learning for students (61.41%), improve teaching efficiency (54.8%), make up for the shortage of resources (41.9%), and solve the shortage of teachers (27.34%) 68.22% of managers even expressed their expectation that online teaching will be a part of the normalization of regional education services in the future. so, district and county education managers have a positive attitude towards encouraging and supporting online teaching during “school is out, but class is on”. school administrators: relatively active school administrators are relatively passive in carrying out online teaching, and their attitudes towards online teaching are also slightly different: some actively formulated specific measures for schools to carry out online teaching based on various educational policies issued by the state and the education bureau, such as opening air classrooms based on the teaching week, establish an online curriculum that conforms to the teaching schedule and online teaching characteristics, but some had the phenomenon of copying traditional classrooms directly. the results of 777 school education administrator questionnaires showed that: 68.92% of school administrators believed that the implementation of online teaching can ensure the quality of teaching during the pandemic period; 68.72% believed that online teaching can meet the basic needs of students, but they worried about insufficient teacher preparation; 31.5% of school administrators were skeptical of teachers’ basic skills in online teaching. how to effectively organize and implement online teaching, how to ensure that online teaching achieves the same effect as traditional teaching, how to effectively carry out online teaching activities, and how to manage the teaching and learning process have become the focus of school administrators. teachers: positive attitude but anxious overall, middle and elementary school teachers have a positive attitude towards online teaching. the results of 2,401 teacher questionnaires showed that more than 50% of teachers believed that online teaching can meet the learning needs of students, and 31.9% of teachers were willing to continue online teaching after the pandemic is over. but at the same time, teachers also had a lot of anxiety about online teaching. the main points of anxiety are interaction with students (62.6%), equipment operation (58.6%), and teaching organization (52.1%). in terms of age, middle-aged and older teachers were significantly less anxious about online teaching organization and class manners than young teachers; 72.6% of teachers hoped to receive targeted training, and especially older teachers had more demand for technical application training. from a geographical perspective, urban teachers were more anxious about class manners, software quality, and equipment operation of service providers, while rural teachers were more anxious wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 762 about interacting with students and teaching organizations. from the perspective of willingness to use, there were obvious differences between teachers who had different views on the effect of online teaching: those who recognized the effect of online teaching had a stronger willingness to use; teachers under the age of 34 and teachers between the ages of 45-55 had the willingness of future use; at the same time, with the increase of age, the number of people who wanted to continue online teaching has shown a downward trend. students: urban-rural and learning stages differ significantly in general, students have positive attitude toward online learning and strong adaptability. the results of 17,025 student questionnaires showed that although 16.95% of students expressed some concerns, 83.05% still held a positive attitude (“surprise” 36.92% and “happy” 46.13%). this is mainly because students had a positive understanding of online learning. for example, they believed that online learning could be self-paced and had complete and visible learning records. about 61.46% of students thought that they could quickly adapt to the online learning method, and were willing to continue to use this method to carry out learning activities, especially middle school students. compared with rural schools, urban school students had a more positive and adaptable attitude towards online learning. the major reason may be from urban students had equipment that can meet their daily online learning and they were more familiar with electronic equipment. besides, there are significant differences in the attitudes of students at different stages of learning on the internet: high school students had less disappointment, but relatively higher in the worrisome that may be related to the higher pressure they were facing. parents: high expectations and high concerns the results of 12,130 parent questionnaires showed that on the one hand, parents had high expectations for the remedy measures adopted by schools for online teaching. about 49.2% of parents hoped to have different online teaching methods such as live classroom, video recording, homework correction and feedback, and parents of urban school students and elementary school students were looking forward to the diversification of online teaching methods. on the other hand, the parents’ concerns were also obvious. about 64.1% of parents said they were not clear what type of courses to choose for their children, 52.4% were unfamiliar with online learning operations, and 14.7% said that the network and equipment were in short supply. in addition, parents also had concerns about impaired vision (59.9%), inattention (57.3%), online temptation (49.2%), unanswered questions (43.9%), and poor learning effectiveness (40.9%). problems and countermeasures in online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 763 existing problems differences in policy understanding and implementation education authorities and schools had different understandings of “school is out, but class is on” and lacked systematic and long-term planning. although most provinces and cities had built public service platforms for educational resources, only a few provinces and cities had launched a unified platform. the policies of most provinces and cities were mainly guided by recommendations and standardized requirements. schools organized and arranged themselves in a specific implementation, so there was generally a “one-size-fits-all” implementation of the policy. schools blindly implemented and organized, mainly live broadcast classroom teaching mode, almost made an identical copy of the traditional classroom teaching. the competent education department did not follow up on the access standards, content review, and supervision of online teaching platforms and resources in time, and also lacked guidance on teacher selection platforms. also, hidden dangers existed in the intellectual property rights of online teaching courses during the pandemic. insufficient preparation for basic education informatization the implementation of “school is out, but class is on” at the stage of basic education has exposed the serious problem of insufficient preparation: (i) from the competent department to the school to the teacher, short-term emergency and blind response have occurred; (ii) basic education will be fully networked in a short period is a real frustration and obvious “unsuitable”. this “unsuitability” is mainly reflected in the basic stage of education informatization, which has always focused on schools and classrooms. however, online training outside the school plays an essential supplementary role in the development of basic education informatization and fails to form a systematic and standardized support service system for elementary schools in china. the scientific characteristics and applicability of the teaching plan are insufficient according to the survey data, many regions and schools lack the thinking and design according to local conditions and lack the scientific characteristics and pertinence. the specific performance is as follows: (i) the practice model is relatively simple. the teaching progress is synchronized with the offline teaching, or the schedule is the same as the school learning time. there is no comprehensive consideration, evaluation, and design of the teaching content of different levels and different disciplines. the results of the questionnaire survey showed that 56.6% of teachers tended to use existing or readymade resources for students to learn independently, supplemented by homework guidance. this approach makes the teaching and learning that are originally separated in both time and space less interactive, and the existing curriculum resources are also difficult to meet the dynamic personalized learning needs of students. (ii) most of the online teaching currently used is a free and open platform; it is difficult to realize realwang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 764 time supervision and comprehensive evaluation of students’ learning situations. besides, the online teaching experience during the pandemic and the teaching after pandemic lack a connection, which may become isolated historical data, and cannot be a guiding reference for the teaching after the pandemic. insufficient informatization capabilities of various subjects the lack of information literacy is another practical problem in facing “school is out, but class is on”. at present, the informatization capabilities of various subjects are insufficient. this includes: (i) the ability of the school’s information planning and the rapid organization was insufficient. (ii) teachers’ online teaching ability was uneven. the results of the questionnaire survey showed that 42% of teachers felt anxious, mainly because they did not know how to interact with students online, how to organize teaching activities, and how to deal with equipment operation difficulties. teachers also generally lacked online teaching experience and could not quickly adapt and take advantage of network technology. (iii) students had insufficient online self-learning ability and it was difficult to guarantee learning participation. the results of the questionnaire survey showed that 38.54% of the students had insufficient confidence in adapting to online learning quickly; 37.1% believed that they were less active in online learning; 45.79% said that teachers and parents were required to supervise to complete online learning tasks. (iv) parents had insufficient ability to assist their children in online learning. the results of the survey showed that 52.4% of parents reported that they were not familiar with the operation of online learning, and there was no active and effective solution to the problems that might occur in online learning. weak infrastructure affects the implementation effect weak infrastructure is a fundamental problem that hinders the large-scale popularization of online teaching. this is mainly manifested as (i) insufficient infrastructure preparation, such as large-scale access that greatly exceeds the conventional service capabilities of the platform, and problems such as stalls and frequent disconnections seriously affected the learning experience. (ii) individual users have limited basic equipment. the results of the survey showed that 75.5% of teachers tended to use mobile phones for online teaching, but many teaching platforms and software only support computers, and some institutions’ online teaching programs require more than two computers, which brought inconvenience to online teaching for teachers. also unstable network signals in rural areas have made online teaching a big burden. response measures during the pandemic prevention and control period, online teaching demonstrated many advantages. the online teaching experience and practice accumulated during the “school is out, but class is on” period are very valuable, and it is worth conscientiously summarizing and refining to provide a reference for the subsequent online teaching development. wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 765 macro control, strengthen public support services the informatization foundation and capabilities vary from place to place. to cope with various emergencies, local governments and education authorities need to improve the corresponding management systems and build supporting public service systems. the details include: (i) strengthen investment to ensure that the school’s information infrastructure is in place and promote practical application. (ii) have a long-term and systematic planning, to guide schools to develop specific methods and implementation plans for online teaching in light of local conditions. (iii) strengthen content construction and supervision to improve the digital education-related public service system, increase the effective supply of high-quality educational resources, and expand the coverage of online teaching resources of famous schools and famous teachers. (iv) improve the online teaching-associated support system, provide targeted support services for different users, and ensure the effectiveness of the processing. (v) establish a supervision and guidance mechanism, strengthen coordinated supervision by all regions and departments, broaden social supervision, and improve supervision efficiency. improve the informatization capabilities of various subjects to ensure that online teaching can effectively meet the needs of education and achieve a teaching effect not less than that of face-to-face classrooms, all kinds of educational subjects should pay attention to the improvement of informatization capabilities and form a normalized mechanism. (i) improve the school’s comprehensive informatization capabilities, focusing on strengthening management and technical personnel training, and effectively improving the school’s informatization management level and capabilities. (ii) establish and improve a training system that combines long-term basic and short-term targeted training of teachers ‘information technology application capabilities, so that targeted training and guidance can be quickly initiated in emergencies. (iii) deepen the application of information-based teaching practice, cultivate the habit of teachers and students, improve students’ self-learning ability on the internet, deepen parents’ understanding of online teaching, and improve the application of information technology for teachers, students and parents. build and improve the technical environment and digital resource service system as the basis of online teaching, the technical environment and resources should be given full attention by competent authorities at all levels. (i) at the macro-level, we must provide targeted assistance to areas with limited teaching equipment and network conditions to meet the basic conditions for students to learn online. in the process of allocating teaching resources, the education department should give full consideration to many factors such as school teachers, software and hardware conditions, network implementation, and academic status of the school, so as to promote the full use of digital teaching resources. (ii) at the micro-level, we should focus on strengthening the wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 766 informatization capabilities of education managers and teachers, and provide services such as consulting and technical support to break through technical limitations. it enables education administrators to concentrate on organizing online teacher training, and teachers can concentrate on optimizing online teaching content design. in the future, the government, enterprises, and schools can be laid out following the principle of “infrastructure depends on policies, and individual resources depend on the market.” local governments and education departments should strengthen macro-control and effectively integrate and rationally allocate educational resources. enterprises should be guided by the individualized needs of schools, leading the development and construction of education and teaching resources, and finally the three parties will work together to create a good “internet+” education ecology. references hubei provincial department of education. (2020). provincial department of education’s guidance on the elementary and middle school of the province to carry out network teaching during pandemic prevention and control. available at: http://jyt.hubei.gov.cn/fbjd/tzgg/202001/t 20200130_2016444.shtml [chinese] jiao, j., zhou, x., chen, z. (2020) a case study of “school is out, but class is on” online teaching in the context of pandemic prevention and control. china audiovision education, 2020(3):106-113. [chinese] the ministry of education of china. (2020). general office of the ministry of education office of the ministry of industry and information technology on the elementary and middle school postponement of “school is out, but class is on” related work arrangements notice. available at: http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/a06/s3321 /202002/t20200212_420435.html [chinese] the ministry of education of china. (2020). notice on the delay of the spring semester of 2020. available at: http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xwfb/gzdt_g zdt/s5987/202001/t20200127_416672.ht ml [chinese] wuhan municipal education bureau. (2020). notice of the municipal education bureau on delaying the start of school in the spring of 2020. available at: http://jyj.wuhan.gov.cn/news/2020128/n5 1984963.html [chinese] wuhan municipal education bureau. (2020). wuhan elementary and middle school launched an online teaching implementation plan during the fight against the covid-19 pandemic. available at: http://jyj.wuhan.gov.cn/news/2020128/n6 4324962.html [chinese] zhu, z., peng, h. (2020). all-media learning ecology: a practical solution to the schooling problem of the pandemic period. china audiovision education, 2020(3):16. [chinese] wang, et al. online teaching during the “school is out, but class is on” period in china. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 767 received: 21 april 2020 revised: 02 june 2020 accepted: 12 june 2020 the chinese version of this article has been published in modern educational technology, 2020; 30(3):12-18. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 王冬冬, 王怀波, 张伟, 王海荣, 沈晓萍. (2020).“停课不停学”时期的在线教学研究: 基于全国范围 内的 33,240份网络问卷调研. 现代教育技术, 30(3):12-18. article-dongdongwang-bece_title_15sep2020 article-dongdongwang-bece_maintext15sep2020 “school never stops”: measures and experience in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown marta pellegrini, 1 carla maltinti 2 1. university of florence, firenze fi, 50121, italy 2. regional school office of tuscany, firenze fi, 50136, ministry of education, italy abstract. with the covid-19 outbreak and the resulting lockdown, italian schools have continued to provide education using distance learning systems. in this emergency, the primary aim of the ministry of education was to guarantee each student’s right to education. the expression “school never stops” (“la scuola non si ferma”) is a clear response to the country’s isolation and a demonstration of the school staff’s commitment. this paper describes italy’s educational response during the lockdown by illustrating the measures undertaken by the ministry of education and the initiatives by private and public organizations. the challenges of distance education during the pandemic emergency and future directions for the reopening of schools in september are also examined and discussed. best evid chin edu 2020; 5(2):649-663. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.or021. how to cite: pellegrini, m., maltinti, c. (2020) “school never stops”: measures and experience in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. best evid chin edu, 5(2):649-663. keywords: distance education; covid-19; school never stops; lockdown; school lockdown measures. about the author: carla maltinti, dr., regional school office of tuscany, firenze fi, 50136, ministry of education, italy. email: carla.maltinti@posta.istruzione.it correspondence to: marta pellegrini, phd, department of education, languages, intercultures, literatures and psychology, university of florence, via laura, 48, 50121 firenze fi, italy. email: marta.pellegrini@unifi.it conflict of interests: none. pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 650 he end of january, the world health organization (who) declared that the covid-19 outbreak constituted a public health emergency of international concern, reporting 7,818 confirmed cases worldwide with the highest number of cases in china (who, 2020a). given the wide and rapid spread of the virus and its severity, in march the who declared covid-19 a pandemic. as we know, italy was one of the first countries after china where the number of cases increased rapidly from february. the italian government took immediate measures to halt the spread of the virus, starting from the most affected regions. on february 23, some municipalities in lombardy and veneto have declared ‘red zones and were subjected to quarantine to reduce the spread of the virus outside these regions. after the initial measures that related only to specific areas in the country, the ministerial decree (dpcm) of march 4 established measures at the national level that involved the suspension of public events, the closure of schools and universities, and the recommendation to implement smart working where possible. measures to isolate affected areas and limit the movement of people were no longer effective in a country where the number of cases and deaths had risen exponentially within a few weeks. furthermore, the percentage of patients in intensive care reported daily in early march rose consistently, and by march 11, italy had announced 12,462 cases and 827 deaths (remuzzi & remuzzi, 2020). in this scenario, the ministry of education coined the expression “school never stops” (“la scuola non si ferma”) in response to the entire country’s isolation and the measures taken to continually providing students with online instruction. as rapidly as possible, school principals and teachers implemented distance learning using different systems to deal with the emergency and the suspension of face-to-face instruction. restructuring lessons, creating virtual classes, and managing synchronous and asynchronous communication systems was challenging for teachers and students. in april, further measures by the ministry of education together with the support of several educational and technological organizations helped improve and systematize online teaching and learning. this paper aims to describe italy’s educational response during the early months of the outbreak and to discuss issues concerning distance learning during this period of emergency. future guidelines for the reopening of schools in september – recently published by the ministry – are also examined and discussed. measures and initiatives of the ministry of education the protection of citizens’ health is recognized by the italian constitution as a fundamental right since health represents the premise for the exercise of all the other rights that contribute to the full development of the human person (art. 32 of the italian constitution). the early measures of the ministry of education at the beginning of february concerned the diffusion of the circulars prepared by the ministry of health through the regional school offices (usr). they contained the "indications for the management of students and teachers returning or leaving to affected areas of china" (circular of the ministry of health n. 113/2020). to limit the spread of the outbreak, the decree-law of february 23 suspended school trips in italy and abroad and, later, the dpcm of march t pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 651 4 declared the closure of schools and authorized distance teaching activities in schools and universities. at the same time, a task force was set up at the ministry of education to manage the pandemic emergency; the group was composed by delegates of the civil protection, pediatricians, local delegates of ministry of education, representatives of parents and students associations as well as public and private organizations. as regards the management of the epidemiological situation, it was recommended referring only to information confirmed by official sources and information published by the ministry of education. a website page was opened by the ministry of education in which useful information was constantly updated for schools, universities, and institutions of advanced artistic, musical, and choreatic education. this webpage – still active – is divided into four sections: (i) distance learning in which indications and resources to support schools are published; (ii) faq in which the answers to the most frequently asked questions are available; (iii) measures and rules in which the measures and decrees adopted are available; (iv) links to other useful websites. distance education in italian schools in the last twenty years the measures adopted by ministry of education regarding ict have been of different types and have involved different sectors: (i) technological equipment for schools; (ii) staff training in ict; (iii) support of students at risk of drop out, (ministerial decree n. 55/2002; ministerial decree n. 851/2015). especially two school experiences in place in italy were important to base distance learning during the lockdown. the school in hospital that guarantees education to hospitalized pupils and youths through a variety of systems including distance learning, and the rural school project, that involves about 200 schools located in the italian islands or mountain municipalities. in these isolated contexts, technology has always been central to maintain relationships between teachers and students and to provide education through distance learning at home. despite these actions and experiences, the italian school was not prepared for such a radical change requested by the covid-19 that ‘has thrown’ schools into the dimension of online education systems, with their teachers and families. in the early weeks of the lockdown, teachers undertook a variety of initiatives, such as the transmission of materials by e-mail or class electronic register, the record of video lessons, and the use of distance education platforms activated by their schools, the contact with students via mobile phone. this operation involved over 8 million students, thus their families, and one million workers including school principals, class teachers, support teachers, and educational assistants. the tests for this emergency teaching had never been planned or hypothesized; while teachers and students know the escape routes in case of fire in the school and know where to take shelter in the event of an earthquake, nobody was prepared to teach and learn during a pandemic crisis or had previous experience to base teaching activities. suggestions to deal with distance learning and a wide range of online training courses for teachers were promptly made available by the ministry of education. furthermore, the italian government developed https://www.istruzione.it/coronavirus/index.html pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 652 measures to allow parents to take time off from work during school closure and, at the same time, provided funding to purchase devices for the internet connection, tablets, and laptops (dpcm of march 11). the note of the ministry of education of march 17 provided schools with concrete suggestions to teach using online educational platforms. conscious that nothing could fully replace face-to-face education, the aim was to design a learning environment to be lived by students and teachers and to be reshaped if needed. the document also suggested privileging as far as a possible virtual classroom to conduct and attend online classes. a specific section of the document covered activities for children with disabilities, linguistic and/or socio-economic difficulties, at the hospital or in prison schooling. a mini-guide was provided to teachers on april 6 as methodological and practical support to help students to face the emergency. one of the main objectives was to give pupils a sense of security – without sweetening the reality – providing them with simple and clear information to protect their rights – recognized by the un convention of 1989 – and to stimulate their ability to give original and innovative answers to situations of crisis. the guide developed by the ministry of education contains suggestions of activities to do with students concerning the principles of equality, solidarity, wellbeing, information, listening, and personality development. the followings are relevant statements from the guide: (i) reassuring children and youths without an internet connection or digital devices that state is started to provide them; (ii) teachers should contact by phone students who cannot follow distance education and invite classmates to share their notes with them; (ii) engaging everyone in educational activities that act as a stimulus and encouragement; (iii) video calling children and youths with disabilities involving the whole class or part of it and the whole teaching team in order to give encouraging messages and make families and children feel part of the school; (iv) starting educational activities from telling a story, listening to music, or creating small artifacts; (v) reflecting with children and youths on the new educational experience according to their age and their level of awareness; (vi) proposing to write letters and postcards to grandparents, elderly and lonely people, children in group homes; (vii) proposing the hour of listening, that is one hour of connection per week to listening to the doubts and fears of children and youths; (viii) promoting physical education, through video tutorials, following the motto of ‘relaxing everyone, nobody excluded’; (ix) proposing musical pieces to listen, sing, play and then, make a narration about students’ emotions. since covid-19 does not only concern health but is a social, economic, and cultural crisis, the document made clear the need to guarantee students the right to play, to devote themselves to creative, supportive, awareness-raising, and mutual aid activities. distance education for inclusion as known by the scientific community, italy is one of the first countries that adopted the model of full inclusion abolishing special classes and schools in 1977. during the covid-19 lockdown, particular attention was paid to students with special educational needs and their inclusion in online distance learning. as indicated in the note of the pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 653 ministry of march 17 “the suspension of teaching should not interrupt as far as possible the inclusion process”. the ministry of education suggested supporting teachers to maintain interactions with the pupils with disabilities and between to promote the relationship between the pupil and the other class teachers. furthermore, the document suggested being in contact with the family and to prepare personalized materials for the student and to periodically evaluate the implementation of the individualized education plan. for students with other special needs, such as pupils with linguistic and/or socio-economic difficulties, principals had to assign them – on loan for free use – any devices of school property or request them to the ministry of education. the right of education had also to be guaranteed to hospitalized pupils and youths (school in hospital). the main objective of the web inclusion of all children was to mitigate the potential social isolation connected to the lockdown. for this purpose, the website of the ministry of education had been expanded with a section called ‘inclusion via the web’ (https://www.istruzione.it/coronavirus/didattica-a-distanza_inclusione-via-web.html). it is designed to support the work of principals, teachers, and school staff in providing distance education opportunities to students with special needs. in this section of the website ministry measures, educational experiences, and webinars in collaboration with the institute for educational technologies of national research council (itd-cnr) were published. furthermore, online platforms for distance education were made available free of charge and thanks to the contributions of private organizations that responded to the call launched by the ministry of education. resources for distance learning in the implementation of the so-called ‘cura italia’ (care italy) decree-law (decreelaw n. 18/2020), the economic resources were allocated and distributed very quickly among schools to enhance distance education. of the total amount of 85 million euros, 10 million were allocated to the use of e-learning platforms and to immediately increase or equip schools with digital tools; 70 million were used to purchase digital devices to be assigned on loan for free use to the students with low socioeconomic status; the remaining 5 million were invested in school staff’s training. the assignment of digital devices (for 70% of the amount) was based on the pisa index of economic, social and cultural status (escs-oecd) that allowed to identify areas of disadvantaged families and in which digital devices are less widespread. furthermore, the ministerial decree n. 187 of march 26 established the procedures to assign to schools the 1,000 computer technicians, who are giving support to teachers in distance learning. an additional amount of 80 million euros were then provided to primary and middle schools through the pon (programma operativo nazionale) call – funds from the european structural funds – for the purchase of computers, tablets, and devices for the internet connection. the aim was to guarantee everyone access to distance education. funds were also provided to the provincial centers for adult education (cpia), prison schooling, and schools in hospitals. pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 654 to support schools and families the ministry of digital technology and digitization, with the technical support of the agency for digital italy promoted the ‘digital solidarity’ project. it is solidarity collaboration between the public and private sectors to facilitate smart working, education, well-being, and, therefore, distance communication. companies, associations, and other organizations have provided free digital services to limit economic damage to families, citizens, and businesses. the goal was also to improve the lives of citizens forced to stay at home and reduce social contacts and travel as much as possible, even within cities, to protect themselves and others from contagion. many private and public organizations showed great solidarity towards schools and families supporting the growth of a school community. additional initiatives to implement distance education the covid-19 emergency forced millions of teachers and students to adopt distance learning using digital technologies. however, they were aware that these technologies would not reach the entire school population. not only has the digital divide concerning those who do not have the devices in italy, but even more those who are unable to use them. to deal with these issues the ministry of education promoted collaborations with radio and state television as well as publishing houses and training agencies to offer additional training and educational opportunities besides online distance education. learning through radio and television the health emergency and the requests for interpersonal distancing had given value to the role of the italian state television (rai) for many reasons: ease of use; a powerful way to overcome the digital divide; the accessibility throughout the country without the need of broadband wi-fi internet connection; and the cultural, historical, and artistic richness of the rai archives. in italy over 97% of family units have the television and watching television may reinforce family relationships (censis, 2018). according to the agreement between the ministry of education and the rai a wide range of television channels and programs were dedicated to education. in contrast with distance education, which is mainly developed online, rai has made available to the schools, families, and students of all ages educational contents and lessons usable with every device. a vast repository of products and educational programs was offered on rai cultura (which includes rai scuola, rai storia, rai3), rai ragazzi, and raiplay. among the various initiatives promoted, ‘la scuola in tv’ provided students with lessons on many subjects (e.g., english, mathematics, history, literature, art, greek, latin) taught by expert teachers identified by the ministry of education. this service also includes programs dedicated to adult education (e.g. adults participating in prison schooling) as well as programs channels to support students in preparing the secondary school state exam. even the radio – maturadio – offered over 250 educational podcasts to students who are going to take the state exam. pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 655 unexpected professional development principals, teachers, and administrative offices had no breaks in delivering educational services and in being committed to improving their professional skills especially related to technology. in response to the need to be up to the new task, free training offers were rapidly promoted by institutions, private companies, and publishing houses. the national institute for documentation, innovation, and educational research (indire) has provided hundreds of free webinars on good practices to support innovation processes as well as video tutorials for the use of distance education platforms differentiated by the level of skills in collaboration with ‘etwinning’ – a community for schools in europe. many other organizations (e.g., usrs, publishing houses, itd-cnr, scientific and educational societies) had made available training materials and training opportunities for teachers. the offer of training courses was based on the specific need of the schools; when schools were well technology equipped the training offer was directed to contents and educational methods; when schools had teachers with a low level of digital skills the training offer was focused on the technical aspects of the use of the distance learning platforms. the covid-19 emergency also required significant sensitive and relational resources; therefore webinars on the management of anxiety were widely attended by teachers. the most used e-learning platforms were the ones created specifically for schools and listed by the ministry of education as compliant with the regulations (eu regulation 2016/679): g-suite for education (google), office 365 education a1 (microsoft), weschool (telecom italia mobile). to use them, many teachers were engaged in many hours of detailed study with the support of the school digital animator. this professional and moral commitment is demonstrated by over 35 thousand accesses to the website the ministry of education on the first day of distance education. as a result of both the covid-19 pandemic and everyone’s commitment to the digital skills of citizens – in particular of teachers – have been improved and strengthened. distance education: challenges during the covid-19 lockdown since the closure of schools and universities on march 5, the effort of principals and teachers was to provide instruction with online systems, as required by the dpcm of march 4. in the space of a few days, teachers, students, and their families were ‘thrown’ into a new reality and an approach to schooling characterized by virtual relationships instead of face-to-face ones. as a consequence of the emergency, a huge social change put into question the traditional teaching and learning process and demanded that teachers and parents design and manage online education at home. since the covid-19 crisis, online learning is considered “a critical lifeline for education” (organization for economic cooperation and development, 2020a, p. 1). pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 656 this rapid change was carried out within a few weeks, not without difficulties and issues mainly related to school organization, social inequalities, and the teachers’ knowledge and skills in using online platforms. the challenges faced by italy were similar to those all over the world (organization for economic cooperation and development, 2020b). organizing online teaching and learning one of the first challenges was to completely change the organizational rules and models for providing education. during the initial weeks, assignments, and homework via email or whatsapp were the most common ways of connecting with students. this was done to maintain an active relationship between teachers and students; in other words, a way to show that schools were not stopping. some schools started directly with online lessons through platforms already familiar to principals and teachers, such as microsoft teams, zoom, and g suite. in the beginning, each school used whatever they already knew how to use. as a consequence, the methods for continuing school activities varied considerably between schools. as quickly as possible, the ministry of education identified platforms to choose from and provided guidelines for online education – as explained in the previous paragraph. another organizational challenge emerged especially with students in primary schools, due to their low level of autonomy and self-control. the role of parents during the lockdown has been extremely important especially in primary schools; due to the lack of teacher guidance in the school context, many parents supported their children in studying and supervised them during the synchronous lessons. many people worked from home during the lockdown, meaning that parents often had to work from home using their personal computers and at the same time take care of their children and support them studying. on the one hand, this situation fostered a closer relationship between teachers and parents and a further integration between school education and family education, as happened also in china (zhou & li, 2020). on the other hand, supporting children in school activities demanded that parents manage the time devoted to work and their children and, for many families, access to the one device in their house. furthermore, with the transition to phase two that happened a few days ago, other issues emerged since many people went back to work. as mentioned by locatelli and mincu (2020) phase two “may create even greater difficulties for families where parents need to go back to work and cannot afford to pay someone to take care of their children, who must stay at home because of the school closures”. social inequality and the digital divide these organizational issues are linked to another wider issue, namely social inequality throughout the country. the crisis generated by the covid-19 outbreak had a significant impact during these months on disadvantaged families and intensified existing inequalities (locatelli & mincu, 2020). knowing the parents’ prominent role in providing pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 657 support in education during this period of lockdown, children living in families with a high level of education had better opportunities to cope with online learning compared to vulnerable and poor families. the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd, 2016) found that in italy, 27.7% of adults are at or below level 1 in literacy and 31.7% in numeracy. as a consequence, many parents might not have sufficient skills to give their children the necessary educational support. a recent report by save the children on poverty in italy showed a huge increase in the level of poverty of children (aged 0-17) from 2008 to 2018 (caderna, 2019). in 2008, 3.7% of children were in poverty, while in 2018 the percentage more than tripled (12.5%), with a clear disparity between the north and south of italy – 45% of the children in poverty in 2018 lived in the south. furthermore, the index of cultural deprivation of children ages 6-17 – calculated considering the access to cultural activities, such as theater, cinema, museum, and concerts – showed that 7 children out of 10 are considered ‘deprived’. the istat data (2020) suggests that these children might be the ones who suffered the most during the lockdown and that inequalities may grow due to the covid-19 crisis. inequality was inevitably intensified during the lockdown due to the introduction of distance learning systems to provide students with lessons at home. the istat data (2020) showed that in 2019, 33.8% of italian families had no computer or tablet. the percentage dropped to 14.3% when only families with at least one child were considered. 22.2% of families in italy have a computer or a tablet for each family member. students aged 6-17 often have low digital skills; only 30.2% of children have high digital skills, resulting in a low level of autonomy to study using a computer. furthermore, 23.9% of italian families do not have access to the internet at home and 41.9% of children live in overcrowded housing, two problems that together reduce the children’s possibility of studying in a quiet place using online systems. it is estimated that 6.7 million students were reached by distance learning during the lockdown, while 1.6 million students were excluded (cittadinanza attiva, 2020). to limit the rise of inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged people and to make distance learning possible throughout italy, at the end of march the ministry of education allocated funds to purchase digital devices in order “not to leave anyone behind”, quoting lucia azzolina, minister of education. the effects of this situation were particularly damaging for the most vulnerable students, including students with disabilities. many teachers and principals believe that the greatest difficulty has been developing a system capable of giving the necessary attention to pupils with disabilities, to adapt and personalize contents and educational strategies through distance learning (fundaro, 2020). despite the inevitable difficulties in providing students with personalized instruction through online systems, many initiatives were promoted by the ministry of education, private associations, and publishers to support teachers and families during the lockdown – as described in the previous paragraph. teachers’ knowledge and skills in distance learning pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 658 one of the first issues raised by the covid-19 crisis was the capability of teachers to provide distance learning. according to the talis 2018 report (oecd, 2020c), italy is below the oecd average for the level of ict usage during class lessons – 47% of teachers answered that they allow students to frequently use ict during lessons. regarding teacher professional development, 52% of teachers reported that they have attended some kind of training on ict, 36% felt sufficiently skilled to use ict in teaching after completing their training. furthermore, the pisa 2018 data (oecd, 2020a) showed that 50% of the principals believed that teachers in their school have the necessary technical and pedagogical skills to integrate digital devices in their teaching. further data published by the european commission in 2019 and weschool showed a worse scenario regarding professional development on ict; only 20% of teachers have attended digital literacy training courses, 20% can teach remotely, 40% would like to learn to do it, and the remaining 40% are against it (pasta, 2020). these data revealed that italian schools and teachers were not fully prepared for the shift from face-to-face instruction to distance learning that occurred due to the covid-19 outbreak. nevertheless, a huge change was achieved in the first months of the lockdown thanks to the commitment of principals and teachers and free professional development initiatives. teachers’ efforts were recognized by public authorities, families, and more in general by society as a whole, and their efforts, like those of healthcare personnel, are uncontested throughout the country. as regards teacher professional development, in the first weeks of the school closures the need to know and use the various online systems was particularly highlighted. later on, more attention was given to creating digital content and adapting faceto-face instruction to the online way of delivering education (caponata et al., 2020). as mentioned in the previous paragraph, a prominent role was played by the indire, which provided teachers with first-hand support on online learning systems, and later webinars on topics related to teaching and learning strategies, evaluation, and more in general to distance learning. these initiatives were essential in addressing the emergency, however further "suitable measures will have to be adopted [at the ministry level] to provide all teachers with the necessary skills to deal with the digital transformation which has been accelerated by this emergency" (locatelli & mincu, 2020). plan for the reopening of schools as we approach the end of the school year in mid-june, the major concern for people involved in schools – the ministry, principals and teachers, parents and students, experts, and researchers – regards the conditions under which schools will start in september. although the decision partially depends on how the outbreak develops during summer, the ministry of education is working to provide guidelines for the new school year. the question from many experts and teachers is: on what basis will the ministry of education make decisions on how to reopen schools? to answer this question, it would be important to know what worked and what did not, based on the data that the ministry should have been collected during these months. a rigorous evolution would have not been feasible in a period of emergency, pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 659 during which the aim was to provide education and to continue the relationship between teachers and students. however, data on the opinions of teachers, students, and parents on distance education would have helped to effectively design the reopening of schools in september. in italy, few data were collected during this first attempt at distance learning and no investigations regarding the implementation of distance learning were launched at the central level of the ministry of education. data were collected by the usr of each region, but only some of them published the results on their websites. an investigation ‘youth and quarantine’ promoted by the di.te. national association (technology addictions, gap, cyberbullying) and skuola.net collected data on the opinions of students, parents, and teachers on distance learning through a survey. although the initiative is certainly valuable, it did not provide a picture of the entire country. participation was voluntary, with 1,245 responses, which represent a few data considering that there are about 8 million students in italy. as a consequence of the lack of a centrally promoted investigation, we do not have a clear and exhaustive picture of what worked and what should be improved in reopening schools. a positive initiative by the ministry of education to restart schools in september was to collect best practices in a dedicated section of its website and its social network pages. experiences, stories, and examples of distance learning in italian schools were collected and shared as a way to animate the narrative of best practices, to bring together educational institutions, and to show that the school wanted to move forward, even in such a difficult and unpredictable time. a few days ago, on may 28, the ministry of education published the guidelines for school reopening in september which take into account the recommendations of the who (2020b). with this document, the ministry proposed to start the new school year mainly using face-to-face education. according to the guidelines, it will be necessary to observe interpersonal distancing and hygiene requirements by wearing a mask, differentiating the times of entry and exit of students, and reorganizing the classroom space, such as the arrangement of the desks and furniture. interpersonal distancing is more difficult to observe in preschool and kindergarten. for this reason, organizational and personnel precautions will be required, e.g. disinfecting regularly the surfaces, washing hands, and reducing the number of pupils present in each class at the same time. each school may decide to alternate face-to-face education and distance learning based on the spaces available and the age of the students. primary schools should privilege face-to-face lessons, while middle and secondary schools may propose the use of distance learning systems for part of the educational time to reduce the number of pupils in the school environment. the recommendation is to use school outdoor facilities for physical activities, breaks, and lessons when possible (council of ministers and technical scientific committee of may 28). conclusions pellegrini & maltinti. measures and experiences in italian schools during the covid-19 lockdown. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 660 during the covid-19 pandemic, teachers, principals and families showed a great commitment to continuing to provide students with the education, thus responding to the ‘schools never stops’ principle put forward by the ministry of education. in some cases, despite a few digital resources and skills, they tried to guarantee each student’s right to education, also through the use of additional resources (e.g., television channels). in a few months, the ministry of education, with the support of other organizations, provided professional development to teachers and technological devices to students, accelerating the integration of technology in the teaching and learning process. however – as discussed in the article – there is an urgent need to overcome the difficulties and challenges faced during these past months in time for the reopening of schools. among the most critical issues discussed in this paper, it is worth mentioning social inequalities exacerbated by the lockdown and the preparedness of school staff in the redesign of educational strategies and contents for distance learning. this new way of teaching introduced during the lockdown has increased the difference in students’ opportunity to learn in italy worldwide. students with disabilities, with a low socioeconomic status as well as students with no technological equipment or an internet connection, were the ones who suffered the most during this period for the low access and participation in distance learning. this issue should be taken into account in effectively designing the reopening of schools in september; these students need the adequate support they did not receive during more than three months of lockdown by their teachers or parents. italy may look at the initiatives for school reopening announced by other countries that are facing the covid-19 crisis, such as the netherlands and the uk that have planned to provide the most needier students with tutoring by an adult (slavin, 2020a; 2020b). tutoring – recognized by many international reviews of research as the most effective practice with struggling students (inns et al., 2020; pellegrini et al., 2020) – could accelerate the learning of students who did not participate in online learning or did not improve their learning during the lockdown due to different reasons. furthermore, there is the need to invest in teacher professional development to improve their competencies in using online educational tools, and more in general technology to make sure to provide students with adequate resources, contents, and strategies in online, face-to-face, or blended learning in september. for the reopening of schools in september, the ministry of education has established a committee of experts to support the ministry in making decisions and to provide advice about innovations to be implemented in schools. according to the ministry’s course of action for school reopening (latest plan dated may 28), face-to-face education will be privileged since the school is, as recognized by the document, the context in which each child has the opportunity to properly grow and develop. the ministry guidelines of may 28 are not final and will be updated in the following weeks to provide a clear guideline for 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(2020b) key messages and actions for covid-19 prevention and control in schools. https://www.who.int/docs/defaultsource/coronaviruse/key-messages-andactions-for-covid-19-prevention-andcontrol-in-schools-march2020.pdf?sfvrsn=baf81d52_4 zhou, l., wu, s., zhou, m., & li, f. (2020) ‘school is out, but class is on’, the largest online education in the world today: taking china’s practical exploration during the covid-19 epidemic prevention and control as an example. best evid chin edu, 4(2):501-519. received: 04 june 2020 revised: 26 june 2020 accepted: 02 july 2020 originalarticle-martapellegrini-bece_title_15july2020 originalarticle-martapellegrini-bece_maintext15july2020 bece. newsletter bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1276 does being left behind estrange the peer relationship? an empirical analysis based on ceps by qian, j., hao, y.p. correspondence to: qian, j, central china normal university. e-mail: qianjia@mail.ccnu.edu.cn eer relationships can not only reflect the intimacy and harmony in children’s interaction with others, but also represent an important aspect of children's socialization and a key indicator of social adaptation. the absence of family education from parents may lead to deviations in the behavior of left-behind children, making them more likely to be rejected by their peers in the process of socialization. this paper uses the data of 2013-2014 baseline survey, china education panel survey (ceps) and adopts the propensity score matching method (psm) to explore whether staying behind will affect children’s peer interactions? is there a causal relationship, and to what extent? is there heterogeneity among different groups? this study defines the peer relationship as a dependent variable, staying behind as an independent variable, and staying behind as the state with one or both parents leaving home for employment, and other control variables including age, gender, and grade are used. first, using the least squares method, with peer relationship as the dependent variable and staying behind as the core independent variable for regression, the results show that staying behind experience has a negative impact on the construction of students' peer relationships. then, using staying behind as the dependent variable and the selected covariate as the independent variable, the logit model is established. the regression results show that male students whose ethnicity is han, being only child and in seventh grade, and with fathers of low level of education are more likely to be left behind. the results of the probability model of propensity score show that there is a non-negligible heterogeneity between the left © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. p mailto:qianjia@mail.ccnu.edu.cn bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1277 behind and the non-left-behind. in order to ensure the accuracy of the result of propensity matching scores, this study carried out a balance test, and the matching effect and estimation results were good, and at the same time, the common support hypothesis was satisfied. after that, by matching the samples according to different left-behind status, different grades, different genders, and whether they are boarding students, this paper studied the heterogeneity of the impact of staying behind on the peer relationship of students. it is concluded that the negative impact of staying behind on the peer relationship of students is more prominent among those seventh grade non-boarding boy students (the younger ones in the sample) with fathers leaving home. finally, based on the use of the psm method, the propensity score is incorporated as a new variable into the regression model, to establish a regression model that effectively controls the sample selection bias. according to the results of sharpley value decomposition, staying behind can contribute 3.75% to the explainable variation of peer relationships, that is, left-behind students are in a "relatively disadvantaged position" in terms of peer relationship construction. based on above findings, this research puts forward several suggestions:  strengthen psychological guidance for the key development stages of the socialization of left-behind children, because schools and teachers play a guiding role in the construction of student peer relationships.  emphasize parents’ family education responsibilities to leftbehind children, and guide migrant worker parents to pay attention to the mental health, peer communication and social communication of left-behind children.  further reform the urban and rural household registration system, solve the problem of schooling for children living with migrant parents, turn population mobility from "individual mobility" to "family mobility", and change the state of "parent-child separation". source: education and economy, 2021;(04):48-55+80. the mediating role of anti-bullying administrative measures in the relationship between bullying and students’ core competencies i-hua chen, 1 ni xie, 2 zhi-yuan meng 1 1. qufu normal university, qufu 273165, shandong, china 2. guizhou normal university, guiyang 550001, guizhou, china abstract. this research evaluates the role of school administrative measures (including creating a greater school belonging and paying attention to student attendance) as independent variables and their resulting core competencies through the mediator of students’ experience with school bullying. this study adopted a multi-level mediation model to empirically analyze data from middle school students and school administration in four chinese provinces based on the 2015 programme for international student assessment (pisa). data were collected from a total of 9,060 students and 260 administrative staff. the results were: (i) relational bullying was significantly and negatively correlated with the three core competencies, although no significant impact was found for either verbal or physical bullying; (ii) schools which were successful in creating a more positive environment, including greater school belonging and greater attention to students’ attendance, demonstrated lower levels of relational bullying; (iii) in terms of school-level variables, a greater sense of shared belonging had a direct effect on improving student performance on math and science competencies, while greater attention to students’ attendance was associated with higher student scores on all three core competencies; (iv) furthermore, school-level variables, including the sense of shared belonging and greater attention to students’ attendance demonstrated a positive indirect effect on students’ core competencies through the mediating effect of reduced relational bullying. best evid chin edu 2020; 5(2):681-701. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar050. chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no.2, 2020 682 how to cite: chen, i.h., xie, n., meng, z.y. (2020) the mediating role of antibullying administrative measures on the relationship between bullying and students’ core competencies. best evid chin edu, 5(2):681-701. keywords: core competencies; school bullying; school administration; attendance; sense of belonging; multi-level mediation modeling; 2015 pisa. about the authors: ni xie, d.ed., school of education, guizhou normal university, guiyang 550001, guizhou, china. email: 364236069@qq.com. zhi-yuan meng, doctorate candidate, school of statistics, qufu normal university, qufu 273165, shandong, china. email: 1360881683＠qq.com. correspondence to: i-hua chen, d.ed., professor, chinese academy of education big data, qufu normal university, qufu 273165, shandong, china. email: aholechen@gmail.com. funding: the 2016 general education project of the china social science fund, “college entrance examination and research on transformation and development of general high schools" (bha169000). conflict of interests: none. mailto:364236069@qq.com mailto:aholechen@gmail.com chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 683 introduction lobally, educational administrators and policymakers hold the standardized scores reported by the programme for international student assessment (pisa) in high regard, placing a strong emphasis on pisa’s measurement of core competencies, holding these scores as indicators of school success (wu, 2013). the emphasis of student performance on pisa, thus, reflects the role that school administrators must play in the cultivation of students’ core competencies. however, pisa not only evaluates the core competencies of 15-year-old middle school students across the globe (in terms of mathematics, reading, and science), but also collects a wide range of relevant background information, including studentand school-level factors which may influence student performance. as such, pisa data serves as a valuable source for educational researchers in empirically investigating the potential relationships between performance on core competencies and other relevant background factors, the results of which can reveal, to a certain degree, which factors related to school administration demonstrate the greatest influence on students’ academic performance in terms of the three core competencies. given the availability of studentand school-level background data, some chinese researchers have already begun to conduct studies using a variety of items from pisa datasets. in the case of students’ science competencies, zhao, guo, and jiao (2017) utilized multi-level analysis to evaluate pisa data, demonstrating the significant and positive effects of school-level variables, including the provision of creative extracurricular activities, scientific resources, and greater cooperation among science teachers. in terms of reading, science, and mathematics competencies, chen (2017) found significant effects for non-cognitive factors, including achievement motivation, parental emotional support, reduced test anxiety, and a sense of belonging to the school. although a sense of belonging to the school, as measured in chen’s (2017) study, was based on individual students’ perceptions, the construct of “belongingness” can also serve as a higher-level (school-level) variable in multi-level modeling, as in the shared perceptions among students of the same school. in this manner, the use of school-level belongingness can better reflect the degree to which school administration is effective in developing an appropriate environment for teaching and learning. while the aforementioned studies have evaluated the relationship between school measure variables, such as the provision of activities and resources, with students’ performance on core competencies, the relationships among school bullying, school administration efforts and students’ core competencies have not yet been empirically evaluated. therefore, this study utilized the pisa data released in 2015 to empirically explore the relationships among school administration factors, student bullying, and the three core competencies (mathematics, reading, and science). variables belonging to different levels, both school-level and student-level, were included in the multilevel mediation modeling analysis of the present analysis. the aim of this analysis was to evaluate how school-level variables, including school administration, can influence student-level variables, such as performance on core competencies, by considering the g chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 684 mediating role of school bullying. as such, this study contributes a new perspective on the prevention of school bullying that, in turn, has the potential for improving adolescent students’ performance in terms of core competencies. independent variables: creating a sense of shared belonging and attention to student attendance based on the limitations facing existing studies, which were based on single-level models, this study adopted a multi-level analysis, including mediation, using aggregated data from the 2015 pisa datasets. this data was used to generate school-level independent variables including a) creating a sense of shared belonging and b) attention to student attendance. since these two school-level factors reflect the administrative actions or measures implemented by school staff, they are highly practical in nature and can be generalized to other contexts. based on preliminary analytical results adopting single-level analysis, these two variables were supported as relevant to both students’ performance on core competencies and school bullying, serving as the basis for the decision to further test these relationships using a multi-level mediation model. in terms of the sense of shared belonging to one’s school, chen (2017) demonstrated that higher levels for the sense of shared belonging were associated with higher core competencies for adolescent students. furthermore, students’ perceived sense of belonging to the school was negatively associated with reported bullying (chen & zhi, 2017; didaskalou et al., 2017). in terms of student attendance, research has demonstrated that student truancy has negative impacts on academic achievement and is associated with reported bullying on campus (gastic, 2008). based on the aforementioned studies, administrative measures that both develop a sense of shared belonging and greater attention to student attendance are relevant to the incidence of school bullying as well as student performance on core competencies. mediator: school bullying the results of a meta-analysis have shown that school bullying has a significant negative effect on academic achievement (nakamoto & schwartz, 2012). empirical evidence supporting the negative influence of bullying served as a basis for this study in selecting school bullying as a mediating variable. moreover, the school bullying is both a new item for pisa, added for the first time in 2015 (oecd, 2017a), and an increasingly prevalent issue in chinese education in recent years (yang et al., 2017; li, 2017; wang et al., 2015). according to the oecd (2017a), after controlling for the influence of the overall socio-economic status of a school’s families, students who report being more frequently bullied at school scored 47% lower on the science competency exam as compared with students who reported infrequent bullying. given the fact that peer victimization has a profound impact on student learning performance, the pisa report (oecd, 2017a) urges schools to take concrete measures to curb school bullying, adding that school bullying directly and negatively impacts students’ performance on core competency measures. furthermore, the report chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 685 (oecd, 2017a) suggests that, in order to improve campus safety and enhance students’ potential learning success, schools must actively enact student management policies. based on this logic, the mediating role of school management efforts is seen as a means to indirectly improve students’ performance on core competencies by directly reducing school bullying. following the release of the 2015 pisa data and report, some studies in china have conducted secondary data analysis on school bullying-related topics (e.g., chen & zhi, 2017; huang, 2017). however, thus far, no studies have adopted a multi-level mediation model including the school-level administration variables of (i) developing a sense of shared belonging and (ii) attention to student attendance. research questions the purpose of this study was to investigate the degree to which school-level independent variables indirectly influence students’ performance on core competencies through the mediation of the student-level variable of school bullying. this study utilized raw data from students and administrators in mainland china from the 2015 pisa datasets in the development of a multi-level mediation model. based on recommended procedures for examining mediation effects in multi-level models (wen & chiou, 2009), the research questions of this study are stated as follows: rq1: does school bullying significantly influence students’ performance in terms of reading, mathematics, and science competencies? rq2: does an administrative approach that seeks to develop a sense of shared belonging and pays greater attention to student attendance significantly reduce students’ experiences of school bullying? rq3: does the reported sense of shared belonging and student attendance significantly explain differences among students in terms of performance on reading, mathematics, and science competencies? rq4: does a sense of shared belonging and student attendance have a significant indirect effect on students’ performance on reading, mathematics, and science competencies through the mediating factor of school bullying? multi-level modeling procedures assuming that school administrative policies and procedures will directly reduce school bullying which, in turn, will indirectly influence students’ performance on core competencies, a fundamental feature of the research model was the relationship between school administration factors and school bullying. in order to clarify the relationship between these two factors, related variables were first controlled. the following sections discuss the control variables included in the multi-level model and research hypotheses corresponding to the paths of the multi-level model. control variables chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 686 based on a review of school bullying research, certain student-level and school-level demographic variables have been found to influence the occurrence of school bullying. however, since many of these variables were not the focus of the model developed in this study, they are treated as control variables. in terms of student-level variables, gender, grade, and family socioeconomic status were included as control variables. based on the findings of huang (2017), who evaluated 2015 pisa data from mainland china, boys, and lower grade students were more likely to be victims of bullying. furthermore, jansen et al. (2012) reported that adolescents in the netherlands from families of lower social status reported a higher proportion of physical and psychological bullying symptoms and, as such, more strongly experienced the negative effects of school bullying. in terms of school-level variables, the school’s overall family socioeconomic status, school size, and location of the school district were included as control variables in the multi-level model. the school’s overall family socioeconomic status was necessarily included based on the results of a multi-level study of high school students from various countries, which revealed that large gaps in the levels of economic purchasing power among families in a school district were associated with more frequent occurrences of school bullying (due et al., 2009). based on the recommendations of due et al.’s study, a school’s overall family socioeconomic status, as a school-level variable, must be controlled. the size and location of schools were also evaluated by the model, in reference to betts’ (2014) investigation into the relationship between the size and location of schools and differences in the occurrence of school bullying, with students from larger schools demonstrating greater vulnerability to physical bullying, and location (urban vs. rural) showing no significant influence. thus, although there no significant impact on school location was noted in betts’ (2014) study, due to the large educational gaps between china’s urban and rural areas, it was considered prudent to incorporate school location in the model as a school-level control variable. research hypotheses the research hypotheses proposed by this study are in reference to the limited findings of prior single-level studies. the expansion of the proposed model to a methodology adopting multi-level analysis was deemed prudent, given the potential contribution of both the student-level and school-level variables discussed in previous sections of this paper. sense of shared belonging the first school-level variable included in the multi-level model was “sense of shared belonging.” a sense of shared belonging can be conceptualized as a student-level constructor, in the case of this study, computed as a school-level variable through the aggregation of data from a school’s entire student population. thus, as a school-level variable, the interpretation of “sense of shared belonging” differs from the student-level construct in that, in addition to representing the shared and collective perceptions regarding the school environment by a school’s student population, it can also reflect the school’s overall administrative efforts towards the development of an appropriate envichen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 687 ronment for teaching and learning, including care for and acceptance of students (freeman et al., 2007). while past empirical studies have evaluated sense of belonging as a student-level variable (chen, 2017; chen & zhi, 2017), in order to evaluate the efficacy of school administration in anti-bullying efforts (stewart, 2008), a sense of shared belonging was set as a school-level construct in this study. furthermore, it should be noted that liu and liu’s (2011) follow-up study found no significant correlation between students’ sense of belonging (as a student-level variable) and academic achievement, after differentiating initial stage and linear growth values. as such, this study adopts students’ sense of shared belonging as an emotional factor, with the influence of emotional factors on academic achievement operating as an indirect, rather than direct, effect. based on the findings of previous studies investigating students’ sense of belonging, it seems more likely that a sense of shared belonging, as a school-level variable, can best reflect the degree to which school administrators actively and effectively develop an environment wherein students develop positive feelings towards the school, leading to better academic performance. however, although the school-level sense of shared belonging influences the core competencies of individual students across levels, the possible mediating effects have yet to be investigated. as liu and liu (2011) conclude, students’ sense of belonging serves as an emotional factor that indirectly influences academic achievement through other mediating variables (dong & yu, 2010). thus, this study hypothesizes that a school-level sense of shared belonging will influence students’ performance in terms of pisa core competencies (rq3). as such, this study proposed school bullying as a potential mediator for the influence of a sense of shared belonging on students’ core competencies. specifically, victims of bullying often feel a lack of acceptance within a school’s environment and, as a result, fail to seek assistance, retreat from school life, and demonstrate lower levels of confidence, resulting in an increased likelihood of being bullied further, resulting in a long-term vicious cycle (chen & zhi, 2017; didaskalou et al., 2017). moreover, a significant correlation exists between the experience of being bullied and low academic achievement, based on the meta-analysis of nakamoto and schwartz (2010). thus, this study hypothesizes that bullying directly impacts students’ performance on core competencies (rq1). from the previously noted single-level empirical studies, students’ sense of shared belonging and school bullying appear to be causally linked, making it difficult to determine which variables are independent and which are mediators. however, by aggregating individual data in computing a school-level variable for a sense of shared belonging and adopting bullying as a student-level variable, the independent variable and mediating variable can be more clearly assessed. from the perspective of multi-level mediation analysis, higher-level (school-level) variables are generally adopted as independent variables and are hypothesized to influence the lower-level (student-level) variables (wen & ye, 2014). therefore, the “sense of shared belonging” as a school-level was adopted as the independent variable and school bullying as the mediating variable. after determining the possible paths among the three variables (students’ sense of shared belonging, school bullying, and student core competencies), we hypothesized chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 688 that school administrators, by actively developing students’ sense of shared belonging would a) directly prevent school bullying (rq2) while b) indirectly improving students’ core competencies (rq4). attention to student attendance based on pisa data, the factor regarding the school administration’s efforts towards “attention to student attendance” is evaluating using three items evaluating: students’ lateness, skipped classes, and truancy. these are student-level variables in the original 2015 pisa datasets but were aggregated as a school-level variable reflecting the administration’s attentiveness to school attendance. students’ timeliness and attendance are undoubtedly necessary to ensure the quality of learning. if students are not willing to attend classes or are truant, they are not likely to perform well academically (fang, 2007). as such, paying closer attention to students’ attendance in one measure by which school administrators can promote students’ attendance classes and timeliness, factors assumed to have a direct effect on students’ performance on core competencies. thus, this study hypothesizes that school-level sense of attention to student attendance will demonstrate an influence on students’ performance in terms of pisa core competencies (rq3). furthermore, the pisa report (oecd, 2017a) suggests that when students realize that the school will attentively enforce school rules, bullying events will be reduced. therefore, it is possible that more attentive student management by the administration, as a school-level variable, can deter the occurrence of school violence, reduce opportunities for students to experience bullying, and have a positive indirect effect on students’ core competencies. thus, in the multi-level model, school bullying likewise serves as a mediator between school administrators’ efforts to enforce student attendance and students’ resulting performance on core competencies. close relationships have been found among school bullying, student attendance, and academic achievement (gastic, 2008). in order to avoid bullying, students may protect themselves by avoiding the school environment. however, by skipping classes, such students fail to keep up with lessons, resulting in poor academic performance. the research of zhao and zhu (2012), targeting both juvenile offenders and non-offending middle school students, found that skipping classes was closely associated with peer victimization, demonstrating that skipping classes weakened the relationship between students and the school, leaving them vulnerable to negative behaviors. as such, skipping classes has a mutually causal relationship with school bullying, wherein bullied students attempt to skip classes to avoid peer victimization but, by skipping classes, lose their connection with the school, preventing victimized students from obtaining assistance and continuing to suffer bullying. thus, this study hypothesizes that bullying directly influences students’ performance on core competencies (rq1). as previously noted, if the single-level analysis is adopted, it is difficult to determine the independent variable from a bi-directional correlation. however, by aggregating attendance as a higher-level (school-level) variable, the independent and mediating variable can be clearly distinguished. since the school-level factor of attention to chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 689 students’ attendance, as defined in this study, reflects the attentiveness of the school’s administration in the implementation and enforcement of school rules, this variable serves as a higher-level, school-level variable and an independent variable in evaluating the effectiveness of school bullying prevention. therefore, this study hypothesizes that if the school administration pays attention to students’ attendance through a more attentive administrative approach, they will demonstrate that the school attaches importance to students’ learning, resulting in a strengthened relationship between students and the school and more effective prevention of school bullying. in this way, an attentive school administration, which pays attention to students’ attendance, mediated by a decrease in school bullying, has the potential to improve students’ core competencies. after determining the possible paths among the three variables (attention to school attendance, school bullying, and student core competencies), we hypothesized that school administrators, by paying more attention to student’s attendance would a) directly prevent school bullying (rq2) while b) indirectly improving students’ core competencies (rq4). research methods data source variables from the 2015 pisa dataset were selected for analysis, including background information on students and school administration. these samples represented the chinese provinces of beijing, shanghai, jiangsu, and guangdong. data from a total of 9,841students and 268 schools (with each school represented by one school administrator) were analyzed. after excluding missing data, the number of valid subjects included 9,060 students (52.4% male and 47.6% female) and 260 administrative staff. from among these schools, schools with a total student population of less than 1,600 accounted for 59.2% of schools, while schools with more than 1,600 students accounted for 41.8% of total schools. schools located in towns and small cities accounted for 50.8% of the total, with schools located in large cities accounting for 37.3% of the total, and schools in rural areas accounting for 11.9% of total schools. variables in the multi-level model and corresponding 2015 pisa data this section lists the variables included in the research model and provides examples of items from the corresponding 2015 pisa dataset (see table 1). included in table 1 is a column entitled “variables” which includes the variables of the multi-level mediation model, including dependent and independent variables, a mediator, and control variables belonging to either the studentor school level. the column entitled “corresponding 2015 pisa data” includes items from the 2015 pisa dataset used in computing model variables (including both measurement indicators and the original items on which these measurement indicators were based). derived variables included in the model include two generated from the pisa data, including the original pisa item of chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 690 table 1. the variables of the model and the corresponding data of pisa 2015. variables corresponding data measurement indicators original pisa items dependent variables (studentlevel) mathematics, reading, and science competencies ten plausible values (pv) for each competency mathematics: pv1math pv10math reading: pv1read pv10read science: pv1scie pv10scie independent variables (schoollevel)* sense of shared belonging the aggregate of the variable “belong” for students from the same school belong: st034q01tast034q06ta attention to students’ attendance the aggregate of the number of days students are late for school each week late for school: st062q03ta the aggregate of the number of days students skip class each week skipping classes: st062q02ta the aggregate of the number of days students are truant each week truancy: st062q01ta mediator (studentlevel) being bullied verbal bullying: mean pisa verbal bullying scores. verbal bullying: st038q04na and 05na relational bullying: mean pisa relational bullying scores. relational bullying: st038q03na and 08na physical bullying: mean pisa physical bullying scores. physical bullying: st038q06na and 07na control variables (studentlevel) gender male or female based on pisa codes gender: st004d01t grade grade based on pisa codes grade: st001d01t family socioeconomic status “escs” weighted “homepos”, “hisei” and “pader” values control variables (school-level) school size “schsize” addition of the number of sc002q01ta (boys) and sc002q02ta (girls) type of school private v.s. public from pisa codes sc013q01 (1 = private school, 3 = public school) school location location-based on pisa codes sc001q01 (1-5 representing the village, small town, town, city, and big city, respectively) school family socioeconomic status the aggregate of the “escs” value for all students from the same school * averaging scores for students in the same school and aggregate them as a school-level variable note 1: the variable names in the table are exactly the same as those in the pisa 2015 data file. note 2: according to the pisa 2015 manual, in order to correctly analyze the pv values, a one-time analysis of the ten pvs in terms of the mean value is not recommended. rather, each pv must first be analyzed and then combined with the results of the other 10 pv values in order to establish significance. this study utilized hlm software to perform the above-mentioned processes. note 3: in addition to variables such as the size, type, and location of the school, other school-level independent variables and control variables were aggregated from student-level variables. note 4: for the calculation of family socioeconomic status, the following items were included: “homepos” (home possessions), “hisei” (highest parental occupation), and “pader” (parental education). chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 691 “belong” (representing the sense of shared belonging) and “escs” (representing the overall school families’ socioeconomic status). the technical manual for pisa (oecd, 2017b) stated that the derived variables are scale scores generated by computing original items through item response theory, with these resulting derived scores being suitable for using for direct comparisons among oecd member countries. data analysis data analysis consists of two parts: descriptive statistics and multi-level mediation modeling. in terms of descriptive statistics, since the pisa data involves ten plausible values (pvs) for estimating students’ core competencies, these values cannot be directly processed using spss statistical software. therefore, a syntax was first generated using idb analyzer 4.0 (iea, 2018), and then executed using spss 22.0 to compute descriptive statistics. for the multi-level mediation model, we used hlm 6.0 to analyze the data, following the suggestions provided by the pisa technical manual (oecd, 2017b) to weigh variables at the student-level and school-level, utilizing the values of “w_fstuwt” (final student weight) and “w_schgrn” (final school weight). in terms of the steps involved in conducting multi-level mediation modeling, this study followed the recommended procedures of wen and chiou (2009) to address the four research questions.  step 1 (rq1). this study first evaluated the coefficient for the influence of the mediator on the dependent variables. the dependent variables included students’ mathematics, reading, and science competencies. the mediator included three types of school bullying (verbal, relational, and physical). based on the results of the first step, we retained the bullying types with statistically significant coefficients before continuing to conduct a follow-up analysis.  step 2 (rq2). next, we computed the coefficient for the influence of the schoollevel independent variables on the mediator variable of school bullying. the school-level variables in this study were a) sense of shared belonging and b) attention to students’ attendance. in terms of attentive school administration efforts, which pay attention to students’ attendance, three items were included: “late for class,” “skipping classes,” and “truancy.” in step 2, we tested the impact of these two school management measures on the mediator (school bullying) and retained those context variables with statistically significant influence.  step 3 (rq3). the third step was to test the coefficient for the influence of the school-level variables on the dependent variables (core competencies). from step 2, only school-level variables with significant coefficients were used in testing their effects on the dependent variables. it should be noted that only school-level variables with coefficients reaching statistical significance in step 3 were then retained for further analysis in step 4.  step 4 (rq4). the final step was to confirm whether or not a mediating effect existed within the model. the criterion for a mediation effect is that when the schoollevel variables and the mediator are included in the same model, the coefficient for the influence of the school-level variables on the dependent variables must be lower chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 692 than the coefficient when the mediator is not included. in this case, if the coefficient for the influence of the school-level variables on the dependent variables (core competencies) was not significant, and the influence of the mediator on the dependent variables was significant, a complete mediating effect would be indicated. however, if the coefficient for the influence of the school-level variables on the dependent variables (core competencies) still reached a statistically significant level, a partial mediating effect would be indicated. results descriptive statistics the descriptive statistics are provided in table 2. in terms of school-level variables, the average school size was 1,476 students (sd = 1,445). the mean for overall school families’ socio-economic status was -1.16 (sd = 0.76), while the mean shared sense of shared belonging was -0.30 (sd = 0.21). mean values were also calculated for being late for school (mean = 1.52, sd = 0.24), skipping classes (mean = 1.11, sd = 0.11), and truancy (mean = 1.03, sd = 0.05), which indicated that, on average, less than two absences or late arrivals were observed over the most recent two weeks. the average value for student-level family socioeconomic status was -1.04 (sd = 1.11). since this value was negative, it suggests that the family socioeconomic status of students was lower than the average for students in other oecd countries. among the three core competencies, the mathematics competence was the highest (mean = 538.38, sd = 104.19), followed by science competence (mean = 524.38, sd = 101.84), and reading competence (mean = 501.18, sd = 106.87). the mean value for verbal bullying was 1.30 (sd = 0.56) and relational bullying was 1.30 (sd = 0.59). the mean for physical bullying was 1.35 (sd = 0.56). given the above values and the variation among different types of bullying, student-level bullying ranged widely among schools, from situations where students reported no bullied to schools where students reported experiencing bullying several times a year. mediation effects the analytical results of multi-level mediation modeling are provided in table 3. in order to confirm that the intraclass correlation coefficient (icc) and the variation components met the requirements of multi-level analysis, we first tested a null model including the dependent variables of the three core competencies (mathematics, reading, and science). the results demonstrated that the icc for mathematics, reading and science competencies were 48%, 51%, and 49%, respectively, and that the various components of these three variables were significantly different from zero, which indicated that the core competencies for students in the same school were similar, with significant differences between schools. since the assumptions required for multi-level mediation modeling were met, this analysis was adopted to evaluate the nested data derived from the 2015 pisa through non-independent sampling. in addition, based on the recom chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 693 table 2. descriptive statistics. mean sd school-level school size 1,476 1,445 school-level family socio-economic status (escs) -1.16 0.76 sense of shared belonging -0.30 0.21 late for school 1.52 0.24 skipping classes 1.11 0.11 truancy 1.03 0.05 student-level family socioeconomic status (escs) -1.04 1.11 mathematics competency 538.38 104.19 reading competency 501.18 106.87 science competency 524.38 101.84 verbal bullying 1.30 0.56 relational bullying 1.30 0.59 physical bullying 1.35 0.56 mendations of wen and chiou (2009) school-level variables adopted a fixed slope and grand mean-centered when the multi-level mediation model was tested. the relationship between school bullying and the core competencies the multi-level model equations are shown as follows. the results demonstrate that when studentand school-level control variables were included, only relational bullying was shown to negatively influence all three core competencies (with a coefficient for mathematical competency of γ50 = 8.53, p = 0.01; a coefficient form reading competency of γ50 = -6.21, p = 0.04; and a coefficient for science competency of γ50 = -6.93, p = 0.01). verbal bullying and physical bullying showed no significant effects on the three core competencies. student-level (equation 1-1) core competency ij ＝β0j＋β1j(gender ij)＋β2j(grade ij)＋β3j(socioeconomic status ij) ＋ β4j(verbal bullying ij) ＋ β5j(relational bullying ij) ＋ β6j(physical bullying ij) ＋ γij school level (equation 1-2) β0j ＝ γ00 ＋ γ01(school type j) ＋ γ02(school size j) ＋ γ03(school location j)＋ γ04(school-level socioeconomic status j) ＋ u0j; β1j ＝ γ10; β2j ＝ γ20; β3j ＝ γ30; β4j ＝ γ40; β5j ＝ γ50; β6j ＝ γ60 the relationship between school administrative measures and school bullying chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 694 table 3. multi-level mediation model. null model step 1 step 2 step 3 step 4 dependent variable cc cc rb cc cc (without mediator) cc (with mediator) m r s m r s m r s m r s fixed effects γ00 267.25** 229.48** 195.53** 1.83** 223.56** 203.88** 165.85** 241.26**a 246.92**b 213.30** b 172.71** a 177.46**b 246.09** a 251.29**b 216.19 **b 176.19** a 180.63** b γ01 school type -18.41 -15.35 -10.13 0.02 -12.78 -11.16 -5.12 -11.22 a -17.98 b -14.86 b -3.49 a -9.53 b -10.94 a -17.44 b -14.52 b -3.31 a -9.16 b γ02 size -0.00 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 a 0.00 b 0.00 b 0.00 a 0.00 b 0.00 a 0.00 b 0.00 b 0.00 a 0.00 b γ03 location -5.03 -0.05 -2.09 0.02 -3.35 1.35 -0.47 -3.95 a -4.11 b 0.81 b -1.07 a -1.11 b -3.76 a -3.90 b 0.94 b -0.94 a -0.96 b γ04 school-level escs 62.03** 63.05** 62.47** 0.01 42.02** 46.89** 43.78** 46.51** a 51.76** b 53.86** b 48.31** a 52.07**b 46.49**a 51.37**b 53.61** b 48.30** a 51.79 **b γ05 school-level shared belonging -0.33** 62.82** 45.04 53.51* 90.85** a 82.06** a 87.59** a 79.76 ** a γ06 late for class 0.02 γ07 skipping classes 0.27* -182.27** -164.70** -185.00** -210.34** b -184.86** b -208.91 ** b -206.01** b -182.05** b -205.85** b γ08 truancy 0.40 γ10 gender 9.28* -13.83** 13.02** 0.12** 8.24* -14.43** 8.31* a 8.26* b -14.41** b 12.48* a 12.43* b 9.23*a 9.19* b -13.81** b 13.13** a 13.09** b γ20 grade 32.38** 34.26** 36.16** -0.08** 34.46** 35.73** 33.95** a 33.95** b 35.37** b 37.42** a 37.38** b 33.18** a 33.19** b 34.87** b 36.87**a 36.83**b γ30 escs 6.83* 8.48** 5.94** -0.01 6.89** 8.50** 6.90**a 6.91** b 8.51** b 5.97** a 5.98** b 6.80** a 6.81** b 8.44** b 5.90**a 5.91**b γ40 verbal bullying -1.67 -0.72 -1.19 γ50 relational bullying -8.53* -6.21* -6.93* -8.26** a -8.30** b -5.38* b -5.81* a -5.86* b γ60 physical bullying 2.29 2.25 3.30 random effects σ2 (intragroup variation) m: 5562.65 r 5481.30 s: 5091.36 5282.33 5135.06 4757.59 0.36 5305.17 5144.49 4769.17 sb: 5304.63 sc: 5305.24 sc: 5144.62 sb: 4768.62 sc: 4769.43 sb: 5283.25 sc: 5283.85 sc: 5136.39 sb: 4759.05 sc: 4759.86 τ00 (intergroup variation) m: 5145.82* r: 5667.24* s: 4901.72* 1849.56** 1648.24** 1466.85** 0.004* 1370.26** 1297.71** 1005.84** sb: 1671.39** sc: 1469.10** sc: 1344.84** sb: 1315.21** sc: 1074.77** sb: 1636.61** sc: 1435.53** sc: 1324.72** sb: 1292.61** sc: 1053.93** note: cc: core competency; rb: relational bullying; m: math; r: reading; s: science; sb: shared belonging; sc: skipping classes. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01; a coefficient for the influence from sense of shared belonging to the school (school-level); b coefficient for the influence of skipping classes (schoollevel) based on the results of step 1, only relational bullying had a significant effect on students’ core competencies. thus, only relational bullying was utilized to test the association between school administration measures and bullying. based on equations 2-1 and 2-2, the results demonstrate a significant and negative coefficient for sense of shared belonging (γ05 = -0.33, p < 0.01) and a significant and positive coefficient for skipping classes (γ07 = 0.27, p = 0.03). however, the coefficients for late for school and truancy were not significant. these results imply that the higher the sense of shared belonging (as an aggregate measure) and the more attentive the student administration was towards students’ attendance (as evidenced by lower rates of skipping classes), the lower the level of reported school bullying. student-level (equation 2-1) chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 695 relational bullying ij＝β0j＋β1j(gender ij)＋β2j(grade ij)＋β3j(socio-economic status ij) ＋ γij school-level (equation 2-2) β0j ＝ γ00 + γ01(school type j) ＋ γ02(school size j) ＋ γ03(school location j) ＋ γ04(school-level socio-economic status j) ＋ γ05(sense of shared belonging j) ＋ γ06(late for school j) ＋ γ07(skipping classes j) ＋ γ08(truancy j) ＋ u0j；β1j ＝ γ10；β2j ＝ γ20； β3j ＝ γ30 the relationship between school administrative measures and students’ core competencies since the sense of shared belonging and attention to student attendance had a significant effect on relational bullying in step 2, we tested the influence of these two school-level independent variables on students’ core competencies during step 3. adopting equations 3-1 and 3-2, the analytical results are as follows. first, in terms of mathematical competency, the coefficients for sense of shared belonging (γ05 = 62.82, p < 0.01) and skipping classes (γ07 = -182.27, p < 0.01) reached statistical significance. second, for reading competency, the explanatory effect for skipping classes (γ07 = -164.04, p < 0.01) was significant, while the sense of shared belonging was related at a statistically insignificant level. third, regarding science competency, both sense of shared belonging (γ05 = 53.51, p = 0.02) and skipping classes (γ07 = -185.00, p < 0.01) demonstrated statistically significant effects. the results of step 3 imply that higher degrees of sense of shared belonging are associated with higher scores in terms of students’ mathematics and science competencies. furthermore, more attentive school administrative measures (by managing students’ attendance and lowering the number of skipped classes) were associated with higher scores for all three core competencies. student-level (equation 3-1) core competency ij ＝ β0j＋β1j(gender ij)＋β2j(grade ij)＋β3j(socio-economic status ij) ＋ γij school-level (equation 3-2) β0j ＝ γ00 + γ01(school type j) ＋ γ02(school size j) ＋ γ03(school location j) ＋ γ04(school-level socio-economic status j) ＋ γ05(sense of shared belonging j) ＋ γ07(skipping classes j) ＋ u0j; β1j ＝ γ10; β2j ＝ γ20; β3j ＝ γ30 the indirect effect of school administrative measures on students’ core competencies through the mediator of school bullying after conducting steps 1 through 3, the independent variables meeting the criteria for analysis by step 4 of the multi-level mediation model were: a) sense of shared belonging and b) skipping classes, with a mediator of relational bullying. in terms of dependchen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 696 ent variables, because the sense of shared belonging and students’ reading competency was not significantly related, we only tested the mediation effect from the sense of shared belonging on mathematics and science competencies while examining the mediation effect of skipping classes on all three core competencies. first, regarding a sense of shared belonging, we used equations 4-1 and 4-2, including the dependent variables of mathematics and science competencies, to obtain the coefficients for their influence without including the mediator of school bullying. then, following equations 4-3 and 4-4, the coefficients for the sense of shared belonging for mathematics and science competencies were computed while including school bullying as a mediator. the results demonstrated that the coefficient for the influence on mathematical competency changed from 90.85 to 87.59, and the coefficient for the influence on science competency changed from 82.06 to 79.76. based on these findings, the influence of relational school bullying on mathematical (γ 50 = 8.26, p < 0.01) and science (γ 50 = 5.81, p = 0.02) competencies were significant. given that when the variable of relational school bullying was included as a mediator, the coefficient for the influence of sense of shared belonging on the dependent variables was lower as compared to the model which did not include relational school bullying, we conclude that a mediation effect did exist. however, this mediation was only partial, since the coefficient for the sense of shared belonging (a school-level variable) was still significant. second, in terms of the effects of the school-level variable of skipping classes, we adopted the same procedure described above. equations 4-5, 4-6, 4-7, and 4-8 were used to test the effects on mathematics, reading, and science competencies. the results demonstrated that when the variable of relational bullying was included, the coefficients for the influence of relational bullying on the three core competencies were all significant (mathematical competency: 8.30, p < 0.01; reading competency: 5.38, p = 0.02; science competency: 5.86, p = 0.02), while the coefficients for the school-level variable of skipping classes changed from 210.34 to 206.01 for mathematics competency and from -184.86 to -182.05 for reading competency. likewise, the coefficient for science competency changed from -208.91 to -205.85. thus, after relational bullying was included, the coefficient for the influence of the school-level variable of skipping classes on the three core competencies was lower than the model that did not include the mediator of relational bullying. since the coefficient of the context variable of skipping classes reached a significant level, relational bullying was concluded to provide partial mediation. student-level (equation 4-1) core competency ij ＝ β0j＋β1j(gender ij)＋β2j(grade ij)＋β3j(socio-economic status ij) ＋ γij school-level (equation 4-2) β0j ＝ γ00 + γ01(school type j) ＋ γ02(school size j) ＋ γ03(school location j) ＋ γ04(school-level socio-economic status j) ＋ γ05(sense of shared belonging j) ＋ u0j; β1 ＝ γ10; β2j ＝ γ20; β3j ＝ γ30 chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 697 student-level (equation 4-3) core competency ij ＝β0j＋β1j(gender ij)＋β2j(grade ij)＋β3j(socio-economic status ij) ＋ β5j(relational bullying ij) ＋ γij school-level (equation 4-4) β0j ＝ γ00 ＋ γ01(school type j) ＋ γ02(school size j) ＋ γ03(school location j) ＋ γ04(school-level socio-economic status j) ＋ γ05(sense of shared belonging j) ＋ u0j; β1j ＝ γ10; β2j ＝ γ20; β3j ＝ γ30; β5j ＝ γ50 student-level (equation 4-5) core competency ij ＝ β0j＋β1j(gender ij)＋β2j(grade ij)＋β3j(socio-economic status ij) ＋ γij school-level (equation 4-6) β0j ＝ γ00 ＋ γ01(school type j) ＋ γ02(school size j) ＋ γ03(school location j) ＋ γ04(school-level socio-economic status j) ＋ γ05(sense of shared belonging j) ＋ γ07(skipping classes j) ＋ u0j; β1j ＝ γ10; β2j ＝ γ20; β3j ＝ γ30 student-level (equation 4-7) core competency ij ＝β0j＋β1j(gender ij)＋β2j(grade ij)＋β3j(socio-economic status ij) ＋ β5j(relational bullying ij) ＋ γij school-level (equation 4-8) β0j ＝ γ00 ＋ γ01(school type j) ＋ γ02(school size j) ＋ γ03(school location j) ＋ γ04(school-level socio-economic status j) ＋ γ05(sense of shared belonging j) ＋ γ07(skipping classes j) ＋ u0j; β1j ＝ γ10; β2j ＝ γ20; β3j ＝ γ30; β5j ＝ γ50 discussion based on the findings of previous single-level studies, our research expanded upon this framework in developing a multi-level mediation model using the 2015 pisa data from mainland china. the results demonstrate that two independent variables played indirect and positive roles in terms of influencing students’ core competencies by reducing school bullying. these two independent variables are a sense of shared belonging (which had a positive effect on students’ competencies) and skipping classes (which when lowered, is associated with better outcomes in terms of students’ competencies). these school-level variables reflect schools’ administrative efforts to develop a positive environment for teaching and learning (reflected in the aggregate score of students’ sense of shared belonging) and the schools’ attentive administrative efforts, wherein monitoring of students’ attendance was consistently adopted, as reflected by students’ attendance (with more attentive administrations deterring students from skipping class chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 698 mitigating the relationship between skipping classes and experiencing bullying, as well as reducing the negative relationship between skipping classes and students’ core competencies). since these two independent variables are deemed to be highly practical and directly applicable to the field of educational management, the findings of this study provide a reference for school administrators to prevent and control school bullying and simultaneously improve students’ core competencies. in light of the impact of students being late for school or truant, which are in violation of school rules and may indicate the presence of school bullying, and the resulting impacts on students’ core competencies, according to this study, school management should focus more closely on students’ attendance, particularly in terms of skipping classes. application of multi-level mediation model this study adopted a multi-level mediation model, which is rare in research regarding both school bullying and students’ core competencies. in contrast, most studies use regression analysis including multiple predictor variables in the model simultaneously. however, a multi-level mediation model is a more appropriate method for further elaborating on the specific paths of influence among factors that, in turn, can provide more specific feedback and recommendations for educational administrators. studies adopting regression analysis on school bullying among adolescents in guangdong province (wang et al., 2012), ontario, canada (betts, 2014), and quebec, canada (di stasio, savage, & burgos, 2016) have been conducted, but with mixed or unclear results. likewise, zhao et al. (2017) and huang (2017), in analyzing science competency and school bullying among students from four provinces of china, also adopted the 2015 pisa data. however, although these studies found several significant explanatory variables at different levels, in terms of core competencies or school bullying, they were unable to further specify paths of influence for the factors included in their models, due to their use of multiple regression. thus, our multi-level mediation model aims to evaluate the factors that have demonstrated significant explanatory power in the past, and further evaluating paths among variables and their relative influence, which has potential theoretical contributions for the related research topics. at present, only wang and meng (2017) have published research using a multi-level mediation model, finding that the school atmosphere directly influences a number of student-level variables, which then has an indirect positive role in science competency. with the application of multilevel analysis in educational research becoming more and more popular, we expect that multilevel mediation model applications will be developed more extensively in the future. attentive measures for preventing school bullying the results of this study demonstrate, in terms of school administration, that it is beneficial for schools to enact measures that combine attentive approaches to the enforcement of school rules (in particular, students’ attendance) as well as measures that can develop a sense of shared belonging. building students’ sense of shared belonging and chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 699 paying greater attention to students’ attendance can reduce the occurrence of relational bullying among students, resulting in an indirect positive impact on their performance, in terms of core competencies. these two types of administrative approaches can jointly contribute to the development of a safe and positive learning environment for students. in this learning atmosphere, bullying can be reduced and, as a result, students may experience greater feelings of acceptance, resulting in greater willingness to seek help from others, even if they are bullying by their peers and avoidance of subsequent bullying. at the same time, when school administrators and teachers are focused on monitoring students’ attendance, they can identify students who may be suffering from school bullying (which may be the underlying cause of student lateness, skipping classes, or truancy), which is conducive to immediate interventions. the results of this study echo the recommendations of pisa’s school bullying report (oecd, 2017a) which calls on schools to create environments where students feel closer connections with teachers and clearly recognize that the school is an orderly place wherein school rules are followed. this recommendation is highlighted by the findings of this study that suggest school administration efforts can make students feel at ease and can prevent bullying events. limitations the paths constructed by our multi-level mediation model can provide empirical evidence that school bullying serves as a mediator between the school administrative measures and students’ core competencies. however, it is still unclear whether or not there are other mechanisms influencing the relationships among the variables evaluated in this study. since some factors are beyond the scope of this study and are not addressed in this manuscript, we suggest this lack of data as a limitation and potential for future analysis. for example, if a school adopts a more attentive model of student attendance management, this approach might first influence the overall sense of shared belongingness which, in turn, can decrease bullying and its influence on students’ core competencies. as such, future studies can evaluate multiple paths of mediation. next, since this study was based on a multi-level mediation model, we were required to follow corresponding steps for data analysis. during this process, although we found other interesting findings not directly related to the primary focus of this study there were not described in more detail in this manuscript. for example, the results of the first step of our multi-level mediation model demonstrated no significant correlations between verbal and physical bullying and students’ core competencies; therefore, these two types of school bullying were not included in follow-up analyses, and their impact in terms of school management measures was not tested further. finally, the data used in this study was limited to data reported in the 2015 pisa survey, which limits the explanatory power of some research results. for example, it is impossible to conclude why a sense of shared belonging at the school-level did not affect students’ reading competency but had a positive effect on mathematics and science competencies. since this issue cannot be explained by existing 2015 pisa data, further data collection and analysis are recommended. chen et al. anti-bullying measures and students’ core competencies. vol.5, no. 2, 2020 700 acknowledgments: we highly appreciate professor gamble's help in translating articles. professor gamble has made a great contribution to the proofreading and semantic correction of the article, so that the chinese version can be accurately translated into english. references betts, c. 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(2013) key features and implications of successful schools – a review of pisa 2009 report “what makes school success”. foreign edu res, 1:39-45. yang, f., yu, b., zhu, y. x., & xu, q. y. (2017) correlation between school bullying and school belonging: evidence from new educational experiments. cours textb teach meth, 5:113-120. zhao, d. c, guo, y. g., & jiao, l. y. (2017) the scientific literacy performance of 15year-old students in four provinces (cities) and their influencing factors based on the analysis of pisa 2015 data. edu res, 6:80-86. zhao, j. & zhu, p. y. (2012) school connection tightness and juvenile causal experience research taking lessons, truancy, and dropout as indicators. edu res exp, 1:51-56. received: 21 april 2020 revised: 02 june 2020 accepted: 12 june 2020 the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of sichuan normal university (social sciences edition), 2019; 46(4):85-95. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 陈奕桦，谢妮，孟志远., 校园欺凌防治与中学生核心素养关系实证研究. 四川师范大学学报 (社 会科学版) 2019; 46(4):85-95. article-yihuachen-bece_title_15july2020 article-yihuachen-bece_maintext15july2020 bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1060 is media multitask bound to negatively affect online learning? by chen, j., lin, h., & liao, x. correspondence to: chen, j., school of education, hunan university of science and technology, china. email: jingjunchenpsy@163.com edia multitasking is generally considered to be one of the main negative factors affecting online learning, and this negative impact could be relatively complicated. a study published in modern educational technology conducted empirical research on instant message interference in students’ mathematics video learning, and researchers compared the learning effects of 54 eighth-grade students under different interference conditions. the study adopted the incoordinate control group, setting one of the groups with insufficient media multitasking experience as the control group (lmm=14), and considering the other three groups with rich experience as the treatment group (hmm1=14, hmm2=14, hmm3=12). using the one-way repeated measures anova, with the interference amount of instant message as the independent variables and the post-test results of mathematics video learning, the main outcomes are concluded as follows:  within the limited learning period, even students with rich media multitasking experience the learning effects of them will be affected by the negative impacts of the frequency increasing of dealing with multitasks, which is the “frequency effect”;  for students with rich experience, the instant messaging interference does not affect the learning effect within certain limits, and the learning effects gradually decline when the limit went beyond. this study proposes the following suggestions: on the one hand, educators can optimize the media multitask through training students’ ability, so as to reduce the interference of multitasking on online learning. on the other hand, it is more realistic to guide learners to control irrelevant multitasking in the process of online learning within a certain frequency range than to try to prevent teenagers from taking on media multitasking. source: modern educational technology, 2021; 31(3):50-56. m general and vocational tracks and equity of higher education enrollment opportunities among classes: a reconstruction of indicator system for social class-based differential enrollment opportunities and its empirical analysis yan cao, shanshan tang institute of higher education, east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china based on the educational hierarchical reproduction theory and the mmi and emi hypotheses, this paper discusses the impact of the tracking of general and vocational education at the secondary level on higher education opportunity equity among social classes. the study finds that increasing gross enrollment rates of both general high schools and secondary vocational schools can help improve the equity in admission opportunities of colleges and universities among social strata; expanding the share of general high school places by adjusting the structure of general and vocational tracks (that is, the generalvocational ratio) can effectively reduce the class disparities in college and university admission opportunities; neither the change in the scale nor in the structure of general and vocational tracks will contribute to alleviating class inequality in top university enrollment opportunities. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(1):1461-1466. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab003. how to cite: yan, c., & tang, s. (2022). general and vocational tracks and equity of higher education enrollment opportunities among classes: a reconstruction of indicator system for social class-based differential enrollment opportunities and its empirical analysis. best evidence in chinese education, 11(1):1461-1466. keywords: tracking of general and vocational education, higher education, enrollment opportunity, class equity, class disparity yan & tang. general and vocational tracks and equity of higher education enrollment. bece, vol.11, no.1, 2022 1462 about the author: shanshan tang, institute of higher education, east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china correspondence to: yan cao, institute of higher education, east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china. e-mail: caoyan0516@126.com conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:caoyan0516@126.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ yan & tang. general and vocational tracks and equity of higher education enrollment. bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1463 the tracking of general and vocational education at the secondary level is the first streaming chinese students face in the entire educational system. to some extent, it is not only educational tracking, but also a form of hierarchical differentiation among classes. in the context of worsening social inequality and blocked social mobility, there exist huge class disparities in the acquisition of resources and capital in students’ early stage of schooling. the expansion of regular college and junior college enrollment scale and the continuous upgrading of the industry also contribute to the problematic circumstances of secondary vocational education such as low returns, implicit social discrimination, and obscure development prospects. the primary issue for the tracking of general and vocational education in china is the contradiction between the need of economy and industry for vocational education development and the low public demand for vocational education. the purpose of this paper is to explore the appropriate tracking scale and structure that help reduce the gap in student access to higher education among social strata from the perspective of regional development. research hypotheses the increase in total enrollment of general schools enable those students who would otherwise be diverted to the vocational track to enter academic schools and enhance their opportunity of attaining higher education, thereby improving equity in higher education opportunity among different classes. the following hypotheses are put forward in this study. h1: expanding the general school enrollment scale is conducive to reducing the class gap in higher education opportunity disparity, while it cannot change the inequality in high-quality tertiary education opportunity among classes; h2: the increase in the proportion of general school places helps alleviate the class inequality in student access to higher education, whereas it makes no differences to the disparity in top-level university attendance among classes. sources of data this paper sources data from the enrollment database of all regular colleges and junior colleges in china and summarizes the number of enrollments in each region from in the academic year of 2014-2015. additionally, it consults the china statistical yearbooks to trace the data of those students who participate in college entrance examination in this academic year (2014-2015) in various regions and draws on the numbers of regional primary school graduates (2008-2009), junior high school graduates (2011-2012), secondary vocational enrollments (2011-2012), high school enrollments (2011-2012), and regional high school graduates (2014 and 2015) of the corresponding groups whose college entrance examination year was in 2014-2015. results and discussion the regression analysis of the effect of general and vocational education tracking on class disparities in tertiary education opportunity yan & tang. general and vocational tracks and equity of higher education enrollment. bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1464 after controlling for other factors, the gap in places between junior and senior secondary schools in various regions significantly affects the equity of higher education. the widened gap in school places results in the increased disparities in tertiary education opportunity among classes. in terms of the effect of school places on the class disparities in access to the general tertiary education (including regular and junior colleges) and the 4-year regular college courses, the logarithmic coefficient values are 0.005 and 0.006, respectively, which means that with every 100% increase in the gap in places between junior and senior secondary school, the disparity between the middle class and the lower middle class in the access to general tertiary education will expand by 0.5%, and that in access to 4-year regular colleges will increase by 0.6%. the r-squared values mediated by the model of enrollment scale of general and vocational tracks are 0.591 and 0.541, and the r-squared value mediated by the model of enrollment structure of general and vocational tracks is 0.407-0.458, which shows that the scale and structure of general and vocational tracks can properly explain their effects on class equity of college enrollment opportunities in three years. the p values of the f test are all less than 0.01, indicating that the overall model has a significant explanatory effect. after controlling for other variables, the coefficients of the effect of the gross enrollment rate of general high schools on class disparities in student access to general tertiary education and 4-year regular college education are -0.165 and -0.158, respectively, statistically significant at the 1% level, which means that with every 100% increase in the gross enrollment rate of general high schools, the gap in general tertiary education and regular college education opportunities between the middle class and the lower middle class will significantly decrease by 16.5% and 15.8%, respectively. the increase in the gross enrollment rate of secondary vocational schools has a relatively small influence on the class disparities in general tertiary education and regular college education opportunities with influencing coefficients being -0.125 and -0.126, respectively, statistically significant at the 5% level, which indicates that with every 100% increase in the gross enrollment rate of secondary vocational schools, the gap in general tertiary education opportunity between the middle class and the lower middle class is reduced by 12.5%, and the gap in regular college education opportunity by 12.6%. therefore, regarding the enrollment scale, the increase in the gross enrollment rate of both general high schools and secondary vocational schools is likely to enhance class equity in higher education opportunities, while the effect of expanding enrollment scale of general education is more pronounced. using the ratio of general-vocational school places (or the proportion of general high school places) to represent the structure of general and vocational tracks, this study discovers that without considering the discrepancy in school places between junior and senior secondary levels, the proportion of general high school places has no significant impact on the class disparities in the general tertiary education and 4-year regular college education opportunities. after controlling for the above discrepancy in school places, the proportion of general high school places significantly affects the gaps in the general tertiary education and 4-year regular college education opportunities between the middle class and the lower middle class, with coefficients of -0.192 and 0.167, respectively, statistically significant at the 1% level, which signals that with every 100% increase in the proportion of general high school places, the class disparity in the general tertiary education opportunity is reduced by 19.2%, and that in the 4-year regular college enrollment opportunity by 16.7%. after controlling for the discrepancy yan & tang. general and vocational tracks and equity of higher education enrollment. bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1465 in places between junior and senior secondary schools, the higher the proportion of general high school places in the structure of general and vocational tracks, the more conducive it is to the promotion of education opportunity equity between classes. moreover, the increased proportion yields a slightly greater positive effect on the equity in 4-year regular college education opportunity than that in the overall tertiary education opportunity. this result provides a new perspective in examining the role of tracking. nowadays, china’s high education is more universalized than ever before, gradually weakening the “screening function” of the college entrance examination. general-vocational education tracking, as the first streaming in students’ entire education course, will largely affect their access to later opportunities. from the point of view of class equity, expanding the enrollment scale of general secondary education, to a large extent, allows students from disadvantaged classes more opportunities for further academic education, and delay the time of first “educational diversion”, thereby promoting inter-class mobility. the regression analysis of the effect of tracking on class disparities in top-level university attendance to evaluate the class-based differentials in high-quality tertiary education, this study introduces diverse college categories into the model to examine the effect of tracking on first-class university enrolment opportunity. mediated by the model of enrollment scale of secondary schools, the r-squared values is 0.478 and 0.431; mediated by the model of structure of general and vocational tracks, the r-squared value is 0.424-0.590, signaling that the mediation of independent variables can explain the variance (between 42.4% and 59%) of class disparities in top university attendance. after controlling for relevant factors, neither gross enrollment rates of general and vocational secondary schools nor the ratio of general-vocational school places is significantly related to the class disparities in first-class university attendance. the result of analysis validates the initial hypotheses and demonstrates the intense competitiveness and rigorous selectiveness of top universities. increased admissions of general high schools simply mean the raised number of participants in the college entrance examination. virtually, the tracking of general and vocational education has no effect on ordinary class students’ access to top universities. conclusions scaling up the enrollment of both general and vocational tracks by increasing the gross enrollment rate of general high schools and secondary vocational schools and other means will help improve the equity of admission opportunities of colleges and universities among social strata and reduce disparities in student access to higher education between the middle and lower classes. additionally, increasing the proportion of general high schools (i.e., the general-vocational ratio) by adjusting the structure of general and vocational tracks can effectively reduce the stratum gap in college and university admission opportunities. regarding superior higher education opportunities, neither the increase in the gross enrollment rate of general high schools nor secondary vocational schools nor the rise in the proportion of general high school places in the general-vocational tracking structure can contribute to alleviating class inequity. yan & tang. general and vocational tracks and equity of higher education enrollment. bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1466 the chinese version of this article has been published in beijing university education review, 2021, 19(4):21. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 曹妍, 唐珊珊. (2021).普职分流与阶层间的高等教育入学机会公平—各地区分阶层入学机会 指标的再构建及其实证研究. 北京大学教育评论, 19(4):21. received: 30 march 2022 revised: 11april 2022 accepted: 05 may 2022 3-absbract-yancao-bece_title_may2022 3-absbract-yancao-bece_maintextmay2022 what role does school play in helping socioeconomically disadvantaged students succeed against the odds? pingping zhang, yongmei hu zhengzhou university, zhengzhou, china beijing normal university, beijing, china abstract. based on the data of a large scale survey conducted by collaborative innovation center of assessment toward basic education quality at beijing normal university, this study examined the role of school in reducing education inequality. the results showed that schools concentrated with resilient students had higher mean socioeconomic status (ses) and ses heterogeneity, more education resources, higher teaching quality, and more positive school climate, and these factors also functioned as significant predictors of academic resilience. providing socioeconomically disadvantaged students with access to both high ses schools and enriched school resources can even the education inequality related to family background. in order to promote education equality, policymakers and education practitioners should take measures to reduce the degree of stratification and encourage student integration, promote equal distribution of high quality education resources among schools, enhance teachers’ ability to effectively use individualized, cooperative and inquiry teaching methods, and build a supportive climate. best evid chin edu 2019; 2(2):243-263. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1051 keywords: socioeconomic status; disadvantaged students; resilient students; educational outcome equity correspondence to: yongmei hu, professor, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing, china. email:hym0718@163.com. about the author pingping zhang, lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at department of education, zhengzhou university, zhengzhou, china. email:zppcandy@163.com conflict of interests: none. zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 243 introduction ince the release of coleman report in 1966, the impact of schools on students’ achievement and education inequality has been a hot topic in educational sociology and educational economics. it has been widely studied regarding the role of schools in students’ academic development and in education inequality, and formed distinct views such as schools can reproduce and expand education inequality, or schools can compensate for the cognitive gap between students with different family backgrounds (raudenbush & eschmann, 2015). regarding school’s role in promoting education inequality has been dominating contemporary sociology of education, because it was recognized that schools enlarge the learning outcome inequality, which consequently expands social inequality. however, accumulating empirical studies revealed that educational inequality, in some other aspects such as the gap between students’ academic achievement, cognitive and noncognitive skills is strongly related to family socioeconomic status (ses), in which schools had much larger compensation effect than expected (alexander, et al., 2001; downey, et al., 2004; downey & condron, 2016; ready, 2010). as the resource substitution theory indicated that the existence of multiple resources makes the outcomes less dependent on any particular resource, i.e., in an individual’s development, one type of resource can compensate the other that was absent (ross & mirowsky, 2006). for students from low ses families, they are at a prominent disadvantage in the possession of family economic, cultural and social capital, their academic performances would largely depend on the accessible school resources, so they would benefit more from schools where the quality improved. in other words, access to high-quality school will make up the negative impact resulted from the lack of family resources. accordingly, the chance for individuals with disadvantaged family background to become academically resilient students 1 will be significantly increased if the school quality improved. based on the basic theoretical model of education effectiveness research proposed by klieme et al. (2014), this study aimed to explore the influence of school input and process factors such as the composition of school, school resources, teaching quality, and school climate on disadvantaged students’ academic resilience, and to test the applicability of “resource substitution theory” in the school education outcomes. literature review based on the educational production function, studies analyzed the role of school factors that affect students’ development under the theoretical frame as “background input process output”, of which the factors include school composition, school resources, teaching quality and school environment (borman & dowling, 2010; du & yang, 2012; oecd, 2005; ren & xin, 2011; xie & zhang, 2018). school composition and the development of disadvantaged students s zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 244 as a result of residential segregation and the implementation of nearby enrollment policy, there is a distinct social class division between schools. students from disadvantaged families are more likely to be enrolled in socioeconomically disadvantaged schools. the socioeconomic composition of a school reflects the degree of social class division, which is widely considered as an important factor to explain the difference in students’ performance between schools. investigation into the relationship between school composition and students’ development provides an essential reference for education policy reform and practice. school socioeconomic composition functions as an indicator for students’ achievement that shows a significant heterogeneity. studies have shown that the link between school socioeconomic composition and academic performance was stronger in disadvantaged students. from the data of the second international mathematical comparative study, zimmer et al. (2000) found that the peer effect was significant enough to affect students’ academic achievement for those who aged 13 to 14 years and especially for students with lower mathematical ability across five participating countries. using the data of the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss) 2011, gustafsson (2016) found that, in most countries or regions, the average school ses was the most remarkable moderating variable of the relationship between family ses and the eighth grade students’ achievement, which indicated that education system can somewhat compensate the education inequality that related to family background, and the most effective education system will help disadvantaged students to achieve better results through building up a safe, orderly and achievement-oriented school environment, as well as providing higher quality instruction. as reviewed by anjani (2016) that the expansion of heterogeneity of students’ ses within a school was more conducive to their development, that is, the integration of students from various social status can be a policy used to promote academic development of disadvantaged students. however, contrast results from different studies had not found a definite relationship between school socioeconomic composition and academic performance. rumberger et al. (2005) conducted a multilevel analysis on the data of national education longitudinal study, and no significant difference was found regarding the impact of school ses on the academic achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged students. the descriptive study conducted by perry et al. (2010) on the australian pisa samples also found that the achievement gap between high and low ses schools was almost the same among different individuals with various ses levels. in sum, the school composition has a heterogeneous effect on students’ achievement, and providing disadvantaged students with opportunities for entering relatively higher ses and more heterogeneous schools is one of the ways to compensate for the lack of family education resources. however, direct evidence was yet found on this relationship. based on relevant findings and the resource substitution theory, we hypothesized that,  h1a: the higher the average ses for schools, the higher the probability that disadvantaged students would be resilient. zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 245  h1b: disadvantaged students enrolled into high ses schools would significantly reduce learning outcome gap that was related to family background.  h2a: the greater the ses heterogeneity for schools, the higher the probability that disadvantaged students would be resilient.  h2b: disadvantaged students enrolled into high heterogeneous ses schools would significantly reduce learning outcome gap that was related to family background. school educational resources and the development of disadvantaged students investigation into the effect of school educational resources on students’ academic performance would provide a basis for the policy formulation to allocate resources and for the implementation of measures to promote a balanced development of education. in general, variables such as the average education expenditure, proportion of teachers who hold different types of degrees or qualifications, teachers’ work experience, and school size were regarded as school education resources to carrying out survey and experimental studies, and then drawing certain type of relationship between these resources indicators and students’ achievements. it has showed that the heterogeneity of school education resources had substantial effect on students’ achievement, and disadvantaged students who are lack of family resources would benefit more from the enriched school resources. at least three significant evidences support this relationship. first of all, the school quality has a bigger impact on students’ performance in low-resourced countries. heyneman and loxley (1983) conducted a comparative study of 28 countries, and found that the effect of school education resources on elementary students’ achievement displayed different patterns in different education systems (so-called “heyneman–loxley effect”, hl effect), namely the lower the country’s per capita income, the smaller the impact of family ses on students’ achievement, the greater the impact of schools and teachers’ quality on students’ achievement. baker et al. (2002) found that although hl effect has subsided somewhat, it still exists in those countries affected by extreme poverty, instability and infectious diseases. the most recent study conducted in the developing countries also verified that school resources had significant impact on students’ performance (ndlovu, 2018). second, school education resources have significant impact on the academic performance of disadvantaged students. based on the comparative data provided by pisa, agasisti et al. (2014) used multilevel logit regression to find that the quality of school education resources, the proportion of qualified teachers, extra-curricular activities significantly improved the possibility of disadvantaged students to be resilient, whereas class size, computer per student were of little importance (agasisti, et al., 2018). based on the samples of the fourth to eighth graders, southworth (2010) adopted multilevel linear regression to find that improving the quality of teachers and school resources reduced the influence of school ethnic composition and socio-economic composition on students’ academic achievements indicating that school could compensate for disadvantaged students. third, the influence of school educational resources on students with low ses is zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 246 relatively greater. studies have found that school educational resources have bigger impact on disadvantaged students than the advantaged peers, such as the positive effect of small-class teaching on minority students was more significant than white students (finn & achilles, 1999), and teacher quality and student/teacher ratio had significant impact on the relationship between family ses and students’ achievement (hou & shen, 2014; nye, et al., 2004). these results suggested that school educational resources play a compensating role in helping disadvantaged students to develop. however, few studies observed the heterogeneous effect of school resources on different groups of students, and more empirical evidence is needed regarding the impact of school resources on the academic development of disadvantaged students’. based on previous findings and the resource substitution theory, and to examine the impact of school education resources on the academic development of disadvantaged students, we hypothesized that,  h3a: access of disadvantaged students to schools with more sufficient educational resources would significantly increase their chances to become resilient students.  h3b: access for disadvantaged students to schools with more sufficient education resources would significantly reduce learning outcome inequality that was related to family background. teaching quality and the development of disadvantaged students observable teaching methods and teaching practices are important indicators of teaching quality, which represent middle-leveled learning opportunity and reflect a more authentic process of educational equity. variables such as the frequency of teachers’ use of cognitive activation, adaptive teaching, inquiry-based teaching methods, as well as classroom management, and classroom learning environment are used to indicate teaching quality, and correspondingly their impact on students’ academic development was observed. studies have shown that teaching quality affects students’ learning motivation and achievement, and high-quality teaching had a greater impact on students who were at risk of academic failure. klieme et al. (2009) proposed a basic model including cognitive activation, classroom management and supportive climate, which assumed that cognitive activation influences students’ mastering and understanding of knowledge through deep processing and self-reflection; structured and clearly-defined classroom management affects students’ achievement through time on task; and supportive climate influences students’ learning motivation through the mediation of mood and emotion. studies based on data from the tennessee star plan indicated that all four grade students can benefit from effective teaching, and evidence showed that the effect of teaching on math was more obvious in schools concentrated with minority students although the overall difference of genders, races or ses backgrounds was small (konstantopoulos & chung, 2011). studies of fourth grade students in six european countries found that the teacher factors in the education effectiveness dynamic model that includes structured teaching, questioning and problem solving, higher order probzhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 247 lem solving thinking skills, providing opportunities to practice and applicate new knowledge, quality of interaction between teachers and students, and formative learning assessment had much bigger impact on the academic achievements of students with low performance, but none of these factors had larger effect on students with good performance (vanlaar et al., 2016). studies of latino students from low-income families showed that the flexibility and practicability of teaching had a positive effect on students’ academic resilience (sosa & gomez, 2012). studies of elementary students in south american showed that, compared with non-resilient students, resilient students were more likely to report that teachers providing more feedback and teaching arrangements were reasonable (waxman et al., 1997). teaching strategies, such as group learning and encouraging each other, helped promote educational resilience (downey, 2008). these results suggested that maximizing students’ meaningful participation in the class through teachers’ effective teaching is an important way to enhance academic resilience. according to previous research findings, we hypothesized that,  h4a: disadvantaged students entering schools with better teaching quality would significantly increase their probability to become resilient students.  h4b: disadvantaged students entering schools with better teaching quality would significantly reduce learning outcome inequality related to family background. school climate and the development of disadvantaged students school climate is a relatively persistent and stable “soft environment” characteristic that distinguishes one school from the other. it is an important aspect of the school education process. it was described that school climate is the order and discipline, teacherstudent relationship, academic pressure, teachers’ morale, etc., through which the correlation with students’ academic development was investigated to provide reference for school-based improvement. studies have shown that positive school climate is protective to resilience and weakens the negative impact of family ses on students’ achievements. children exposed to risk factors would benefit from supportive school relationships and achieve sustainable academic success (wang et al., 1998). a follow-up study of low-ses minority elementary students in the united states showed that a safe and orderly school environment and positive teacher-student relationship are contributors to distinguish resilient students from non-resilient ones (borman & rachuba, 2000). a multilevel logit study based on pisa 2006-2015 data indicated that, for most participating countries and regions, schools with positive class environment were more likely to produce disadvantaged resilient students (agasisti, et al., 2018). a study of american 15-year-old students found that the correlation between ses and student achievements in an orderly classroom condition was weaker than that from a negative condition (cheema & kitsantas, 2014). a multilevel regression study of israel’s nationally representative sample of elementary and middle schools suggested that, school climate has a compensating and moderating effect for the relationship between school ses and students’ zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 248 achievements, which could be described as the achievement gap between students with different family backgrounds is much smaller under positive school climate condition (berkowitz, et al., 2015). in addition, a meta-analysis of 78 studies on school/classroom climate and students’ academic performance from 2000 to 2015 showed that positive school and class climate reduced the negative impact of low ses on academic performance (berkowitz, et al., 2017). these findings suggested that the positive school climate contributed to the academic development of disadvantaged students and reduced educational inequalities related to family background. in sum, supportive school and class climate has positive impact on students’ academic performance and narrows the academic gap among schools and students with different socio-economic status. therefore, we hypothesized that,  h5a: disadvantaged students entering a school with positive learning climate would increase their probability to become resilient students.  h5b: access of disadvantaged students to schools with positive learning climate would reduce outcome inequality related to family background. methods data the data were from the “regional assessment of education quality” project jointly carried out by collaborative innovation center of assessment toward basic education quality at beijing normal university and an eastern province in 2014. stratified threestage unequal probability sampling method was adopted to select the fifth and ninth grade students, their parents, teachers and principals from 11 cities in the participating province for the academic test or survey. the project collected data of students’ moral behavior, physical and mental health, academic development, interests and academic burden as well as information regarding their families and schools. a total of 30,743 grade 9 students from 610 junior high schools were enrolled in this study. among them, 84.6% were public schools and 15.4% were private schools. urban schools accounted for 22.5%, county-level schools were 27.9%, and rural schools were about 49.7%. besides, 48.7% were female students, 52.8% were from one-child families, and 92.7% had received more than one year of preschool education. variables the school characteristic variables (table 1) include: i) mean school ses and ses heterogeneity that reflect student composition and peer group characteristics; ii) school education resources including the adequacy of various teaching materials, courses and extracurricular activities that reflect the educational input; iii) school teaching quality including the use of individualized, cooperative and inquiry teaching strategies that reflects the learning opportunities; iv) school climate that reflects the learning environment. zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 249 table 1. variables. variable explanation ses category the mean of parents’ highest education level, parents’ highest occupational status and family property score was calculated after standardization and converted into a variable of 0-10. then, according to the criteria of top/bottom 1/3, it was divided into disadvantaged students, average students and advantaged students. academic achievement students’ standardized test scores of chinese, mathematics and science are averaged after standardization, and then converted into variables of 0 to 100. academic resilient firstly, the residuals of the regression of academic achievement on ses and ses square terms are regarded as academic resilience. then, academic resilience was classified into high, medium and low performance by top/bottom 1/3 standard. finally, the top 1/3 group was defined as resilient students, and the bottom 1/3 group was defined as non-resilient students. gender girl=1, boy=0. age calculated according to the date of birth of the student report. only child single child in the family=1, others=0. preschool education 1 year or more preschool education=1, less than 1 year=0. school mean ses mean of students’ family ses in the school. ses heterogeneity standard deviation of students’ family ses in the school. educational resources the scores of the adequacy of school infrastructure and teaching materials, extracurricular activities and school-based courses are standardized and averaged, and then converted into a variable of 010. teaching quality the mean of students’ evaluation about teachers’ individualized, collaborative and inquiry teaching, which is converted into a variable of 0-10 at the school level. school climate the mean of students’ evaluation about teachers’ behavior in respect, trust, fairness and justice, which is converted into a variable of 0-10 at the school level. public/private school private school=1, public school=0. school in the city school in the city=1, others=0. school in the county school in the county=1, others=0. school size total school enrollment/100. as showed in the table 2, for the whole sample, the mean of students’ academic performance and academic resilience were 65.156 and 59.183, respectively. the average age was 14.455. the means of school ses, ses heterogeneity, educational resources, teaching quality and school climate were 4.271, 1.344, 6.793, 5.063 and 5.111, respectively. the average enrollment of schools was 1,198. for the sub-samples, the mean academic performance of disadvantaged students was significantly higher than that of non-disadvantaged students, and the average age of disadvantaged students was significantly higher than non-disadvantaged ones. advantaged schools had highest 2 score in mean ses, ses heterogeneity, educational resources, teaching quality, school zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 250 table 2. descriptive statistics. variable full sample split sample f m sd disadvantaged avg advantaged stdt academic achievement 65.16 17.37 58.39 65.15 72.11 1,823.02 *** age 14.46 0.63 14.56 14.45 14.36 253.86 *** schl schl mean ses 4.27 1.16 3.13 4.05 5.64 1,217.74 *** ses heterogeneity 1.34 0.27 1.11 1.33 1.59 331.59 *** edu resources 6.79 1.90 5.75 6.89 7.73 67.37 *** teaching quality 5.06 1.48 4.42 5.07 5.71 44.12 *** schl climate 5.11 1.37 4.63 5.09 5.61 28.08 *** school size 11.98 8.30 7.50 12.81 15.62 59.68 *** note: ***: p<0.001, **: p<0.01, *: p<0.05. m: mean; avg: average; sd: standard deviation; stdt: student level; schl: school; edu: education. climate and school size; schools with middle-level status scored the second high; and disadvantaged schools scored the lowest in all school factors. the overall development of disadvantaged students’ was in general worse than those from the average and advantaged families, and the quality index of disadvantaged schools was significantly lower than advantaged schools reflecting the idea that family background has significant effect on children’s human capital accumulation. the uneven distribution of education resources between different schools was an important mechanism of the education inequality. these differences demonstrated the problems that disadvantaged students might have, and these differences within this group provide potential key to solve the development problems. therefore, we, in this study, explored the school factors associated with disadvantaged students with different academic development outcomes (resilient versus non-resilient), and explained how schools provide educational compensation for disadvantaged students. statistical analysis multivariate analysis of variance (manova) was used to explore the characteristic differences among schools with different proportions of resilient students; multilevel logit regression was used to explore the influence of school factors on the odds ratio (or) of disadvantaged students becoming resilient, and multilevel linear regression was used to explore which school factors narrow the achievement gap between students with different family background. all analyses were conducted in stata13.0. results zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 251 characteristics of the schools with different proportion of resilient students in order to illustrate the relationship between schools and the academic resilience of disadvantaged students, we first analyzed the characteristics of schools with different ratios of resilience students. schools were divided into three groups according to the proportion of disadvantaged resilient students, i.e., low resilient schools, medium resilient schools and high resilient schools. school grouping was the independent variable and the five characteristics were dependent variables. through manova and post hoc tests, we examined the differences among different groups of schools. the judgment rules of mean difference effect size (cohen’s d) listed by pu (2014) (|0.2|, |0.5|, |0.8| represent small, medium, and large effects, respectively) were taken as the criteria for comparisons among different school groups. the results are presented in the table 3. it showed that different school groups had significant differences in all the characteristic variables (p<0.001), and the score of high resilient schools was higher than that of medium and low resilient schools. the average ses of high resilient schools was significantly higher than that of medium and low resilient schools and the effect size was 1.233 and 1.434, respectively. the ses heterogeneity of high resilient schools was significantly higher than that of medium and low resilient schools and the effect size was 0.152 and 0.214, respectively. the education resource adequacy at high resilient schools was significantly higher than that of medium and low resilient schools and the effect size was 0.449 and 0.564, respectively. the teaching quality of high resilient schools was significantly higher than that of medium and low resilient schools and the effect size was 0.346 and 0.550, respectively. the school climate of high resilient schools was significantly higher than that of medium and low resilient schools and the effect size was 0.220 and 0.247, respectively. these results indicated that, the quality of high resilient schools was significantly higher than both medium and low resilient schools, which manifested as higher average ses, greater ses heterogeneity, more education resources, higher teaching quality and more positive school climate. this is consistent with previous studies. in terms of the socio-economic composition of school, study based on the national assessment of educational progress data in the united states found that, the school ses of high performing african-american eighth graders was much higher than that of the low achieving students (lee, et al., 1991). based on the pisa 2006 data, study was conducted and found that the average economic, social and cultural status of the schools attended by resilient students was slightly higher than that of the disadvantaged lowperforming students (oecd, 2011). based on the education quality assessment data in china, he et al. (2016) found that the average ses of fourth grade migrant children with high academic achievement was significantly higher than the migrant children with low academic achievement. in terms of school resources, a study of pisa 2009 italian students found that the education resource quality of the schools with the lowest quarter of resilient students was significantly lower than other peer schools, and the difference in the extracurricular activity index was especially huge (agasisti & longobardi, 2014). zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 252 table 3. characteristics of schools with different proportion of resilient students. school group stat. school factors mean ses ses hetero. edu resources teach quality schl climate low resilient schools mean 3.787 1.233 6.273 4.634 4.953 sd 1.027 0.249 2.122 1.612 1.422 medium resilient schools mean 3.912 1.306 6.587 4.991 4.998 sd 0.817 0.257 1.659 1.262 1.298 high resilient schools mean 4.875 1.483 7.340 5.454 5.285 sd 1.012 0.248 1.676 1.375 1.339 group difference f 76.313*** 51.477*** 17.715*** 16.490*** 3.499*** η 2 0.206 0.149 0.057 0.053 0.012 post-hoc comparison highlow meandifference 1.088*** 0.249*** 1.068*** 0.820*** 0.333* cohen’d 1.434 0.214 0.564 0.550 0.247 highmedium meandifference 0.963*** 0.177*** 0.753*** 0.463** 0.287* cohen’d 1.233 0.152 0.449 0.346 0.220 note: ***: p<0.001, **: p<0.01, *: p<0.05. schl: school; edu: education; hetero: heterogeneity; stat: statistics. regarding teaching quality, a classroom observation study of schools concentrated with low family income hispanic students in the us showed that, quantity and quality of theacademic interaction between teachers and students in the reading and mathematics classes (teachers took student-oriented teaching strategies such as cognitive guidance, cooperative learning, and understanding student at social and interpersonal levels) were the most influential variables of the academic results of low-income hispanic students (waxman, et al., 2008). on school climate, a study carried out in public schools in canada found that resilient schools (“beating the odds schools”) scored the 82nd percentile in the school climate, and the long-term underperforming schools scored in the 14th percentile; after accounting for a variety of factors such as characteristics of student organizations, school size and human resources, the climate of resilient schools was still more positive than the other schools (voight et al., 2013), suggesting that school climate was an important distinguishing characteristic between “resilient school “and “non-resilient school“. the influence of school factors on the academic resilience of disadvantaged students we built up a series of two-level logistic regression models which included school average ses, ses heterogeneity, education resources, teaching quality and school climate as the key independent variables respectively to examine the influence of school factors on the academic resilience of disadvantaged students after accounting for the basic characteristics of students and schools. the results are shown in the table 4. zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 253 table 4. the influence of school factors on the possibility of disadvantaged students becoming resilient. variables model 0 model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 model 5 gender 1.454 *** (0.087) 1.464 *** (0.079) 1.455 *** (0.078) 1.455 *** (0.078) 1.455 *** (0.078) 1.455 *** (0.078) age 0.822 *** (0.035) 0.822 *** (0.033) 0.825 *** (0.033) 0.821 *** (0.033) 0.819 *** (0.033) 0.82 *** (0.033) only child 1.093 (0.894) 1.064 (0.058) 1.082 (0.060) 1.084 (0.060) 1.088 (0.060) 1.09 (0.060) preschool education 0.894 (0.079) 0.867 (0.073) 0.879 (0.074) 0.889 (0.075) 0.89 (0.075) 0.891 (0.075) city school 1.422 * (0.250) 0.485 *** (0.082) 0.836 (0.139) 1.192 (0.190) 1.275 (0.203) 1.362 (0.222) county school 1.671 *** (0.249) 0.813 (0.102) 1.047 (0.138) 1.562 *** (0.195) 1.515 *** (0.190) 1.618 *** (0.209) private school 0.795 (0.235) 0.807 (0.125) 0.888 (0.145) 0.894 (0.149) 0.810 (0.134) 0.793 (0.134) school size 1.023 * (0.012) 0.997 (0.006) 1.008 (0.006) 1.015 * (0.006) 1.02 ** (0.006) 1.022 *** (0.007) school mean ses 2.524 *** (0.185) ses heterogeneity 7.468 *** (1.706) education resources 1.226 *** (0.035) teaching quality 1.293 *** (0.048) school climate 1.144 *** (0.045) constant 11.079 *** (7.322) 0.581 (0.379) 1.105 (0.737) 3.348 (2.132) 3.577 * （2.275） 6.004 ** (3.855) n of students 7630 7630 7630 7630 7630 7630 n of schools 585 585 585 585 585 585 note: 1. exp(b) is presented in the table and standard error in parentheses. 2. ***: p<0.001, *: p<0.01, *: p<0.05. according to model 0 (only control variables were included), gender, age, school location and school size had significant influence on the probability of disadvantaged students to become resilient, whereas the coefficient of single child or not, preschool education and private school were not significantly related to this probability. to be specific, the odds ratio of disadvantaged girls becoming resilient was 1.454 times higher than the disadvantaged boys; with one-year increase in age as unit, the odds ratio of disadvantaged students becoming resilient was decreased by 17.8%. the odds ratio of disadvantaged students in urban schools and county-level schools to become resilient zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 254 was 1.422 and 1.671 times higher than those from rural schools, respectively. for every additional 100 students in school size, the odds ratio of disadvantaged students becoming resilient increased by 2.3%. these results indicated that, compared with their peers, male students, older students (who enrolled in school later than usual or have had repeated grades), rural school students and small school students were more likely to face the risk of academic failure caused by low family ses, so they need more attention being paid by their parents and educators. according to models 1 to 5, after accounting for the effect of students and school characteristics, the five factors were all significant predictors of the probability of disadvantaged students becoming resilient, which could be understood as: i) for oneunit increase in the average school ses, the odds ratio of disadvantaged students becoming resilient (or, the same below) increases by 152.4%. ii) for one-unit increase in the ses heterogeneity of school, the or increases by 646.8%. iii) for one-unit increase in school education resources, the or increases by 22.6%. iv) for one-unit increase in the teaching quality of the school, the or increases by 29.3%. v) for every unit improvement of school climate, the or increases by 14.4%. therefore, the hypotheses h1a, h2a, h3a, h4a and h5a were verified. the role of school in reducing achievement gap related to family background for students in different ses groups, we set a series of multilevel linear regression models which contained the key explanatory variables at the school level including the basic characteristics of students and schools and family capital, so as to investigate the effect of each school factor on the academic performance of students. the results are shown in the table 5. after accounting for the controlling variables, five school factors significantly and positively predicted each group’s academic achievement indicating that junior high school students with different family ses all benefited from the improvement of school average ses, school ses heterogeneity, school education resources, teaching quality and school climate; and with the exception of school climate, the effect of the other four school factors on students’ academic performance increased as family ses decreased. in order to compare the difference between the effects of school factors on three groups of students, we used the method that was proposed by lian (2017) that includes the interaction terms to test whether the disadvantaged or the advantaged group benefited more from school improvement. first, we introduced a dummy variable di (di=1 indicates disadvantaged group, and di= 0 indicates advantaged group) to represent the student group. second, we included the interaction terms of dummy variable di and all independent variables in the multilevel linear regression equation. for example, the academic performance was the dependent variable, the school average ses was the core independent variable, we constructed the interaction term of the di with all the controlling variables (gender, age, single child or not, preschool education; family economic capital, family cultural capital, family social capital; school location, private/public, school size) and school average ses in the equation. third, we ran the re zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 255 table 5. the differential impact of school factors on different group of students. variable split-sample regression test for coefficient difference between disadvantaged and advantaged groups full sample disadvantaged students average students advantaged students student characteristics included included included included included school characteristics included included included included included school mean ses 6.099 *** (0.299) 6.539 *** (0.437) 5.693 *** (0.361) 4.673 *** (0.326) 0.899 * (0.444) ses heterogeneity 14.21 *** (1.397) 12.840 *** (1.568) 12.473 *** (1.402) 9.993 *** (1.357) 0.033 (1.259) educational resources 1.547 *** (0.190) 1.536 *** (0.194) 1.313 *** (0.201) 1.024 *** (0.194) 0.343 * (0.157) teaching quality 1.93 *** (0.224) 1.768 *** (0.248) 1.708 *** (0.226) 1.628 *** (0.225) -0.082 (0.207) school climate 1.206 *** (0.238) 0.908 *** (0.268) 1.038 *** (0.209) 1.114 *** (0.236) -0.313 (0.212) n of schools 610 592 610 588 610 n of students 30,743 10,585 9,844 10,314 20,899 note: 1. student characteristics include gender, age, family structure (only child of not), preschool education as well as family economic capital, cultural capital and social capital; school characteristics include school location, school size, private/public school. 2. ***: p<0.001, *: p<0.01, *: p<0.05. 3. standard error in parentheses. gression model and paid attention to coefficients of the interaction of di and the core independent variable. in the example above, the positive coefficient of the interaction term means that school average ses had a stronger effect on the academic performance in disadvantaged students; the negative coefficient of the interaction term indicates that school average ses had a stronger effect on the academic performance in advantaged student group. for the model with school ses heterogeneity, school education resources, school teaching quality and school climate as the core independent variables, the regression coefficient difference test of disadvantaged and advantaged students was also carried out according to the similar steps. the results are shown in the table 5. the coefficient of the interaction terms between schools’ mean ses, school education resources and dummy variable were positively significant indicating that disadvantaged students gained more achievement benefits from the improvement of school average social status and school education resources. the coefficient of the interaction terms between ses heterogeneity, teaching quality, school climate and dummy variable were not significant, which indicated that disadvantaged students had basically the same achievement as disadvantaged students from the expansion of school ses heterogeneity, zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 256 improvement of school teaching quality and improvement of school climate. therefore, hypotheses h1b and h3b were verified, but hypotheses h2b, h4b and h5b were not verified. discussion the role of school composition based on the large scale survey data conducted by collaborative innovation center of assessment toward basic education quality in china, our empirical study found that school average ses can be used to predict the probability of disadvantaged students to become resilient, as well as to narrow the education inequality related to family background, which confirmed previous findings such as “school socio-economic composition was significantly and positively related to students’ academic performance” (palardy, 2013; perry, 2012) and “the average school ses could predict the possibility of disadvantaged students’ academic resilience” (agasisti, et al., 2018). different explanations exist regarding the possible reasons why socio-economically disadvantaged students benefit from their peers who came from families with high ses. first, according to the endogenous effect of the social interaction (or social contagion effects) (manski, 1993), peers’ learning motivation and academic performance would directly influence student’s academic achievement and to get them been more similar with their peers. disadvantaged students who had peers with higher family ses generally developed higher self-education expectations (wu & huang, 2010) and experienced fewer behavioral problems (kahlenberg, 2012). disadvantaged students in higher-ses classes or schools might face pressure from social norms to become more like their peers, thereby spending more time on their learning and achieving better results than expected. second, socio-economically advantaged schools have more explicit and implicit resources such as higher-quality teachers, accumulated teaching and course resources, and potential resources from the community and parents as well. disadvantaged students who were enrolled in these advantaged schools would automatically get access to these resources that would greatly compensate for the lack of family education resources. third, in schools with higher ses, teachers there usually have higher expectations on students’ performance, and then they would adopt higher standards for students and implement them in teaching. this kind of teaching strategy is beneficial to disadvantaged students. fourth, disadvantaged students in higher-ses schools might receive more educational involvement from parents and more support from teachers, which would help them to develop positive psychological traits and valuable non-cognitive skills, thus achieve higher grades and narrow the achievement gap to advantaged peers. why does the increase of ses heterogeneity in school promote academic resilience of disadvantaged students? first of all, a significant positive correlation exists between the average school ses and ses heterogeneity. in our study, the correlation coefficient between them was 0.711. disadvantaged students who were enrolled in heterogeneous schools have more relatively advantaged peers than those in the homogeneous schools. according to our explanations mentioned above, these students will benefit zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 257 from the positive peer effects. second, socioeconomic diversity reduces the negative impact of poverty on the brain. continued pressure brought by poverty and fear would pass negative impact on the prefrontal executive function, and make individual’s ability to solve problems, set goals and complete task be restrained (wang & zhou, 2017). relocating these disadvantaged individuals from persistent poverty pressure to schools with high integration of ses will produce positive results. third, diversity promotes individual’s cognition development. according to piaget’s cognitive development theory, children’s cognition development is partially due to the imbalance of conflicts and diversity, and being in a diversified environment will promote individual’s positive thinking ability, intellectual input and perspective formation, which contribute to good learning results (conwayturner, 2016). the role of school education resources this study found that the adequacy of school education resources positively predicted the probability of disadvantaged students for becoming resilient and reduced the educational inequality associated with family background indicating that school education resources indeed play a part in compensating for the development of disadvantaged students. this finding was consistent with the results on the effect of school curriculum and teaching resources. using the pisa 2009 data of 15 eu countries, agasisti et al. (2017) found that disadvantaged students who were enrolled in schools with more extracurricular activities and higher quantity and quality of resources were more likely to become academically resilient. based on the data of large-scale education quality assessment in china, he (2013) found that the student-teacher ratio and the number of math classes per week had a significant positive impact on the academic resilience of migrant and left-behind children. students with low family ses gain significant benefit from adequate school education resources, probably because there may not have that much opportunity for them to participate in cultural activities at home, whereas the courses and extracurricular activities that schools provide can exactly help them to develop a sense of belonging and school identity, thus motivate them to learn more to improve academic performance and narrow the gap to the advantaged peers. the effect of school teaching quality our study revealed that the teaching quality of a school positively predicts the probability of disadvantaged students to become resilient, and provided new evidence that schools providing students with more meaningful learning opportunities such as differentiation, cooperation and inquiry learning could successfully cultivate academic resilience (wang, et al., 1998). using differentiating teaching strategy, the teachers have the opportunity to know their students more such as their difference/gaps in proficiency, ability to understand and knowledge use, learning interests and quality, and set up more appropriate teaching goals and use more reasonable teaching schedule to guide each individual student accordingly. with the help of teachers, the academic difficulties faced by disadvantaged students will be solved to a large extent, their confidence in learning and their motivation to explore new knowledge are also greatly promoted, zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 258 which are helpful to give a full play to their potential and make their academic performance more reliant on their own effort. using cooperative teaching strategy, students have more opportunities to discuss and communicate, and establish close relationship with their peers and teachers, and then their abilities to communicate, listen and cooperate, and their initiative, creativity and sense of competence all are greatly improved. a democratic and harmonious learning climate helps students to develop a more positive emotional attitude to schools and learning, and then put more effort in learning activities. using inquiry-based teaching strategy, students have more opportunities to participate in activities such as raising questions, making assumptions, designing plans, analyzing results and drawing conclusions, and also have more opportunities to communicate, present and reflect that not only help to deepen their understanding of knowledge, but also cultivate their interpersonal skills. inquiry-based classes can enhance students’ autonomy and have been showing to be helpful to students’ learning. the effect of school climate this study found that positive school climate is a significant predictor of the academic resilience of disadvantaged students, and provided new evidence that positive school climate is significantly correlated with academic success in low ses schools, and that support from important characters are the key reasons for them to achieve good performance. studies on the relationship between school climate and academic success in public middle schools in canada showed that students in schools with high school climate scores (top 5%) were 10 times more likely to be resilient than those in schools with average scores (voight, et al., 2013). in a meta-analysis of 99 articles about the correlation between teacher-student relationship and academic achievement ranging from pre-school to high school, the effect size of positive/negative teacher-student relationship and students’ academic achievements was small to medium, and teacherstudent relationship had more influence on low ses students’ academic achievement, and negative teacher-student relationship had more destructive influence on the academic development of students with learning difficulties or school failure risks (roorda, et al., 2011). the resilience and youth development model that derived from ecological system theory assumed that teenagers have psychological needs such as safety, love and sense of belonging, and the fulfillment of these needs largely depends on the protective factors and resources provided by school, families, society, and peer groups (including close relationship, high expectations, and meaningful participation opportunity). if external resources are able to meet their psychological needs, individuals will develop resilient traits (such as cooperation, empathy and self-efficacy), and these traits will protect children from the adverse effects of the risk factors and help to obtain good development (li & zhang, 2006). according to this model, positive school climate, serving as an external environment support, will help to satisfy students’ basic needs such as building relationships, developing competence, and improving their psychological capital to cope with adversity, and becoming academically resilient. implications zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 259 from our study, we drew conclusions that showed significant differences in terms of school quality indicators between resilient and non-resilient schools, i.e., school quality indicators positively predicted the probability of disadvantaged students to become resilient, and school mean ses, school education resources significantly narrowed the achievement gap that related to family ses. based on these, we put forward the following four suggestions to promote equal education. first, the government and educational authority should try to reduce the social class division of students and promote the integration of school students. governments and educational departments at all levels need to promote balanced development of compulsory education, strengthen the exchange and sharing of teachers, management experience, curriculum and resources between schools and different regions, narrow the gap in teachers and school conditions, even the imbalanced phenomenon of high ses student’s concentration in some schools caused by school enrollment, and adjust the school social composition. in terms of school admission policy, we suggest the number of high ses students in quality schools must be strictly controlled, the access probability of disadvantaged students to quality schools must be increased to certain level to help them get more resources and supportive school environment, so that they can take advantage of these resources and environmental conditions to accelerate and narrow the achievement gap to their peers. second, the government and educational authority should increase investment in education resources and pay attention to the fairness of high-quality resources distribution. regarding educational resource investment, especially teachers’ recruitment and supplement, governments at all levels should take into account the family background of students and give preference to schools with large number of disadvantaged students, so that making up the development gap between disadvantaged students in these schools and their advantaged peers. in addition, we also call for attention to the differences in school curriculum and extracurricular activities that potentially increase the achievement gap between schools. the local education department should try to provide afterschool services and high quality teaching resources for disadvantaged schools to ensure that high quality teachers and teaching resources are balanced and allocated, and gradually minimize the quality differences between schools. third, schools should try to improve teachers’ ability to effectively use differentiated, cooperative and exploratory teaching methods. all kinds of schools, especially disadvantaged schools with a large number of disadvantaged students, should further deepen the reform of class teaching, and promote differentiated, cooperative and exploratory teaching methods to give all students the same zhang & hu. school’s role in helping ses disadvantaged students success vol.2, no. 2, 2019 260 opportunity to receive teachers’ care, so that every student’s learning needs can be met to a greater extent. meanwhile, local education departments and schools should further intensify teacher’s training in disadvantaged schools through establishing cross-regional teacher development community and research platform, and carrying out various kinds of teaching experience exchanges to improve teachers’ ability to apply effective teaching strategies and gradually narrow the gap between teachers’ professional abilities. all these measures help to promote students’ achievement and narrow the gap between them resulted from the difference of family background. fourth, schools should try to build supportive school climate. teachers’ support, especially for disadvantaged students, by paying attention to each student’s development, encouraging their participation in the class, listening their needs, expressing respect, providing necessary help as well as giving high expectations, can improve students’ school experience and enhance the sense of school belonging that subsequently help them to devote to learning. besides, schools can provide appropriate feedback, recognition and rewards for teachers, motivate them to be dedicated to their jobs, and give them more opportunity of on-job training and further professional development, through which a solid foundation would be paved for improving the academic resilience of disadvantaged students.■ note: 1. students who encounter risk factors for academic failure (e.g., low family ses, migrant background, and ethnic minorities, etc.) but achieve much higher academic performance are called resilient students. for example, in the reports of pisa 2009, 2012, 2015 (program for international student assessment), the regression residual of students’ performance on family economics, social and cultural statuses (escs) and escs square terms are used as indicators of academic resilience, and those with low escs and high academic resilience are defined as resilient students. in the thematic report of “education equity: breaking barriers to social mobility” released by oecd 2018, students with escs at the lowest 1/4 of their country/region and scores at the highest 1/4 of their country are defined as resilient students from the domestic perspective (oecd, 2018). 2. disadvantaged schools were defined as having the lowest 1/3 of the average family ses, but advantaged schools were defined as having the top 1/3 of the average family ses. 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(2000) peer effects in private and public schools across countries. j policy man, 19(1): 75-92.■ received: 6 june 2019 revised: 25 june 2019 accepted: 17 july 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in china economics of education review, 2019; 4(2):3-25. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 张平平, 胡咏梅. 家庭处境不利学生如何实现学业成绩的逆袭: 学校在其中的作用. 教育经 济评论, 2019; 4(2):3-25. article-pingpingzhang-bece_title_31july2019 article-pingpingzhang-maintext-bece_31july2019 bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1072 healthy context paradox of being bullied and externalizing problems among adolescents by liu, x., pan, b., chen, l., li, t., ji, l., & zhang, w. correspondence to: liu, x., shandong normal university, china. email: liuxiaowei123000@163.com ealthy context paradox mainly refers to the situation where the bullied adolescents tend to show more psychological problems, such as depression and anxiety, while the surroundings are relatively low in bullying level. a study published in acta psychologica sinica further conducted indepth research exploring this counterintuitive psychological phenomenon, analyzing the relationship between being bullied and externalizing problems. specifically, students’ externalizing problems represent explicit misbehaviors. in terms of model construction, researchers set the average level of being bullied within a class as moderating variables and taking hostile attribution bias as mediating variables. the results are as follows:  between the level of individual being bullied and externalizing problems, the former can significantly positively predict externalizing problems, while the level in the class did not predict externalizing problems directly, which adjusted the correlations, the lower the level, the higher the frequency of individual externalizing problems, as a result, presenting the “healthy context paradox” phenomenon.  after the inclusion of mediating variables, the average level of bullying in the class significantly negatively predicted the relationship between the experience of being bullied and the hostile attribution bias. as for the class with a higher average level of bullying, the relationship between the experience of being bullied and the hostile attribution bias was relatively weak. these results suggest that hostile attribution bias plays a mediating role in the healthy context paradox. although the classroom environment is relatively positive, the students tend to become more “incompatible” as long as they are bullied, and then their hostile attribution bias will increase, and more externalization problems will occur. the researchers suggest that after a bullying incident, teachers should help the victim by forming the proper attributional pattern. in addition, in the h vol.8, no.1, 2021 1073 daily teaching work, teachers can design games and activities aimed at promoting positive interaction between classmates to help students build good peer beliefs and reduce the hostile attribution bias of bullied individuals. source: acta psychologica sinica, 2021; 53(2):170-181. bece. newsletter vol.11, no.1, 2022 1467 the effect of parental involvement on online learning performance of secondary students: a report on the survey of primary and secondary school online teaching in jiangsu province by cao, m., zhu, x., & shen, s. correspondence to: shusheng shen, nanjing normal university, china. e-mail: ssshen_nj@163.com his paper was published in the journal of east china normal university. affected by the covid-19 pandemic, china’s education system has experienced a nation-wide practice of online teaching and learning. the online learning performance of primary and secondary school students and their adaptability to the new operation has become a social concern. families are more involved in child learning process than ever before. based on a large-scale survey of online teaching in primary and secondary schools commissioned by the jiangsu provincial department of education, this study explores how middle school students perform in online learning and how parental involvement affects secondary school students’ online learning performance. the findings of the study are as follows.  overall, the online learning performance of middle school students is close to good, the learning engagement is good, and their behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement have reached an abovegood level. their learning outcomes are measured by the degree of goal achievement; the outcomes are close to good; students can quite effectively complete online learning tasks and achieve the learning objectives set by teachers. middle school students are at a medium level in learning psychology and not very pro-active in learning. a big share of middle school students has psychological problems, such as emotional instability and anxiety, which deserves public attention.  parental involvement has a positive impact on student learning psychology, and a good parent-child atmosphere positively influences students’ learning mentality. homework tutoring by parents has the greatest positive effect on online learning outcomes and also positively influences learning engagement and learning psychology of students; the creation of a good learning environment can predict student learning engagement to a considerable extent and directly aft mailto:ssshen_nj@163.com vol.11, no.1, 2022 1468 fects online learning experience and learning psychology; excessive parental education expectations or over-rigorous learning supervision may negatively affect students’ learning psychology and exacerbate students’ anxiety and academic stress. based on the research results, this study offers several recommendations. first, in home-school collaboration, it is necessary to incorporate parent education into the teaching framework of blended learning, guide parents to renew their concepts in terms of educational expectations, parent-child communication, and online learning supervision, and teach them how to alleviate their children’s anxiety through scientific parenting styles. second, parents should be concerned about children’s mental state in online learning. different learners have distinct psychological characteristics, and thus different measures should be taken to intervene on potential risks of online learning. finally, the interactivity, cooperativeness, and sociality of online learning need to be further strengthened. source: journal of east china normal university (education sciences), 2021; 2021(4):16-28. bece. newsletter vol.7, no.2, 2021 1007 the important role of education in the targetedpoverty alleviation by meng, z., hao, w., hong, s., & wang, z. correspondence to: wenwu hao, professor, school of education, shaanxi normal university, china. email: haowenwu@snnu.edu.cn survey published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences) selected peasant households (including the poverty and non-poverty families) from contiguous poor areas in northwestern china and analyzed the data through four dimensions of the relationship between the rural family economy and the of educational development. the results are as follows:  the income or consumption structure of peasant households is relatively simple and the development difference between poverty and non-poverty families is significantly obvious. the deepen degree of the poverty family, the heavier burden it carries in educational investment, while the input intensity increase gradually.  education has a significant positive effect in promoting the economic development of peasant households. what is worse, for the peasant households, a lower level of human capital will cause a significant in the quality structure of human resources and subsequent intergenerational transmission, along with the severe aging of the population.  the main factors behind the poverty among different peasant households are basically the same, but the attribution tendency is obvious. they are satisfied with the intensity and methods of poverty alleviation; however, problems like the lack of precise supply, knowledge, and goal establishment still exist.  the vast majority of the poverty and non-poverty families believe that education can make their children develop better and improve the family economic status, and they all hope that their children can receive undergraduate education. most of the former consider that participation in skill training is useful for getting rid of poverty and become better off, while the latter believe conversely. in terms of urgent and important educational details, they value the financial aid for education, daily health care, and disaster prevention and mitigation. a vol.7, no.2, 2021 1008 source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2020; 38(12):109-120. bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1059 how family environment influences pupils’ learning performance? by yang, f. correspondence to: yang, f., school of education, soochow university, china. email: yangf@suda.edu.cn ecently, a study published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences) used the methods such as structural equation model and multiple linear regression to analyze the data collected from 770 pupils who engaged in “home-school co-education” in new educational experiment and setting 726 pupils as the control group. the results of the paired-sample analysis show that: the indirect effect of family environment on pupils’ learning performance through mediating variables such as the students’ learning engagement and school environment was significant. school environment had a significantly positive effect on pupils’ learning engagement and learning performance, and home-school interaction could also significantly improve students’ learning performance. the home collections of pupils who engaged in new education experiment schools were significantly higher than those in the non-new education experiment schools. the longer the schools participated in the “home-school co-education” of the new educational experiment, the better the students’ reading performance and mathematics performance were. research recommendations:  create a family learning environment for parents and children to read, write and live together.  establish a scholarly campus and develop new courses that refer to the integrity of life.  strengthen students’ learning engagement and develop learning habits through achieving a goal once a month.  optimize home-school cooperation and realize the ecological cogovernance of education modernization. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2021; 39(3):71-83. r the current situation, characteristics, and countermeasures of the verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers: an empirical study of four provinces and cities in china qiran wang, yang li beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. the negative impact of the verbal abuse on student by the elementary school teachers is a big issue. a total of 416 students from four provinces and cities in china were enrolled in this study. we found that the occurrence rate of the verbal abuse by elementary school teachers was not high, whereas it still caused psychological trauma to students once happened by manifesting as the frustration of learning efficacy, self-confidence and interrelationship. regarding the causes, student’s poor academic performance was the major reason, and it was significantly related to students’ gender, i.e., male students who had poor academic performance were far more vulnerable to be verbally abused by their teachers. further, the study also found that students who were verbally abused by teachers were more easily bullied at school. the findings suggest that the government and schools should take joint measures to clarify the specific boundaries of teachers’ verbal punishment to students and standardize their verbal behavior to get teachers respect and care for students and create a healthy learning environment. best evid chin edu 2020; 6(1):739-752. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar060. how to cite: wang, q., & li, y. (2020) the current situation, characteristics, and countermeasures of the verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers: an empirical study of four provinces and cities in china. best evidence in chinese education, 6(1):739-752. keywords: elementary school teachers; verbal abuse; current situation; characteristics. wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no.1, 2020 740 about the author: qiran wang, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing, 100875, china. email: wangqiran1917@163.com. correspondence to: yang li, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing, 100875, china. email: 201821010005@mail.bnu.edu.cn. funding: research on the governance of school bullying (17jya003); a study on the mechanism of bullying and violence in elementary and middle school in beijing (aaca17015); teacher verbal abuse on the primary through high school students (1812217). this work was also supported by the csc scholarship (201906040125). conflict of interests: none. © 2020 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 741 introduction he basic principle for educators is to respect and nurture students and they should follow it as their professional accomplishment. with the prohibition of both formal and informal corporal punishment in elementary and middle schools, verbal abuse is becoming the main conduit for teachers’ harmful behavior towards students in china. other countries had established child protection laws, such as the australian children protection act, the uk children act, the us dignity in schools campaign, and the un committee on the rights of the child, and explicitly prohibit teachers from conducting verbal abuse. the aim of these guidelines was to establish a harmonious and safe school culture to respect the dignity of students, protect them from degrading and punitive measures, provide a guiding framework enabling teachers to listen to the their views, and develop specific procedures to suspend harmful behavior or allow them to appeal. however, in china, few policies, laws, or regulations are currently available to limit teachers’ verbal abuse. teachers should oversee the students to shape their learning, but they are equal with students. the real dignity of teachers does not from their subjective feelings, but from students’ moral affirmation, knowledge acquisition and emotional attachment. in china, teachers’ verbal abuse against students currently does not violate any laws and regulations. therefore, we need to pay attention to helping teachers to respect students and establish a good, cooperative, pleasant, and mutually trusting relationship with students. literature review definitions of verbal abuse in western countries, teachers’ verbal abuse had been systematically studied, and it is usually divided into physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and neglect. verbal abuse was defined as a type of teacher’s speech mode, which produces adverse influences on students’ emotional, social, cognitive and physiological functions and adaptability (wang, 2009). teachers use shouting, abusing and other forms of speech to incur mental and psychological abuse to students, and negatively impact students’ emotional and mental health. in china, teachers’ verbal abuse was defined as the use of discriminatory and insulting words or overwhelming criticism that deprecate students’ personality and judgment, and result in devitalization on students’ dignity, spirit and mental health (sun, 2008). specifically, teacher’s verbal abuse was regarded as the behavior of restricting and depriving students of their right to speak and freedom of thinking (wang, 2009). in this study, teachers’ verbal abuse refers to the negative speech of teachers that negatively impact students’ physical and mental development through reprimand, insult, and abuse during the education and teaching activities. t wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 742 forms of verbal abuse teachers’ verbal abuse shows different forms. king and janson (2009) pointed out that it includes abusive language, slander, sarcasm, contempt, ridicule and other insulting and discriminatory language. theoklitou et al. (2012) mentioned that it is loud yelling, coarse and rude attitude, harsh criticism, and denigration of the child’s personality. this study classified teachers’ verbal abuse into two categories: (i) direct verbal abuse, i.e., a teacher directly and actively makes verbal attacks to a student, including yelling, insulting and sarcastic remarks; (ii) indirect verbal abuse, i.e., a teacher does not directly attack a student but evokes their peers to exclude them, or the teacher deliberately ignores or refuses to communicate with the student. effects of verbal abuse the adverse effects of teachers’ verbal abuse majorly include the academic performance, physical and mental health and social interaction, in combination with its negative results like poor academic performance, damaged self-esteem, feeling of inferiority and self-closure tendency. a student survey showed that teachers’ abuse had a significantly negative effect on students’ psychological function (nearchou, 2018). an interview of six graders showed that teachers’ verbal abuse worsened their relationship with teachers, even led to verbal conflicts and violent attacks. furthermore, teacher’s verbal abuse got students hated their school and classes, and sometimes led students pretend to be sick to avoid schooling (geiger, 2017). method data collection to get a good sample size, 13 elementary schools from four different provinces were selected. in this study, random sampling was used, and 20 students were selected from each class. all survey questionnaires were filled in the class. the average time for each questionnaire was five minutes. the survey questionnaire was drafted in simplified chinese. the questionnaire was majorly to collect (i) demographic information of the students including gender, age, location, grades and school types; (ii) variable information from the students like types of direct verbal abuse, types of indirect verbal abuse, and academic self-efficacy.. meanwhile, semi-structured interviews were used to understand other possible issues, such as the influence of teachers’ verbal abuse and the actions taken when abused by teachers, etc. from november 2018 to february 2019, 16 students from different elementary schools were interviewed. we used spss and mplus to analyze the questionnaire data. to ensure the data coverage of interviews, the respondents were not only asked to answer designated questions, but also encouraged them to talk about their input on verbal abuse (table 1). variables wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 743 table 1: demographic information of the students. item number percentage gender male 233 56.0% female 183 44.0% grade second 47 11.3% third 68 16.3% fourth 56 13.5% fifth 113* 27.2% sixth 132 31.7% area east 155 37.3% middle 166 40.1% west 95 23.6% academic performance poor 85 20.3% average 237 57.1% good 94 22.6% total 416 100% *: the original number herein was 133. given the authors’ correction, it is corrected to be 113. table 2: types and reasons of teachers’ verbal abuse. types of teachers’ verbal abuse direct verbal abuse roar, ridicule, taunt frighten, threaten indirect verbal abuse isolated, exclude neglect, ignore reasons of teachers’ verbal abuse learning performance violation of classroom discipline poor academic performance, wrong answers other reasons family background, economic conditions looking and dressing wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 744 table 3. occurrence of teachers’ verbal abuse. types of teachers’ verbal abuse frequency (number/%) 1 time 2-3 times > 3 times roar, ridicule, taunt 58 (13.9%) 18 (4.3%) 15 (3.6%) frighten, threaten 62 (14.9%) 18 (4.3%) 12 (2.9%) isolated, exclude 20 (4.8%) 11 (2.6%) 8 (1.9%) neglect, ignore 26 (6.3%) 16 (3.8%) 9 (2.2%) four questions sets were designed for the dimension of “teachers’ verbal abuse”, two items including direct and indirect verbal abuse were asked. the direct verbal abuse indicates that teachers yelled at students or made fun of student such as “yelling at me” or “saying i’m stupid”, and teachers frightened me such as “punish me if i don’t perform well or telling my parents”. the indirect verbal abuse means that teachers isolated me or destroyed my classmate relationship, such as “stopping other students from playing with me”, teacher intentionally ignored me, such as “not listening to my explanation and do not care about me”. for the dimension of “reasons for teachers’ verbal abuse”, four questions were asked. two of them were about learning performance such as “teachers scolded me because i disturbed class discipline” or “teachers scolded me because i am not good at learning”. the other two questions were other factors such as “teachers teased my family or parents” or “teachers teased my appearance or clothing” (table 2). meanwhile, this study also listed topics of teachers’ positive verbal behaviors, which include “teachers often said encouraging words to me”, “teachers patiently guided me when i encountered problems”, “teachers enlightened and comforted me when i was in sad”, “teachers had a good attitude when they talked with me”, “teachers praised me in front of other students”, and “teachers praised me before other teachers or my parents”, etc. sara (2018) found that students who were ignored or abused by teachers were more vulnerable to school bullying. therefore, this study also dealt with the issue of school bullying, and investigated the relationship between teachers’ verbal abuse and different types of school bullying. results occurrence of teachers’ verbal abuse table 3 shows that the occurrence of verbal abuse by teachers in china is relatively low, which indicated that most elementary school teachers in china abide by professional integrity. however, several students reported that they frequently suffered from teachers’ verbal abuse. our study found that approximately 20% of students suffered from teachers’ direct verbal abuse more than once each semester, and about 10% suffered indirect wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 745 figure 1. reasons for teachers’ verbal abuse. figure 2. influence of teachers’ verbal abuse. wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 746 verbal abuse more than once per semester. during the interview, it was found that almost all 16 interviewees mentioned that they had been subjected to direct or indirect verbal abuse from teachers with varying degree, some of which even were due to teachers’ strong purpose of personal abuse. the following are examples of interview contents: once when i failed to answer a simple question, the teacher scolded me and said i didn’t use my own brain in class, and then said that i’d better quit school. (interviewee c, second grade, female) because i didn’t do the cleaning carefully, the teacher threatened that he would move my seat to the trash next time. (interviewee b, fifth grade, male) the teacher said i was a poor student who would have a bad impact on other students’ academic performance, and he appealed to other students to stay away from me. (interviewee a, third grade, female) the teacher always ignored the question i raised because he thought they were too simple. (interviewee d, sixth grade, male) reasons and influence of teachers’ verbal abuse for the analysis of the causes of teachers’ verbal abuse, this study statistically calculated the proportion of individual item to the total score. the two reasons for academic performance (example: teachers scolded and teased me because i was not good at learning; teachers scolded and yelled at me because i disturbed classroom discipline) were respectively termed “academic performance” and “classroom performance”. the total score of “academic performance 1” was 564, “academic performance 2” was 500, “other 1” was 473, and “other 2” was 474. poor academic performance is the main reason for teachers to conduct verbal abuse (figure 1). the following are examples of interview contents: i believe that i’m stupid. i’m not as smart as others. i always fail in the exam. the teacher also said that i was too dumb to study. (interviewee h, fourth grade, male) once i played games with my classmates in class, the teacher scolded me that i should be a circus clown instead of a student, and i was not qualified to study with my classmates in the same classroom. (interviewee g, third grade, male) my parents got divorced when i was in elementary school. once i got bad scores in exam, my teacher said that i failed because neither of my parents cared for me, and i deserved that. (interviewee e, second grade, female) my parents run a tiny grocery store, and they are busy all day long. i caught a cold the other day and i wept my runny nose with sleeves, which happened to be seen by the teacher. she was furious and asked me if i don’t have parents to take care of me. (interviewee f, fourth grade, female) wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 747 during the interview, students were asked to describe the causes of teachers’ verbal abuse. the following are examples of interview contents: teachers’ verbal abuse to students will cause great harm to students’ mental health, which will last for a long time. according to the survey (figure 2), only 7% of the respondents held an “indifferent” attitude towards teacher verbal abuse, 46.9% of the respondents would feel “sad for a while” after suffering teacher’s verbal abuse, and 46.1% of the respondents would feel “very sad”. in this study, we specifically designed questions for students to describe the impact of teachers’ verbal abuse. after analysis, we found that teachers’ verbal abuse to students formed self-doubt and decreased self-confidence in their studies. the followings are examples of interview contents: i’m introverted and not talkative, once the teacher asked whether i was a dumb man, which made me feel upset for a long time. after that incident, i believed that my character was defective and therefore my self-confidence was damaged. i am afraid to meet teachers and i dare not greet them. (interviewee j, fourth grade, female) i once drew a picture in math course. the teacher grabbed my picture, showed it in front of the classroom and mocked at me, “masterpiece, hmm? wanna be a painter in the future? dream on!” i was ashamed and resentful, and i even couldn’t fall asleep that night. i really love painting, but he satirized me so much that i thought if i should give up painting. (interviewee i, sixth grade, male) characteristics of teachers’ verbal abuse we used the ols regression method to see the influencing characteristics of teachers’ verbal abuse. items of “gender” and “grades” passed the significant test (p < 0.05) (table 4). when compared to female students, male peers were more likely to be abused by teachers (b = -0.131, s.e. = 0.055); students with poor academic performance were more frequently abused verbally by teachers than those with good academic performance (b = -0.088, s.e. = 0.051). another ols regression method was employed to examine the influencing characteristics of teachers’ verbal encouragement (table 5). the items “gender”, “location” and “academic record” passed the significant test (p < 0.05). when compared to male students, female students were more likely to receive verbal encouragement from teachers (b = 0.165, s.e. = 0.071). compared with the central and western areas, teachers in the eastern area were more likely to adopt verbal encouragements to students (b = -0.112, s.e. = 0.060). students with good academic performance were more likely to receive teachers’ verbal encouragement than those with poor academic performance (b = 0.318, s.e. = 0.065). teachers’ verbal abuse to students was regarded as a type of bullying with unequal power (olweus & breivik, 2012). studies show that teachers’ verbal abuse will have a series of negative marginal effects on students, such as affecting the social relationship with their peer classmates, and reducing their self-efficacy (brassard & wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 748 table 4. characteristics of teachers’ verbal abuse. model sum of squares df mean square f sig. regression 3.632 4 0.908 2.916 0.021 residual 127.983 411 0.311 dependent variable: teachers' verbal abuse items b s.e. wald df sig. gender -0.131 0.055 -0.116 -2.373 0.018* grades -0.016 0.020 -0.039 -0.781 0.435 areas 0.052 0.047 0.055 1.106 0.269 academic record -0.088 0.051 -0.084 -1.714 0.047* constant 1.594 0.206 7.732 0.000 *: p < 0.05. table 5. characteristics of teachers' verbal encouragement model sum of squares df mean square f sig. regression 18.225 4 4.556 8.910 0.000 residual 210.164 411 0.511 dependent variable: characteristics of teachers' verbal encouragement items b s.e. wald df sig. gender 0.165 0.071 0.110 2.330 0.020* grades -0.005 0.026 -0.009 -0.181 0.856 areas -0.112 0.060 -0.091 -1.869 0.042* academic record 0.318 0.065 0.231 4.852 0.000* constant 2.539 0.264 9.613 0.000 *: p < 0.05*. fiorvanti, 2015). in china, it is hard to shake teachers’ authority, and their behaviors will be imitated by students, which will make the situation much worse. to investigate whether there is an inevitable link between teachers’ verbal abuse and school bullying, we conducted a correlation analysis, and found that all types of verbal abuse have significant relationship to all types of school bullying behaviors (table 6). students who were more vulnerable to teachers’ verbal abuse were more likely to be bullied by other students. this is also reflected in the interview. wang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 749 table 6. correlation analysis of teachers’ verbal abuse and school bullying. verbal abuse school bullying verbal bullying social bullying cyber bullying physical bullying direct verbal abuse 1 0.705 ** 0.535 ** 0.477 ** 0.451 ** direct verbal abuse 2 0.693 ** 0.532 ** 0.483 ** 0.449 ** indirect verbal abuse 1 0.524 ** 0.564 ** 0.443 ** 0.439 ** indirect verbal abuse 2 0.573 ** 0.550 ** 0.414 ** 0.457 ** n 416 416 416 416 **: p < 0.01; *: p < 0.05. i don’t do well in my study and my teacher often calls me a fool. some guys in my class also call me fool in front of my classmates, which made me feel very shameful. (interviewee d, third grade, male) the teacher said that we should make friends with the students who study well and not hang out with the students who study badly. everyone thinks that everything the teacher says is right, so nobody wants to play with me. (interviewee a, second grade, female) discussion currently, it is extremely rare for studying teachers’ verbal abuse in china through the cnki, only 9 studies are available under the topic of “teachers’ verbal abuse” or “teachers’ verbal attack”. it is of great value to analyze the situation and characteristics of teachers’ verbal abuse within china. our results showed that the verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers is not serious, but it does exist to some extent, and has a negative impact on some students, which is embodied in reducing students’ learning enthusiasm and selfefficacy, and damaging students’ interpersonal relationships. direct verbal abuse is the major form for elementary school teachers, and then followed by indirect verbal abuse. elementary school teachers conduct verbal abuse to students due to their bad academic performance or classroom performance. especially, males with poor academic performance are more likely to be abused verbally. furthermore, there is a strong correlation between teachers’ verbal abuse and student bullying by their classmates. suggestion first, china should build up legislative rules against teachers’ verbal abuse and standardize the language behavior of elementary school teachers. our results showed that the verbal abuse by elementary school teachers occurs frequently and produced a longlasting negative impact on students’ development. it is the duty of the national legislawang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 750 ture and the education administration to establish corresponding legal regulations over teachers’ verbal abuse. it is an unavoidable responsibility for governments to ensure the healthy development of students physically and mentally. the legislature should establish and improve the legal system to prohibit teachers’ verbal abuse, and intensify the revision of relevant education laws; and also should clearly add relevant provisions into teachers law and compulsory education law to prohibit teachers’ verbal abuse. the ministry of education of china and education administration at all levels should formulate corresponding rules and policies in order to guide and supervise teachers’ language behavior, limit and eliminate teachers’ verbal abuse against students. second, elementary schools should improve institutional culture construction and establish prevention mechanisms for teachers’ verbal abuse. it is time to strengthen the construction of teachers’ morality, carry out pre-vocational and vocational training for all teachers, enable teachers to establish the value of respecting and caring for students, and put an end to the verbal abuse in educating and teaching activities. elementary schools should enhance the supervision and assessment of teachers’ verbal behavior. it should be taken into consideration to see whether they use abusive words when evaluating their teaching, and directly linked with the annual evaluation, award evaluation and title evaluation, etc. regular lectures on the prevention of verbal abuse should be given to both teachers and students to enhance their understanding of the characteristics, hazards and countermeasures of the verbal abuse. therefore, students can consciously identify and oppose teachers’ verbal abuse in their daily school life. further, schools should establish a family-school linkage mechanism to prevent teachers’ verbal abuse and facilitate the channels of parents’ complaints. for teachers, it is necessary to clarify their power of punishment, especially the reasonable boundary of teachers’ speech and behavior, and guide teachers to use reasonable and civilized language. although it was called for the “right to punitive education” and a hot debate, in the teaching behavior, it is necessary to endow the teacher with reasonable and appropriate punishment power to standardize student’s learning. however, how to avoid the corporal punishment by teachers in the form of “warning” and how to grasp the limitation of teachers’ power of punishment both require careful consideration and design. similarly, it is necessary to distinguish teachers’ reasonable criticism to students from their verbal violence against students, set the bottom line for teachers to discipline students, and protect teachers’ right to criticize students while forbidding teachers’ abusive words. besides, we should actively carry out teacheroriented education and training, guide teachers to establish a correct view of students, and give more emotional attention and academic support to students with poor academic performance and poor daily behavior, instead of blindly denying, rejecting or even imposing verbal violence on them. last but not least, for students, it is of importance to improve the relief measures for students who suffered from teachers’ verbal violence to reduce its negative impact. our results showed that only less than 5% of the students tried to report the problem and seek help. actively carry out the thematic education to prevent verbal abuse among peers and teachers for elementary school students, and encourage elemenwang & li. verbal abuse to students by elementary school teachers. vol.6, no. 1, 2020 751 tary students to report it and seek help, and school should provide psychological counseling and emotional support to the violence to minimize the negative impact. meanwhile, our study showed that students who suffered from teachers’ verbal violence were significantly associated with bullying. this suggests that schools should carry out educational activities on the theme of fighting against school bullying, preventing teachers’ verbal violence, and building up a safe and healthy campus for their development. references australasian legal information institute. 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[chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.10061789.2018.02.019 received: 27 april 2020 revised: 10 july 2020 accepted: 19 july 2020 the chinese version of this article has been published in renmin university of china education journal, 2019; 2019(2):51-65. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 王祈然, 李洋. (2019). 小学教师对学生言语暴力的现状,特征及对策:基于全国四省市的实证研究. 中国人民大学教育学刊, 2019(2):51-65. article-qiranwang-bece_title_18sep2020 article-qiranwang-bece_maintext18sep2020 bece. newsletter vol.10, no.2, 2022 1420 individual and class factors influencing students’ social and emotional skills by li, m. w., mao, y. q., & li, y. f. correspondence to: mingwei li, nanjing normal university. e-mail: 781945994@qq.com ocial and emotional skills refer to a series of core competencies related to self-adaptation and social development such as emotional regulation, self-control, achievement motivation, and collaboration with others. cultivation of students’ social and emotional skills is critical to the transformation and upgrading of basic education in the new era. published in contemporary education sciences, the study uses data of 2,020 students from beijing and tianjin as an analysis sample to analyze the effects of individual and class factors on students’ social and emotional skills by the two-level hlm, in response to the current public concerns with students’ comprehensive education and social development. the results of the study are as follows.  at the individual level, female students, non-boarders and class leaders show higher social and emotional skills. specifically, gender (β = 0.10, p < 0.01), boarding or not (β = 0.16, p < 0.05), and having been a class leader or not (β = 0.18, p < 0.001) significantly predict students’ level of social and emotional skills, while education levels and being the only child or not do not have significant effects.  at the class level, there are significant inter-class differences in students’ social and emotional skills. specifically, class factors can explain 8.5% of the total variation. in addition, the study finds that teacher-student relationships (γ = 0.11, p < 0.05), peer relationships (γ = 0.53, p < 0.001), and developing opportunities (γ = 0.12, p < 0.05) significantly and positively predict students’ social and emotional skills. clarifying the effects of individual and class factors on students’ social and emotional skills can provide useful references for pertinent education of students’ non-cognitive abilities. based on the analysis results, the researchers suggest that in developing students’ social and emotional skills, teachers should understand and respect differences among individuals, tailoring teaching according to students’ aptitude; meanwhile, supportive class s mailto:781945994@qq.com vol.10, no.2, 2022 1421 atmosphere and harmonious interpersonal relationships also play an important role in developing students’ social and emotional skills; furthermore, extra curriculum activities in various forms should be provided for students to practice non-cognitive skills. source: contemporary education sciences, 2021; 2021(12):80-88. professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china jijun yao nanjing normal university, nanjing 210023, china abstract. in the new century, the quantity and quality of empirical education research in china have been greatly improved, and more people are paying attention to and engaging in evidence-based research and practice in education. in this context, professor robert slavin, a wellknown expert in evidence-based education at johns hopkins university in the united states, contributed greatly to the guidance and assistance to the development of evidence-based education in china. he clarified some vague understandings of chinese scholars on the research and reform of evidence-based education, trained and instructed chinese scholars and students, and built a platform for exchanges between chinese and foreign scholars, which has played an inestimable role in promoting the development of evidence-based education in china. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 8(1):1021-1028. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.or30. how to cite: yao, j. (2021). professor slavin and the development of evidencebased education in china. best evidence in chinese education, 8(1):1021-1028. keywords: robert edward slavin, china, evidence-based education, development correspondence to: jijun yao, professor, school of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210023, china. email: yaojijun_njnu@163.com conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. yao. professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1022 the status quo of the development of evidence-based education in china or a long time, education research in china has focused on qualitative research, especially speculative research. this situation leads to a single academic research paradigm, insufficient scientific characteristics, and disconnection between theory and practice. meanwhile, china’s educational practice and reform are mainly based on experience rather than scientific evidence, which make decisionmaking and practice often biased. it is difficult for principals and teachers to get the guidance of policies and research based on scientific evidence to effectively improve the efficiency of management and teaching. since the beginning of the new century, this situation has been greatly improved. on the one hand, educational decision-making departments have paid more and more attention to the role of scientific research in the process of educational reform and development, and vigorously promoted educational scientific research from the system and management level. in october 2019, the ministry of education of china promulgated the “opinions of the ministry of education on strengthening educational scientific research in the new era” (the policy and regulations department, the ministry of education, china, [2019] no. 16). it is required to further innovate the scientific research paradigms and methods, with particular emphasis on the requirement of “strengthening empirical research, insisting on facts and evidence as the basis, and continuously tracking major issues, focusing on long-term and systematic research”. this reflects a strong sense of evidence at the national level. on the other hand, in terms of the transformation of china’s education research, it has become a consensus in china’s education field to vigorously strengthen empirical research in recent years. in 2015, east china normal university held the first national education empirical research forum, which has been held for six consecutive sessions so far. the forum has grown from the initial participation of more than 600 people to the participation of dozens of journals and universities today; it is a grand event for china’s education empirical research with thousands of offline participants and more than 100,000 online participants. it has greatly promoted the development of empirical research on education in china. as a landmark event, on january 14, 2017, deans of education faculty (department) of 14 universities in china including east china normal university, the chief editors of 32 educational research journals, the leaders of the national educational science planning office, and the education research center of the people’s daily issued the “east china normal university action declaration to strengthen empirical research in education and promote the transformation of research paradigm” in shanghai. the release of this “declaration of action” indicated that vigorously promoting empirical research in education has become a consensus and unified action in the entire chinese education field. in this context, the empirical research in chinese education research in recent years has shown a greater degree of improvement in both quantity and quality. the conf yao. professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1023 tinuous emergence of high-quality educational scientific research results has played a more significant role in promoting educational reform and development. but it goes without saying that the foundation of china’s education research is relatively weak, and there is still room for improvement. studies have found that on the basis of comparing the top domestic and abroad educational journals, although the proportion of empirical research results on education in china was on the rise, the proportion was still relatively low. the methods used by them still focused on statistical description, the application of cutting-edge analysis methods was less, and the overall research level was not high (zhu & ma, 2020). in the past two decades, the development of evidence-based education research and reform has been the most exciting thing in the education field in european and american countries. such progress has also attracted the attention of chinese researchers and policy makers. in recent years, chinese researchers have noticed the development of evidence-based education in the west, but most of them were concentrated in the field of comparative education. they mainly focused on the tracking and introduction of western research trends, and research and practical exploration based on local evidence-based education were still lacking (deng et al., 2019; li & cheng, 2019). in this process, no matter in terms of theoretical research, method application or practical exploration, the development of domestic evidence-based education in china has many areas that need to be clarified and improved. this situation has changed slightly in recent years, but as a whole, the development of evidence-based education in china still has a long way to go. the impact of professor slavin’s team on the development of evidence-based education in china as a leading researcher in the research and reform of evidence-based education, professor slavin has made outstanding contributions to its development. in 2018, professor slavin and his wife, professor madden nancy, were invited by the school of educational science of nanjing normal university, accompanied by professor alan cheung of the school of education of the chinese university of hong kong, to visit mainland china for the first time. since then, professor slavin has paid great attention to the development of evidence-based education in china. he has repeatedly participated in related academic activities organized by universities in mainland china and did his best to help chinese universities and scholars carry out related research. he has made indelible contributions to accelerating the development of evidence-based education in china. he clarified some vague understandings of chinese scholars about evidence-based education although there have been some preliminary explorations, the research and practice of evidence-based education is still a new thing for researchers in mainland china, and their understanding of it is still vague or even inaccurate. in response to this, professor yao. professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1024 slavin accepted the invitation of science insight education frontiers to specially write an article in response to the questions and criticisms on the reform of evidence-based education from the chinese scholars. in this paper, professor slavin responded to the following questions at length: does evidence-based research rely too much on experimental research to narrow education research? why can’t high-quality qualitative research, case studies, and experience become “evidence” in evidence-based research? how should evidence-based research be promoted in developing countries? etc. he believed that in developing countries like china, exploring rigorous and valuable evidence is an effective way to efficiently promote educational research, practice, and reform. in this process, it is equally critical to vigorously promote local evidence-based research and learn from foreign experience (slavin & cheung, 2019). in 2020, invited by the journal east china normal university education review, professor slavin published a paper entitled “how could evidence-based reform advance education?” in the journal, in which he once again discussed the importance of evidence-based reforms to the development of pedagogy (slavin et al., 2021). these discussions clarified the vague understanding of some key issues of evidence-based research in education in mainland china, and further pointed out the direction of related research while deepening the relevant understanding. he made more mainland researchers pay attention to the development of evidence-based education in recent years, professor slavin has come to china to participate in academic conferences and lectures. in 2018, professor slavin and his wife were invited by the school of educational science of nanjing normal university to visit chinese university for the first time. during the period, they gave a number of lectures to teachers and students of nanjing normal university, and systematically introduced the latest development of evidence-based education reform in european and the usa. in 2019, professor slavin and his wife visited china again. together with experts from all over the world, they participated in the “international forum on ideas and actions in pursuing educational excellence” hosted by nanjing normal university and gave keynote speeches. they discussed with chinese evidence-based researchers on ways and paths to promote evidence-based reforms in education. following this, professor slavin went to shanghai to participate in the “fifth national educational empirical research forum” hosted by east china normal university. the keynote speeches made by professor slavin and his entourage at these conferences further expanded the influence of evidence-based research among chinese researchers. it has effectively promoted more researchers and practitioners to pay attention to and participate in the research and practice of evidencebased education. he guided and helped chinese researchers grow professor slavin was very concerned about the talent training and professional construction of evidence-based education. in addition to providing up-to-date information for yao. professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1025 researchers, he also led his team to contributed to the development of evidence-based education in china. during his two visits to china, professor slavin gladly accepted the invitation of nanjing normal university and was successively appointed as a foreign consultant expert of the school of educational science of nanjing normal university and the “hongguo chair professor” of nanjing normal university. in addition, the center for research and reform in education of johns hopkins university led by professor slavin has also received visiting students from china many times. under the guidance of professor slavin’s team, these students have been greatly improved in their research vision and abilities. it has laid a solid foundation for the sustainable development of china’s evidence-based education at a higher level in the future. he actively promoted the research results of evidence-based education in china during his first visit to the mainland china, professor slavin signed a cooperation agreement with the school of educational science of nanjing normal university to cofound the “best evidence in brief (beib)” project in the mainland. the beib project is a global evidence-based research and reform public welfare project led by professor slavin and participated by several universities and research institutions. it compiles the most cutting-edge, most effective, and most interesting evidence-based research results, so that researchers and first-line practitioners can obtain timely first-hand information, thereby promoting the development of evidence-based education. after intense preparations, the beib project in mainland china was launched in november 2018. professor slavin also introduced and shared the website link on his blog. this project has not only received extensive attention from domestic education colleagues in china, but has also become an important window for international evidence-based education researchers to understand the research dynamics in china. so far, beie in mainland china has nearly 10,000 subscriptions and is read hundreds of times every day, and its influence is gradually expanding. on this basis, in order to further expand the influence of evidence-based education research in china, after discussion with professor slavin, the chinese beie project team decided to launch an academic journal dedicated to the achievements of evidence-based education in china. in 2019, best evidence in chinese education (bece) was officially launched, and professor slavin personally served as the chairman of the editorial board. during the development of the journal, professor slavin has given strong professional support. in 2020, with the global spread of covid-19 pandemic, how to maintain the operation of the education system under the premise of pandemic prevention and control has become a key issue for global educators. in this context, professor slavin was invited by the journal bece to publish a covid-19 themed paper. together with scholars from many other countries, they discussed the international antipandemic experience in education. once this group of papers was published, it attracted widespread attention and the journal’s influence increased rapidly. so far, bece has yao. professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1026 been abstracted or indexed in more than ten important databases including ebsco, eric, ssrn, etc., showing a good momentum of development. professor slavin’s prospects for the development of evidence-based education in china professor slavin has expressed his expectations for the future development of evidencebased education in china on many occasions. during his first visit to china, professor slavin expressed his view in the lecture exchange session that china, as a big country different from the west, has different national conditions and educational conditions from the west. however, in terms of evidence-based reform, both east and west should be consistent in promoting education reform through the acquisition of scientific evidence. in this regard, china, as the most populous country, has its own advantages, and its development prospects for evidence-based education are promising. professor slavin has also expressed his views on how to accelerate the development of evidence-based education in china. in 2019, during professor slavin’s participation in the conference in nanjing, a participant ever asked him as: china’s current evidence-based education research foundation is still relatively weak, and many decision makers have not formed the consciousness of making decisions based on evidence. therefore, in this situation, how should we overcome difficulties and advance the development of evidence-based education research and practice? professor slavin’s response to this issue was that even in europe and the united states, evidence-based education reform would be questioned and criticized, which was normal. for a country like china, it is in the initial stage of evidence-based education, the first task was to start it first. in the initial stage, it might be difficult for researchers to obtain excellent and sufficient experimental research conditions. in this case, even doing some research that reduced the rigorous requirements was better than doing nothing. researchers should work closely with front-line teachers and decision makers to make evidence serve the reform and practice of education. in this process, try to gradually improve the quality of research and people’s sense of identification with evidence-based reforms, and subsequently and gradually the research and reforms would be easier to carry out. such a deep and pragmatic insight is not only a suggestion for the research and practice of evidence-based education in china, but also a great encouragement to researchers and practitioners who are interested in it. professor slavin hoped that china’s evidence-based education research and reform can run its own way. when the author accompanied professor slavin and his wife in 2018, i once proposed an idea to use the resources of “success for all (sfa)” and apply its implementation model to carry out related work in china. professor slavin did not approve of this. in addition to sfa’s resources are not suitable for china, he believed that china has its own unique national and education conditions, and therefore also has its own problems that need to be solved. he even advocated that chinese researchers should use evidence-based reform ideas and methods to solve china’s own problems based on the experience of other countries. such a view is obviously very enyao. professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1027 lightening and should be the development direction of evidence-based education in china. professor slavin has always paid close attention to the development of evidence-based education in china. in recent years, the progress of china’s evidencebased research in education and reform has also made him very pleased. due to the pandemic, many planned exchange activities have been suspended, but we have been planning to invite him to visit china again to answer questions and guide chinese scholars again. professor slavin also said in his last letter to the author that he hoped to work with me again after the pandemic was over. but what i never expected was that this had become a wish that professor slavin could never realize. on april 25, 2021, professor slavin left us forever. when the news came, many scholars in the chinese education field who were familiar with him were quite grieving. even if professor slavin has passed away, we believe that the tree of evidence-based education in china will continue to take root and sprout until it flourishes. this is perhaps what professor slavin would like to see most. i would like to deeply in memory of professor slavin with this article! references deng, m., zhang, y., & fan, w. (2019). the development context, application and main experience of evidence-based education in the united states. international and comparative education, 41(4):91-97. [chinese] https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfd total-bjjy201904012.htm east china normal university news center. (2017, january 16), strengthening educational empirical research. east china normal university action declaration issued. [chinese] retrieved may 11, 2021, from https://news.ecnu.edu.cn/58/98/c1833a8 8216/page.htm li, h., & cheng, j. (2019). evidence-based school reform: exploration of the path of basic education reform in the united states. educational research, 40(10):62-73. [chinese] https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfd total-jyyj201910011.htm ministry of education of china. (2019), opinions of the ministry of education on strengthening educational scientific research in the new era. the policy and regulations department, the ministry of education, china, [2019] no. 16, [chinese] retrieved may 10, 2021, from http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/a02/s70 49/201911 /t20191107_407332.html slavin, r.e., & cheung, a.c.k. (2019), evidence-based reform in education: responses to critics. science insight https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-bjjy201904012.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-bjjy201904012.htm https://news.ecnu.edu.cn/58/98/c1833a88216/page.htm https://news.ecnu.edu.cn/58/98/c1833a88216/page.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-jyyj201910011.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-jyyj201910011.htm http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/a02/s7049/201911%20/t20191107_407332.html http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/a02/s7049/201911%20/t20191107_407332.html yao. professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china. vol.8, no. 1, 2021 1028 education frontiers, 2(1):65-69. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.19.ar027 slavin, r.e., cheung, a.c.k., & zhuang, t. (2021). how could evidence-based reform advance education? ecnu review of education, 4(1):7-24. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2096531120976 060 zhu, j., & ma, y. (2020). five years of empirical research on education: characteristics, trends and prospects. journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 38(9):16-35. [chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.10005560.2020.09.002 received: 17 may 2021 revised: 19 may 2021 accepted: 22 may 2021 https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.19.ar027 https://doi.org/10.1177/2096531120976060 https://doi.org/10.1177/2096531120976060 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.09.002 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.09.002 originalarticle-jijunyao-bece_title_may2021 originalarticle-jijunyao-bece_maintextmay2021 bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1209 collaboration report on the study of social and emotional skills of chinese adolescents (iii) yipeng tang, jie zheng, xiaoxue sun, & jingzhong huang east china normal university, shanghai 200241, china ollaboration is essential to social and emotional competence. accordingly, collaboration has always been considered a key indicator and core accomplishment of students’ development. people who excel at collaboration can successfully cooperate with others, reduce interpersonal conflict and achieve the final goal by maintaining a positive attitude. for children and adolescents, greater collaboration means more pro-social behaviors and fewer problem behaviors. collaboration is also important for students’ life development and is closely linked to some life outcome variables, such as educational expectations, health and well-being, according to the oecd. based on evaluation data out of suzhou, china, the study under review presents the evaluation results of teenagers’ cooperation ability from different dimensions and levels. the authors present the research results from three aspects, including the predictive variable analysis of collaboration ability and the life outcome variable of collaboration ability. analysis shows that the students’ empathy, trust, and cooperation capabilities differ depending on age, gender, urban & rural areas, and school types; correlation exists in the 15 kind of abilities of the “big five personalities”. through regression analysis from multiple aspects explored the prediction variables; the researchers explored the student’s ability of collaboration and cooperation ability in the 5 major categories of life outcome variables. specific research results are as follows: general situation of collaboration ability © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. c bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1210 this paper describes the overall performance of students in suzhou in collaboration ability, showing the score of each sub-ability of collaboration ability, the correlation between collaboration ability and other sub-ability, and the differences of age, gender, urban and rural areas, and school types in collaboration ability. the study found students in suzhou self-evaluated quite high, and their self-reported empathy, trust, and cooperation abilities were higher than the international average (i.e., more than 500 points). moreover, the self-evaluation score of the 10-year-old group was significantly higher than that of the 15-year-old group. the correlation between empathy and cooperation was high (r = 0.76 in the 10-year-old group, r = 0.75 in the 15year-old group). there was a moderate correlation between empathy and trust (r = 0.51 in the 10-year-old group, r = 0.53 in the 15-year-old group). trust and cooperation were also moderately correlated (r = 0.55 in the 10year-old group, r = 0.64 in the 15-year-old group). collaboration ability and other social and emotional abilities show a high level of unity, and students who have a high level of collaboration ability tend to have a high level of other abilities. there are significant differences in age, gender, and urban and rural areas in terms of collaboration ability. on the whole, the 10-year-olds were more cooperative than the 15-year-olds. boys at age 10 were less cooperative than girls, but the opposite was true at age 15. but for both 10-yearolds and 15-year-olds, inner-city students showed higher levels of collaboration than those from rural areas. factors influencing collaboration ability the authors used multiple regression to analyze the influence of background variables, students’ variables, teachers’ variables, school variables and family variables on students’ empathy, trust, and cooperation. with concern to background variables, for the 10-year-old group, the two variables of family possession and family book collection both had stable and significant positive effects on students’ cooperative ability (p < 0.01). for the 15-year-old group, parents’ highest educational background, family ownership, and family book collection had a stable and significant positive effect on collaboration ability (p < 0.01). in addition, by comparing the coefficients of the three variables, it appears that the influence degree of family ownership is much higher than that of parents’ highest educational background and family book collection, and the influence coefficient is up to 0.25. generally speaking, family ownership and family book collection have consistent and significant influences on the cooperative ability of the two age groups. as for the student variables, for the 10-year-old group, the five variables of security, friend relationship, good habit friends, indoor activity time, and outdoor activity time all have a stable and significant positive influence on one’s cooperative ability. in addition, from the size of the standardized coefficient, the influence degree of the three variables of security, friendship, and habit friends is much higher than the indoor and outdoor activity time, the bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1211 correlation coefficient is higher than 0.10. for the 15-year-old group, the six variables of security, friend relationship, friends with good habits, indoor activity time, outdoor activity time, and growth thinking have a stable and significant positive impact on the cooperative ability. from the size of the standardization coefficient, the influence degree of security, friendship, and habitual friends is higher than other variables. in addition, high expectations of friends and time spent online had significant negative effects on the 15year-old group (p < 0.01, β = was around -0.06). among the teacher variables, for 10-year-old students, teaching age, teacher’s education background, and teacher-student relationship all have stable and significant positive effects on a student’s collaboration ability (p < 0.01). for the 15-year-old group, only the teacher-student relationship had a stable and significant positive effect on collaboration ability (p < 0.01, β = 0.24), while teaching age had no significant effect on trust and cooperation. teacher’s education background had no significant effect on empathy. overall, the teacher-student relationship had a consistent and significant effect on collaboration in both age groups. as for school variables, school belonging, school cooperation atmosphere, and off-campus activities all had stable and significant positive effects on collaboration ability for 10-year-old students (p < 0.01). from the standardized regression coefficient, the degree of school belonging (p < 0.01 β = 0.34, 0.29, 0.39) was higher than that of school cooperative atmosphere (p < 0.01, β = 0.25, 0.24, 0.22). the influence degree of cooperative atmosphere in school was higher than that of off-campus activities (p < 0.01, β = 0.10, 0.06, 0.10). the 15-year-old group was similar to the 10-year-old group in that school belonging, school cooperation atmosphere, and off-campus activities had a stable and significant positive effect on their collaboration ability, and school belonging had the highest effect (p < 0.01,β = 0.38, 0.42, 0.45). as for the family variables, for the 10-year-old group, the three variables of considerate mother, considerate father, and parents’ high expectations all have a stable and significant positive impact on the cooperative ability. in terms of the normalization coefficient, the influence degree of understanding mother (p < 0.01, β = 0.15, 0.12, 0.14) was higher than that of understanding father. in addition, parent-child problems have a significant negative impact on collaboration ability. for the 15-year-old group, the five variables of understanding father, punishing father, understanding mother, punishing mother, and high parental expectations all had a stable and significant positive impact on a student’s cooperative ability. collaboration and life in terms of education, empathy, trust, and cooperation had positive effects on chinese, mathematics, and art scores for 10-year-old students (p < 0.01), but some effects were statistically insignificant, such as cooperation on mathematics score (p = 0.17) and empathy on art score (p = 0.17). cooperation had bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1212 a significant positive effect on educational expectation (p < 0.01, β = 0.07), but trust had a significant negative effect on educational expectation (p < 0.01,β = 0.06). for the 15-year-old group, cooperation has a significant positive impact on chinese, mathematics, and educational expectations. additionally, trust has a significant positive effect on artistic achievement and educational expectations. from the perspective of global consciousness, both empathy and cooperation have significant positive effects on global consciousness, and the influence degree of empathy is higher than that of cooperation. however, trust has a significant negative impact on global consciousness, but the impact degree is relatively low. from the perspective of health variables, whether 10 years old or 15 years old, collaboration ability has a significant positive impact on students’ self-health evaluation (p < 0.01). from the perspective of subjective well-being, life satisfaction and test anxiety, empathy, trust, and cooperation have significant positive effects on students’ subjective well-being and life satisfaction. they also seem to improve students’ happiness and satisfaction. trust and cooperation have negative effects on test anxiety, which can alleviate the anxiety caused by the test. for the 15-year-old group, empathy has a significant positive effect on subjective well-being and a significant negative effect on test anxiety; trust has a significant positive effect on subjective well-being and life satisfaction, and a significant negative effect on test anxiety. cooperation has significant positive effects on subjective well-being, life satisfaction, and test anxiety. therefore, strategies seeking to improve students’ cooperation abilities should take a combined point and surface approach. the role of one or a type of factor should not be unilaterally emphasized but rather considered according to individuals, families, teachers, schools, and communities. among other factors, understanding parenting and time spent online need more attention. in addition, the ability to cooperate has positive significance for the development of students’ careers, but it still needs to be analyzed scientifically and objectively. collaboration has a positive effect on some life outcome variables, but for other variables, such as students’ academic performance, the results of the suzhou analysis did not convey a completely positive signal. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2021, 39(09): 62-76. correspondence to: yipeng tang east china normal university shanghai 200241 china email: yptang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.rp033 mailto:yptang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn bece. newsletter vol.8, no.2, 2021 1145 a comparative analysis of large-scale online education between urban and rural k-12 schools in china during the covid-19 by hu, y., nie, j., & gu, x. correspondence to: hu, y., department of education information technology, east china normal university, shanghai, china, 200062. email: ylhu@deit.ecnu.edu.cn pon the emergency of the covid-19, the unconventional mode of pandemic-battle has been adopted around china. according to the information technology education subcommittee of the chinese society of education, the researchers conducted an investigation on the online teaching situation of primary and secondary schools during the epidemic in china. on the basis of questionnaire inquiry and interview, the researchers designed questionnaires respectively to collect data of the personnel within the basic education, including the principals, teachers, and students under the situation of “school’s out, but class’s on”. through the spss 22.0, the researchers preprocessed the collected data and then using the descriptive statistics analyzed the present situation of online teaching, so as to compare the results with the variation analysis of the rural-urban differences. the research results show that:  among all participant schools, 89.8% of them have conducted the online teaching of all the curriculum, except courses like p.e., or art cannot be taught online due to the unsuitable learning methods or lacking the corresponding platform.  the chi-square test was adopted to examine whether urban or rural schools have the basic conditions for online learning. the results show that there are still significant differences in basic hardware conditions, network conditions, and venue conditions between urban and rural students. judging from the existing problems, it is concluded that equality of opportunity has not been achieved yet. there are also certain differences in the proportion of time spent on organizing online teaching in urban and rural schools. although both urban and rural schools mainly adopt online live broadcasts and online discussions between teachers and students during the epidemic, the two types of teaching are different in emphasis. urban schools spend a larger proportion of u mailto:ylhu@deit.ecnu.edu.cn vol.8, no.2, 2021 1146 time online lessons, while rural schools tend to concentrate on the online discussions between teachers and students. although schools in different areas have organized the collective preparation for the lesson, there is a certain gap in the focus and implementation of rural schools in curriculum resource construction, ict strategies, and teaching design in the process of lesson preparation compared with urban schools.  statistics show that in terms of financial support, there is a gap between rural schools and urban schools. as for the other safeguards measures, the degree of humanistic care and institutional support of urban and rural schools are both relatively high.  compared with students in urban schools, students in rural schools have higher self-reported scores on learning effects and interests, especially on the aspect of the effects of interaction with classmates and online learning motivation in the online learning process, also they are better in self-perception.  the information technology literacy of urban school students scored higher than that of rural school students. a further t-test was conducted on the difference in information technology literacy, and a significant difference was found. students in rural schools are up against more technical difficulties in the process of online learning, and the mastery degree of them in new technologies compared with students in urban areas. about mental health, urban school students scored higher in mental health than rural school students. the t-test of urban and rural school students showed that there are significant differences in the mental health of urban and rural school students. this difference is reflected in the family-supportive environment and the safeguard measures provided by the school. compared with rural school students, urban school students have better family support and timely psychological, academic, and technical assistance from the school. therefore, from the perspective of providing “fair and quality” teaching and learning, on the one hand, it is necessary to reconstruct the way of resource organization and optimize the ecology of rural teachers’ professional development. on the other hand, it is necessary to cultivate students’ digital resilience and provide high-quality platforms and resources to serve lifelong learning. source: distance education in china, 2021; 2021(05):13-21+76-77. bece. newsletter bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1278 evaluation of the effectiveness of the “applicationassessment” admission method in doctoral student enrollment by wang, y.s., & wang, y.j. correspondence to: wang, y.s., nanjing university. e-mail: yashuangwang@nju.edu.cn study published in degrees and postgraduate education took doctoral students from a university in double-first-class construction as an analysis sample. firstly, the logit regression analysis method was used to investigate the differences between doctoral students admitted through “application-assessment” method and those through none “applicationassessment” methods. secondly, tobit regression and propensity value matching methods are used to compare the difference in scientific research output between doctoral students admitted through the “applicationassessment” method and those admitted through other methods. in addition, this study also analyzed the disciplinary differences in scientific research output between the two categories of doctoral students. in this study, doctoral students admitted through “application-assessment” method are set as the treatment group, and those enrolled under the md-phd program, through general examinations and through exemption of examination are combined to form the control group. in terms of scientific research output, considering the influence of disciplines and the level of paper publication, the scientific output is weighted according to the existing research, and the grade is averaged according to the actual situation of investigation. other variables are divided into three dimensions: individual characteristics, college background and training process. individual characteristics include gender and academic aspirations; college background refers to the type of college at undergraduate and postgraduate stages; the training process variables involve tutors, scientific research training, and academic level. in the logit regression analysis, this study uses individual characteristics and academic background as covariates. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. a mailto:yashuangwang@nju.edu.cn bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1279 the results of the study are as follows:  the logit regression analysis results show that, when other variables controlled, compared with those enrolled under the md-phd program, through general examinations and through exemption of examination, the doctoral students admitted in “applicationassessment” method have higher academic aspirations, though less advantaged in college background.  tobit’s full-sample regression analysis results show that, under the premise of controlling other variables, compared with doctoral students admitted through other methods, doctoral students admitted through the “application-assessment” method have higher scientific research output during their phd.  the results of sub-sample regression analysis show that in science and engineering, the scientific research output of doctoral students admitted through the “application-assessment” method is significantly higher than that of doctoral students admitted through other methods; in the humanities and social sciences, the scientific research output of doctoral students admitted through the “application-assessment” method is higher than that of doctoral students admitted by other enrollment methods, but it is not significant at the 5% level.  the analysis results of the control variables show that academic aspirations and relevant scientific research experience (hosting projects, participating in international conferences) can increase the scientific research output of doctoral students, but factors such as gender, whether the tutor is a returnee, whether there is an associate tutor, and college background have no significant impact on the research output of doctoral students.  the results of the robustness test of the propensity value matching method are consistent with the results of the tobit regression analysis, and both show that the “application-assessment” method has a positive talent selection effect, and this positive selection effect has certain disciplinary heterogeneity. based on the research results, the following two points are concluded: first, the doctoral students admitted through the “application-assessment” method are not advantaged in college background, but they have higher academic aspirations. second, the research output of doctoral students admitted through the “application-assessment” method is higher them that of doctoral students admitted through non “application-assessment” methods. during the phd period. in view of this, the research suggests: first, colleges and universities should continue to promote the reform of the doctoral student enrollment system, further improve the “application-assessment” method, weaken the concern about the applicant’s college background, and make the “application-assessment” method more scientific and efficient. the “applicationassessment” method should be improved to facilitate the fair selection of bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1280 doctoral students with high comprehensive ability and research potential. second, colleges and universities should pay attention to the differences in disciplines when selecting doctoral students through the “applicationassessment” method. while intensifying the reform and development of the “application-assessment” method in science and engineering disciplines, diversified enrollment paths should be explored in the selection of doctoral candidates in humanities and social sciences. third, this study has the following shortcomings: (i) it did not analyze the specific differences between doctoral candidates admitted through the “application-assessment” method and those enrolled under the md-phd program, through general examinations and through exemption of examination. (ii) the survey samples of this study come from universities in “double first-class” construction, and whether the research results can be extended to other types of universities remains to be further tested. source: degree and graduate education, 2021; 2021(9):49-55. bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1223 teachers’ roles in evidence-based educational reform in china alan c.k. cheung department chairperson & professor, department of educational administration and policy, the chinese university of hong kong, hong kong 999077, china. “education reform has as its main purpose to make sure that the education delivered is of quality.” –enrique pena nieto he evidence-based educational reform was initiated in the field of medicine and now has become a cutting-edge reform wave in the world. as a new pattern of educational reform, it aims to optimize educational decisionmaking and practice and promote the improvement of education quality, using scientific research evidence. contrary to experience-based traditional education practice, evidence-based education emphasizes scientific support and data collection, transforms the individual experience into replicable regional experience, and provides scientific basis for implementation of educational policies, strategies and programs. evidence-based educational reform involves personnel from multiple agencies including academic researchers, think tank experts, primary and secondary school practitioners, government and school decision makers. among them, teachers are the key force of evidence-based educational research and educational reform. zhu and zhu (2020) suggest that teachers’ accumulation of practical knowledge and keen insights, the prerequisites of educational reform, provide theoretical support for the development of evidence-based research. some scholars believe that evidence-based educational reform is not system reconstruction, but rather a process of improvement firmly rooted in school situations and teachers’ practice (pei et al., 2020). © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. t bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1224 china’s teaching research system is a special organization in teachers’ professional development, differing from other teacher bodies like teacher union. it not only organizes teachers’ educational and teaching research, but also undertakes certain administrative functions. in this system, chinese teachers receive vocational training compulsory for their teaching career, conduct research on teaching methods and strategies, and cultivate abilities to examine teaching from the perspective of learners (darling-hammond, 2000). it is an important link between classroom teaching and teaching reform. based on the real teaching situations at school, teachers, under the guidance of this system, reflect regularly on teaching practice, discuss with their colleagues, and hold exchanges with higher-level teaching experts. in this way, teachers are self-motivated to gain a more comprehensive and profound understanding of teaching and their internal enthusiasm for learning and internal needs for professional progress are stimulated (liu, 2021). therefore, some scholars commented that teaching research in china is the result of teachers’ professional competence and professional pursuit (cheng, 2021). with deepened basic educational reform in china, especially the curriculum reform, teaching research has also undergone a comprehensive transformation. the transition from experience to evidence has become a consensus in the development of teaching research reform. teachers use standardized evidence and personal knowledge in implementing evidence-based teaching reform according to teaching objectives, students’ practical situations and teaching conditions, aiming to improve teaching quality and teaching methods. in the issue of the journal, the role of china’s teaching research system in promoting evidence-based reform in education: a case study of jiangsu province by zhou (2021) analyzed the patterns, characteristics and results of china’s evidence-based reform in education and examined the roles of china’s teaching research system in this reform, using a 15-year exploration of evidence-based educational reform from jiangsu province as a case study. this paper indicates that china’s teaching research system, a large and stable teaching research organization, has played a vital part in the follow-up evidence-based reform based on education quality survey, represented by jiangsu province. its strengths in organization and execution and more importantly its application of accurate and scientific data contribute to the outcomes of educational reform. the transitions from experience to data and from mere knowledge impartment to comprehensive education mark outstanding achievements of china’s evidence-based reform in education. bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1225 references chen, j.m. (2021). teaching research: treasure of china’s education. journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 39 (5):1-11. doi: https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.05.001 darling-hammond, l. (2000). how teacher education matters. journal of teacher education, 51(3):166-173. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487100051003002 liu, y.x. (2021). tracing back to the root: teaching research originated from the local practice in china. journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 39(5):85-98. doi: https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.05.005 pei, m., jin, w., li, x.y., liu, j., & liu, q.r. (2020). evidence-based teacher education practice: connotation, values and operational mechanism. teacher education research, (4):1-8. doi: https://doi.org/10.13445/j.cnki.t.e.r.2020.04.001 zhou, s. (2021). the role of china’s educational research system in promoting evidencebased reform in education: a case study of jiangsu province. best evidence in chinese education, 9(2):1227-1241. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or067 zhu, x.d., & zhu, z.y. (2020, september 1). building an evidence-based education system and promoting scientific and professional educational decision-making and practice. guangming daily, 09-01, p13. retrieved from: https://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/202009/01/nw.d110000gmrb_20200901_213.htm correspondence to: alan c.k. cheung, ph.d. department chairperson & professor department of educational administration and policy the chinese university of hong kong hong kong 999077 china e-mail: alancheung@cuhk.edu.hk conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.co027 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.05.001 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487100051003002 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.05.005 https://doi.org/10.13445/j.cnki.t.e.r.2020.04.001 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or067 https://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2020-%2009/01/nw.d110000gmrb_20200901_2-13.htm https://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2020-%2009/01/nw.d110000gmrb_20200901_2-13.htm mailto:alancheung@cuhk.edu.hk are students satisfied with the current schoolbased curriculum of chinese traditional culture? a survey of 120 elementary and middle schools in china yiran ding, lijie lv northeast normal university, changchun 130024, jilin, china abstract. the school-based curriculum is one of the crucial ways of chinese traditional culture education. therefore, it is essential to discuss the current elementary and middle school students’ satisfaction with the traditional cultural school-based curriculum. a survey of the curriculum satisfaction of 120 elementary and middle schools in china with a traditional cultural school-based curriculum found that students’ satisfaction with these curriculums is generally average. however, students believed that the quality of the curriculum is still low. its main manifestations were passive satisfaction, compromise satisfaction, excellent satisfaction, fall satisfaction, and autonomous satisfaction. this highlighted the problems of some traditional cultural school-based curriculums like the positioning is based on subjective guesswork, the content has not been effectively screened, and the implementation method is a single indoctrination. based on this, we suggest that: (i) create an all-round atmosphere for students to learn traditional culture actively; (ii) reshape the traditional culture in the curriculum according to the value of the times; (iii) guarantee the cultural resources and professional teachers of curriculum implementation with discipline construction, and (iv) focus on the experience of the implementation process. best evid chin edu 2020; 6(2):863-879. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar079. how to cite: ding, y. & lv, l. (2020). are students satisfied with the current schoolbased curriculum of chinese traditional culture? a survey of 120 elementary and middle schools in china. best evidence in chinese education, 6(2):863-879. keywords: chinese traditional culture; school-based curriculum; curriculum satisfaction; curriculum implementation; cluster analysis ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no.2, 2020 864 about the authors: yiran ding, doctorate candidate, department of education, northeast normal university, changchun 130024, jilin, china. email: dyr123333@hotmail.com. correspondence to: lijie lv, professor, director, department of education, northeast normal university, changchun 130024, jilin, china. email: lvlj@nenu.edu.cn. funding: this work was supported by the beijing normal university china basic education quality monitoring collaborative innovation center major achievement cultivation project: "research on the inheritance of chinese traditional culture in school curriculum and improvement strategies" (project no.: 2019-03-021-bzpk01). conflict of interests: none. © 2020 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 865 background hinese traditional culture is a kind of objects and values that the chinese nation has continuously inherited and developed based on diverse regional customs, unique languages, literature and art, and profound philosophical thinking in its thousands-year history (zhang et al., 2017). it is broad, profound, and diverse. it has the essence in line with the development of the times and social progress and has dross. the ideological culture that transcends time and space and has current value is called chinese traditional culture. its content structure is multi-dimensional, in which values, psychological characteristics, and emotional thoughts constitute the core of national identity and cohesion (zhao, 2002). therefore, chinese traditional culture is fertile cultural soil for the people’s survival and development and the chinese nation’s spiritual backbone. for this reason, in march 2014, the “guiding outline for improving chinese traditional culture education” (hereinafter referred to as the “the outline”) issued by the ministry of education of china not only carried out a top-level design on how to promote chinese traditional culture education in schools but also required various schools increase the proportion of traditional culture in the school-based curriculum. therefore, it is of great significance to examine the effectiveness of the current elementary and middle school’s traditional cultural school-based curriculum. the traditional culture school-based curriculum discussed in this study is a curriculum with chinese traditional culture as the main content, independently established and continuously implemented by elementary and middle schools (lv & ding, 2019). there are many kinds of school-based curriculums of this kind, which include not only the operational content in human life, such as chess, calligraphy and painting, opera, martial arts, and tea art but also conceptual content with a high degree of abstraction, such as local history and culture, ancient classical books, etc. the school-based curriculum should be based on the humanistic environment, geographical resources, historical accumulation of the school, the place where it belongs, and then developed by the level of differentiation, and students’ needs. in other words, the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum is a school-based activity that elementary and middle schools gradually develop based on local cultural resources. it helps students transform their own experience into emotional attachment and cultural awareness of their hometown. since “the outline” was issued, many scholars have researched traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. the research content mainly focuses on the following three aspects: first, the experience combing and improvement strategies of a particular type of traditional cultural schoolbased curriculum construction, such as the school-based curriculum of intangible cultural heritage (zheng, 2017), the school-based curriculum of chinese classics (gao & lei 2016); second, explore how school-based curriculum construction can inherit regional culture (li et al.,2015); third, explore the value and significance of traditional culture-related school-based curriculum construction, such as shaping school cultural traditions (tian & wang, 2018) and generating students cultural consciousness (zheng, 2014). c ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 866 in short, the current research on traditional culture-related school-based curriculum presents two significant characteristics: first, as far as the research subject is concerned, it is mostly seen in the research on curriculum objectives, content, and implementation, and lacks research on curriculum evaluation; second, in terms of the research methods, most research focuses on case studies and discussions and lacks in-depth quantitative research. more importantly, there are very few studies on the effectiveness of china’s current traditional culture-related school-based curriculum construction. if you want to explore the effectiveness of traditional culture-related schoolbased curriculum construction, you must first clarify these curriculums’ evaluation subjects. the construction of the school-based curriculum relies on the school’s own culture, and its purpose is to realize the characteristics of the school, the professionalization of teachers, and the diversified development of students (liu, 2016). these three all point to the independent and diversified development of students. students are the logical starting point for constructing the school-based curriculum and the final destination of its construction. therefore, the subject of school-based curriculum evaluation should be students. the student-based curriculum evaluation emphasizes allowing students to make independent judgments on the value of the courses they learn and then express their attitudes, interests, and needs (xue, 2003). it can neither be limited to measuring the students’ experience gained in course learning, nor can it take the students’ feedback on the teacher’s teaching quality as the only means. there has been a sharp increase in student satisfaction assessments regarding courses as service products in recent years. this evaluation realizes the student-based evaluation concept since the evaluation’s content includes students’ curriculum expectations, quality feedback, and value perception. as far as the actual teaching situation is concerned, if the quality of the students’ experience in the school-based curriculum is higher than their expectations, they will have a higher degree of satisfaction, which may generate curriculum loyalty to continue to pay attention and learn. on the contrary, students will give up choosing the course, which will cause a deviation in the understanding of the course content. in other words, the student’s curriculum satisfaction affects the continued existence and implementation of the school-based curriculum. therefore, this study takes students as the main body of evaluation to examine whether students are satisfied with the current traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. specifically, the researchers described whether students are satisfied with the current traditional culture-related school-based curriculum through group clustering of satisfaction, and explored the problems behind the status quo with the specific answers of the student questionnaire and interviews with teachers and students, to put forward suggestions for improving the quality of the traditional culture-related schoolbased curriculum. methodology theoretical source ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 867 the theoretical model developed for the student course satisfaction scale is derived from the customer satisfaction index (csi) model in foreign business administration. this model is based on the theory of perception and expectation difference proposed by american scholar oliver in the 1980s. the theory believes that when the customer is perceived service quality or product quality is higher than their expectations, the customer will be satisfied with the service or product, and vice versa (oliver, 1980). through the long-term revision of many studies in economics and psychology, csi can judge economic output quality in a particular area. many countries or regions have also established csi models with their characteristics (liu et al., 2003). in education, the csi model includes four essential observation variables: student expectations, perceived quality, value perception, and student satisfaction. at present, this theoretical model has been applied to education, especially in the field of course evaluation, such as online course evaluation (wang et al., 2014) and the current status of high school students’ course satisfaction (yin, 2004). as mentioned above, as the logical starting point and final destination of school-based curriculum construction, students have a say in their own learning experience and feelings and the quality level that the school-based curriculum provides to themselves. therefore, researchers expect to reflect the quality status of the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum to a certain extent based on students’ curriculum satisfaction. scale development and testing aiming at the four basic dimensions of student expectations, perceived quality, value perception, and course satisfaction included in the csi model, the researchers have drawn up their subordinate dimensions: student expectations include students’ expectations of teaching content and methods; perceived quality includes students’ teaching content perception and method; perception of value is the learning gain of students; course satisfaction is the overall satisfaction of students with the course. we have compiled related test questions based on the above dimensions and combined them with the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum characteristics. to ensure the largescale evaluation test’s accuracy, we conducted a trial test on the developed questionnaire. the test subjects were a middle school and an elementary school in changchun city. the total number of test students was 110 and 101 valid questionnaires were returned, and the effective questionnaire recovery rate was 91.82%. we calculated the alpha function of the test data and found that the reliability of the scale was high, with a reliability coefficient (cronbach’s alpha) of 0.928; and using the fa function of the r language psych program to calculate the kmo value of the questionnaire was 0.802, which proved this questionnaire is suitable for factor analysis. then the principal component analysis of the r language was used for the principal component analysis, the factor screening was performed with the threshold value of the characteristic root greater than one into seven standard factors, and the total interpretation of the factor rotation questionnaire using the maximum variance method (varimax) was 69.83%. based on the above exploratory factors analysis, we revised the test questions with multiple loads, inconsistent with the factor structure, and improper presentation, and obtained the fording & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 868 mal traditional culture-related school-based curriculum student satisfaction measurement scale. sample survey this survey used a stratified sampling design. considering the differences in the types and quantities of traditional culture-related school-based curriculums opened in various provinces in china, we conducted a sample survey of 120 elementary and middle school. according to the overall number of schools announced by the ministry of education of china in 2017, the sampling ratio of elementary, middle, and high schools in this study was roughly 5:3:2. during the actual investigation process, the curriculum plans of 120 sample schools were analyzed. we found that 107 schools had a schoolbased curriculum, 92 of which had a traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. after that, this study used paper questionnaires for students who had studied the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum in 92 schools, and a total of 12,230 satisfaction questionnaires were collected (elementary school was 6,874, middle school was 5,356). when inputting data, excluding the missing values in the questionnaire responses and the inadvertent questionnaires, a total of 10,744 valid questionnaires were obtained, including 6,071 from elementary school and 4,673 from middle school. the effective response rate of the questionnaire was 87.85%. reliability and validity test we use r language to carry out reliability tests, exploratory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling of the scale. calculated by the alpha function, the overall cronbach’s alpha of the questionnaire is 0.901, and α coefficients of each dimension were: 0.806, 0.734, 0.903, 0.814, all greater than 0.7. exploratory factor analysis was conducted with the r language psych program, and it was found that the chi-square value of the bartlett sphere test of the questionnaire was 60443.06 (p < 0.001), and the kmo value was 0.945 (p < 0.001). this showed that the result of factor analysis was good enough and suitable for factor analysis. then, the principal component analysis of the r language was used for the principal component analysis, the factor screening was performed with the threshold value of the characteristic root greater than one as the four standard factors, and the maximum variance method (varimax) was used for factor rotation to obtain the total interpretation of the questionnaire as 84.51%. finally, referring to the existing university curriculum satisfaction construction model, using the r language nested semplot program, and fitting the curriculum satisfaction model to output in ram (reticular action model) format (as shown in figure 1) (chen, 2018). the fitting parameters were: x2/df = 2.374 < 3, cfi = 0.946 > 0.9, nnfi = 0.913 > 0.9 and rmsea = 0.047 < 0.06. therefore, the scale has a high degree of goodness of fit to the constructed model, that is, the students’ satisfaction with the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum scale constructed in this study has good structural validity. group clustering and problem description ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 869 figure 1. structural equation model of student satisfaction with chinese traditional culture school-based courses. cluster analysis is often used to classify features of similar groups, but spss clustering is usually disturbed by data noise, and it cannot visualize the features of each group, and cannot be used for calculations with large amounts of data. therefore, we imported the above data into the server and used the average algorithm of the pheatmap package in r language to perform cluster analysis and drew the heat map (kolde, 2019). the image uses branched branches to represent the clustering of groups, and the color depth of the image expresses the level of a specific dimension score. based on the scores presented in different course satisfaction dimensions, we carried out an in-depth description and typed refinement of different groups. after the group clustering situation was divided, we interviewed some teachers and students for some test questions, aiming to reveal the problems behind the satisfaction group’s current satisfaction group of the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. results and analysis the status quo of student satisfaction with the school-based curriculum ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 870 figure 2. group clustering of satisfaction with chinese traditional culture school-based courses of elementary and middle school students. students were satisfied with the current traditional culture-related school-based curriculum (mean value is 7.27). specifically, current students often had high expectations for such a school-based curriculum. the average student expectation was 7.59, and 70.44% of students expressed their willingness to choose traditional culture courses to continue. however, students had a low degree of perception of teachers’ teaching quality in these courses, with an average of only 5.88 points. more than 65% of students believed that teachers’ teaching methods were not satisfactory and could not meet their learning needs. even so, students still maintained a high learning gain (i.e., value perception), and overall satisfaction was high. to explain this phenomenon more comprehensively, we divided it into five categories based on the characteristics of clustering groups: passive satisfaction, compromise satisfaction, excellent satisfaction, gap satisfaction, and autonomous satisfaction, etc. (as shown in figure 2). the proportion of “passive satisfied” students was relatively low, accounting for only 10.39% of the entire group. this kind of students had low expectations for the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. however, because the teachers carefully pre-set the teaching activities, they still perceived a higher curriculum quality ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 871 and achieved a better value perception and curriculum satisfaction degree. the course satisfaction state of this type of student was that the quality of the courses they felt was much higher than their expectations, and they had reached the surprise state described by the american marketing scientist valarie (zeithaml et al., 1988). as shown in the structural equation model in figure 1, the achievement of this type of state was most directly affected by the perceived quality (the direct effect is 0.38), and value perception also played a part of the intermediary role in it, thereby generating a dual process of course satisfaction. the four dimensions of “compromise satisfaction” all performed somewhat. figure 2 shows that since this type of student’s expectations were equal to perceived quality, they were not satisfied with the traditional culture-related schoolbased curriculum. students of this type were not very interested in traditional culture and had reached a compromise evaluation of such courses with a perfunctory attitude. therefore, “compromise satisfied” students often showed a low balance of traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. “excellent satisfied” students accounted for about 20%. this type of student had a higher perceived quality of the course, and because the perceived quality was higher than their course expectations, they had reached a state of surprise. specifically, these students had strong desires and longings for chinese traditional culture, and the school-based curriculum had also met their expectations. therefore, these students were satisfied in all aspects. although the “gap satisfaction” students accounted for about 20%, this type of student’s course satisfaction status was precisely the opposite of the “excellent satisfaction” students. the students with “gap-type satisfaction” did not feel the higher course quality when the course expectations were high, which led to valarie’s loss state (zeithaml et al., 1988). in other words, students’ expectations for learning traditional culture had not been met, and the tremendous gap between expectations and gains had led to lower student satisfaction. in reality, most of these students had much perceptual knowledge of traditional culture and understood traditional culture only from the surface. besides, there was another type of students, accounting for about 25.6%, and they were “autonomous satisfaction.” although these students showed high expectations and low perceptions, they had a high level of course satisfaction. this seems to be different from the “satisfaction = perception-expectation” described in csi’s basic theory. such students started the course with high expectations. although they did not feel good course quality, their strong interest in learning prompted them to conduct exploratory learning autonomously based on some materials or even limited keywords, thus achieving better learning gains and higher satisfaction. therefore, this type of students mainly played a role through the path that students expect to directly affect course satisfaction in the structural equation model (the direct effect is 0.69). this phenomenon was also similar to the results obtained from previous studies on flipped classrooms in universities based on the csi model (zhai et al., 2015). in sum, the current students’ satisfaction with the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum was diverse, and overall satisfaction was not high. elementary and middle school students had high expectations for the traditional culture-related ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 872 school-based curriculum. however, the quality of the curriculum they felt was low, and students’ satisfaction patterns were basically in line with “satisfaction = perception expectation” except for the autonomous satisfaction.” on the one hand, it showed that students’ satisfaction with the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum was in line with the csi theoretical model. on the other hand, it reminded us that while keeping students’ expectations of this type of curriculum, we should work hard to resolve the problem that students felt that the curriculum’s quality was low, thereby enhancing the overall construction of the courses. disclosure of the problems of student satisfaction with the school-based curriculum (i) curriculum positioning is based on subjective guesswork. in the interview, we found that some teachers who participated in the development and implementation of the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum took it for granted that “children who eat mcdonald’s and drink coke lack feelings for chinese traditional culture” and believed that they were at a loss for traditional culture and never care about it. the current test evaluation system does not directly involve the traditional culture-related curriculum content, which leads to perfunctory and one-way indoctrination by teachers in curriculum development and teaching. whether students are willing to accept traditional culture has become a prerequisite for establishing a traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. in terms of this survey, the proportion of “ autonomous satisfaction “ students was high, and about one-third of the students chose to place traditional culture at the top of other school-based curriculums, which showed that chinese traditional culture still has a significant influence on students with particular attraction. besides, students’ responses to the cultural preference context test also proved this point. the survey question is: mr. li needs to bring a gift to foreign friends if he wants to go abroad. the following are some suggestions from students. please sort the following options according to your preferences. options include a set of chess, tieguanyin tea, four masterpieces hardcover edition, fabre’s “insects” hardcover edition, a chinese knot, and a bordeaux red wine gift box. approximately 75.86% of students chose to put gifts representing chinese traditional culture first. as a result, the artifacts representing chinese traditional culture were still the cultural symbols that today’s children are willing to touch, understand, and display. this also showed that the current students’ lifestyles, thinking concepts, and value systems were under chinese traditional culture. therefore, the cultural cognition and judgment of elementary and middle school students cannot be based on the teachers themselves’ subjective assumptions, nor can they mistakenly assume that students do not know and are unwilling to accept traditional culture as the condition of curriculum development and implementation. (ii) the course content has not been effectively filtered. ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 873 the researcher visited some of the research schools dominated by “gap-type satisfied” students and found that in such schools, nearly 90% of the traditional culture courses were part-timed by teachers of chinese language, arts, or music. most of them thought it was necessary to use a school-based curriculum to carry out traditional cultural education, and they were willing to practice it. through a detailed analysis of student interviews and school curriculum plans, we found that some schools require 3rd-grade students to recite the “di zi gui,” “three character classics (san zi jing),” “thousand characters (qian zi wen),” “the great learning (da xue),” “the doctrine of the mean (zhong yong)” and “mencius.” some proposed to attach importance to “the doctrine of the golden mean in classical culture, impartial and all-around integration into the classroom”; some schools organized students to bow to confucius before the high school entrance examination. the champion was on the bridge, streamers and other activities. many schools directly use the content of traditional culture as a school-based curriculum without screening, selecting, and processing. students show varying degrees of dislike for the content of the school-based curriculum. the school-based curriculum content has not been effectively screened, which had become a significant factor affecting student curriculum satisfaction. as mentioned above, the essence and dross coexist in chinese traditional culture. as a cultural selection process, curriculum design will shape students’ understanding of traditional culture, and traditional culture will also be inherited and continued through school education, mostly curriculum. besides, the school curriculum should be a process of understanding, selecting, and restructuring traditional culture, that is, the curriculum is a cultural transformation. chinese traditional culture has differentiated textual expressions, artifacts, and regional customs. therefore, the school-based curriculum need not pursue the unity of the national curriculum. it should use regional resources, consider students’ living environment, and play its unique and agile role in educating people. the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum should be the “rebirth” of the cultural structure that maintains personal values, rather than the “inheritance” of one-way flow. the content of this kind of schoolbased curriculum should not fully cover chinese traditional culture but should be a reasonable choice based on discussions between teachers and students. (iii) the implementation of the course is a single indoctrination. nearly half of the students in the cluster showed “gap satisfaction” and “autonomous satisfaction.” these two types of students had low perceived quality of the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. after a detailed analysis of the two types of student questionnaires, we found that 83.24% of the students thought the course’s teaching methods were unsatisfactory. in implementing the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum, only 1% of students have been to communities, memorials, folklore museums, museums, and confucian temples. most teachers still only teach, preach ideas and instill values on the campus. the single instillation of the curriculum makes the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum only being a form, and it does not provide an opportunity for “revisiting these stories and connecting them with ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 874 the present” with “extended scenes” and “sacred memory spaces” (qiu, 2017). this problem directly leads to the low quality of students’ perception of the curriculum, but it is also difficult for students to form a deep memory and deep identification with chinese traditional culture. traditional cultural content has been systematically presented in national curricula, especially in chinese language, history, ethics and law, music, sports, and fine arts. if the school-based curriculum is only understood as the supplement and expansion of the national curriculum content, the majestic and rich chinese traditional culture will make the curriculum capacity unconstrained. therefore, the school-based curriculum’s traditional cultural content does not care about the increase in the amount of knowledge and information but uses synthesis, experience, and operation to make students feel and practice culture. it provides students with an environment to comprehend culture by integrating existing information and knowledge and practicing the expectation and curiosity of culture. therefore, the implementation of the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum is not merely to “instill” information, “propaganda” values, and “implant” traditional cultural knowledge, but should allow students to discover the beauty in familiar cultural elements. conclusion and suggestion according to the above survey, we found that students’ overall satisfaction with the current traditional culture-related school-based curriculum is not high, and their perception of the curriculum’s quality is still insufficient. besides, students mainly present five forms of passive satisfaction, compromise satisfaction, excellent satisfaction, gap satisfaction, and autonomous satisfaction. after a detailed analysis, we found that due to the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum: the curriculum positioning is based on subjective guesswork, the curriculum content has not been effectively screened, and the curriculum implementation method is singly instilled. this leads to the lack of students’ perception of the courses’ quality in the development and implementation of such courses. then, we made the following suggestions for the construction of traditional culture-related school-based curriculum: create an all-round atmosphere for students to learn chinese traditional culture actively from the survey results, it is found that students have many expectations for the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum, and because of this, some students have reached a state of “autonomous satisfaction.” this shows that it is essential for students to maintain their expectations for such courses. the influence of culture on people is gradual and invisible, so it is critical to actively create a good atmosphere for students to learn chinese traditional culture. in the current era of information explosion, people’s feelings and cognition of many things are not derived from personal experience, but from the mass media. the mass media has many functions or values, such as environmental monitoring, social coordination, and cultural inheritance (raswell, 2013). thereding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 875 fore, in different media, we should actively create an overall atmosphere for students to learn chinese traditional culture. first, whether it is traditional paper media, internet media, or all kinds of current mobile new media, news, public service advertisements, tv, or movies related to chinese traditional culture should be broadcast promptly. the second is to actively construct a trinity chinese traditional culture propaganda mechanism of “school-familycommunity” so that students can feel the discussion and recognition of chinese traditional culture symbols by the elders, peers, and their relatives in different fields. third, the school should help students get immersed in chinese traditional culture’s learning atmosphere through various forms such as campus bulletin and teacher-student etiquette. finally, based on the high frequency of publicity, the field’s diversity, and the appropriate form, an atmosphere of active learning for students is created to maintain their expectations for the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum. adapt to the value of the times and reshape the traditional culture in the school-based curriculum given the problem that the content of some traditional culture-related school-based curriculum has not been effectively screened, we need to clarify that not all concepts and spirits in chinese traditional culture are worth inheriting. the primary prerequisite for the inheritance and promotion of chinese traditional culture should be to judge it carefully. because the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum has “reproduction” in cultural transmission, we must be cautious about the curriculum’s cultural choices. traditional culture is neither a propaganda tool nor a management ruler. the spiritual core it conveys should be desirable, something young people are proud of and willing to pass on. therefore, the curriculum content of traditional culture needs to be reviewed, screened, and even reformed, and the values in line with the development of the times and national characteristics are integrated into the curriculum. therefore, the traditional culture in the school-based curriculum needs to be reshaped according to the values of the times. the inheritance and promotion of chinese traditional culture require the value of the times of “being benevolence, emphasizing the people, keeping honesty, upholding justice, advocating harmony, and seeking great unity” (xi, 2014). this is a modern interpretation of the consensus concept of chinese traditional culture. it highlights the use of “do not impose on others what you do not desire” to treat people or things around you; governing the world with the concept of “treat other people as you would yourself” can realize the traditional chinese concept of a society of “all things grow together without harming each other, and roads are parallel and not contradictory” (ding & lv, 2019). to realize the adaptation to the value of the times and reshape the school-based curriculum’s traditional culture requires the following two points. first of all, the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum is being developed, and the content of traditional culture should be reviewed and selected based on the values of the times. secondly, in teaching, teachers should also pay attention to the comparative examination of different cultures, integrate and condense the values behind the cultures, ding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 876 and help students realize the values of the times in the traditional culture-related schoolbased curriculum give students the correct value guidance. to ensure the cultural resources and professional teachers for curriculum implementation by subject construction whether the positioning of the traditional culture-related school-based curriculum is based on subjective guesswork or the curriculum content has not been effectively screened, it shows that the current school education system, curriculum managers, and implementers themselves have a weak chinese traditional culture accumulation. in fact, in the current relatively westernized discipline organization and knowledge system, it is already difficult for us to find the “words” and practical “methods” of moral development in china’s early discipline teaching. chinese traditional culture has become a small part of subject research and teaching because of its complex system. although the “chinese studies boom” from the end of the last century to the beginning of this century brought chinese traditional culture back to the public eye, the “studies of the quintessence of the country” and “studies of the national heritage” that rejected western culture encountered difficulties in interpretation and implementation of the inheritance of chinese traditional culture (jing, 2010). therefore, many scholars call for establishing chinese traditional culture disciplines in universities or research institutes to strengthen their academic research and teacher training, thereby promoting their discipline construction (guo, 2017). similarly, it is also imperative to guarantee the cultural resources and professional teachers of curriculum implementation with discipline construction in terms of future development. on the one hand, discipline construction must guarantee the cultural resources needed for curriculum implementation. relevant scholars should collect, sort, and compile regional cultural resources, and interpret the core connotations in the related cultural resources, to facilitate the search and use of course developers or implementers. on the other hand, cultivating traditional culture teaching through the discipline construction of traditional culture will break the dilemma that most frontline teachers are part-timers. pay attention to the experience of the implementation process of school-based curriculum the survey found that part of the current implementation of the traditional culturerelated school-based curriculum is a single indoctrination, which has resulted in students not having an indeed embodied experience and deep recognition of chinese traditional culture. if the teaching method is far from the students’ lifestyle, habits, and interests, the course content’s deep meaning is usually challenging to understand by the students. if students do not have the cognitive premise of their own experience, it is even more challenging to produce emotional acceptance and value recognition. this shows that the implementation of traditional culture-related school-based curriculum does not lie in the expansion of information and instillation of ideas, but the course implementation process’s experience. on the one hand, teachers should avoid simple inding & lv. students’ satisfaction with the school-based curriculum of chinese traditional culture. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 877 doctrination and rigid teaching in classroom teaching. promote students’ meaningful learning with concrete experience, life-like examples, and contextual interaction. this requires teachers to combine students’ needs and interests, use multimedia teaching, project-based learning, and other teaching methods in the classroom so that students can happily recognize, accept and share the cultural connotation of their acquisition. on the other hand, in the course of implementation, students are allowed to enter the traditional cultural off-campus environment to study. activities such as visits to related traditional cultural bases outside the campus and related professional experience provide students with opportunities for on-site experience, role-playing and hands-on practice, and provide unique conditions for students to deeply experience the value of traditional culture. in addition, teachers can also invite some intangible cultural heritage inheritors and museum interpreters to the school for technical demonstrations and cultural presentations to enhance students’ understanding and recognition of traditional chinese culture. only in this way can the implementation’s experience the traditional cultural school-based curriculum be enhanced in the reform of classroom teaching, the expansion of the field outside the school, and the introduction of external resources. reference chen, x.f. 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(2020). 学生满意当下的传统文化类校本课程吗? 基于全国百所中小学的调查研 究. 湖南师范大学教育科学学报. 2020(3):102-108. article-lijielv-bece_title_16nov2020 article-lijielv-bece_maintext16nov2020 bece. newsletter vol.7, no.1, 2021 927 income inequality, education competition, and the model of family engagement in education by li, j., & zhang, m. correspondence to: li, j., lecturer, research institute for international and comparative education, shanghai normal university, china. email: eduhappycharlie@163.com n order to “not let children lose at the starting line”, parents get deeply involved in their children’s educational life through various ways such as educational consumption, parental participation, and emotional support. some scholars have proposed that “over-parenting” has appeared, while others have also put forward that this is an inevitable “transitional” parenting strategy presented with the development of society, economy, culture, and education. whether it is “over-parenting” or “transitional” parenting, a survey published in the journal education research, based on the 2018 data of the program for international student assessment (pisa) in 79 countries and regions, take the student’s academic level as the dependent variable. select the way of family education investment, including the two dichotomous variables of the education resource investment and emotional investment, and divide the family education investment into four categories: neglect investment with less investment in education resources and less emotional support, and investment with more education resources but more emotional support material investment, emotional investment with less investment in educational resources but more emotional support, comprehensive investment with more investment in educational resources and more emotional support. the macro-level gdp per capita, the gini coefficient, the gross enrollment rate of higher education, and the micro-level control variables such as family wealth, parents’ highest professional status, and education level are included. the article used a two-level multinomial probit (multinomial probit) model to estimate the data, and the research results are as follows:  different family education investment methods of family academic performance present the characteristics of “comprehensive investment in parenting method > material investment in parenting method ≥ emotional investment in parenting method > neglected investment in parenting method”. i vol.7, no.1, 2021 928  the effect of income inequality and education competition on the choice of household education investment mode presents a nonlinear u-shaped curve relationship.  china is at a stage of high-income inequality and a high gross enrollment rate of higher education. parents can achieve class mobility through educational competition by adopting comprehensive and material-based investment parenting methods that are more beneficial to academic performance. this study found that the current level of emphasis on student family education has not reached “excessive”, and it is still in the “transition” stage of development. therefore, my country does not need to emphasize and advocate the restriction of family education investment but needs to encourage and guide parents to choose a reasonable way of family education investment. source: educational research, 2020; 41(8):75-84. research on the integration of stem education into the rural elementary school science curriculum: an example from rural elementary schools in western china xiuping qiao, 1 xinyi zhou 2 1. jiujiang elementary school, shuangliu district, chengdu 610200, sichuan, china 2. network and information center of chengdu normal university, chengdu 610200, sichuan, china abstract. due to the limitation of social economic conditions, the teaching effect of science in rural elementary schools remains unsatisfactory and poorly studied. this research integrates stem education into rural elementary school science courses to explore whether stem courses are effective in improving students’ knowledge and ability, asking: are stem courses better than traditional science courses in improving students’ knowledge and abilities? an experimental study of stem curriculum teaching was conducted in science education at jiujiang elementary school in shuangliu county, chengdu, china. the experimental group receiving stem classes had increased total score, basic knowledge, and ability expansion compared to the control group receiving traditional classes. this showed that the integration of stem education into rural elementary school science courses is feasible and effective. best evid chin edu 2020; 5(1):581-590. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar034. keywords: stem education; chinese elementary education; elementary school science curriculum; rural school; student scientific knowledge and ability about the author: xiuping qiao, principal of jiujiang elementary school, shuangliu district, chengdu 610200, sichuan, china. email: 496569839@qq.com; correspondence to: xinyi zhou, professor, network and information center of chengdu normal university, chengdu 610200, sichuan, china. email: neemo@126.com. qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 582 introduction tem, short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, emphasizes the intersection and integration of multiple disciplines. since the introduction of stem education in the united states in 1986, both developed countries, such as those in europe and the united states, and developing countries have increasingly paid attention to stem education. in china, a national strategy exists to vigorously develop stem education through national policy intervention (yu & hu, 2015). because stem education has made outstanding contributions to socioeconomic and technological development in terms of key capabilities and innovative thinking, stem education research has also become a hot topic that is experiencing rapid development (li et al., 2019). the research includes four categories: stem conceptualization, educational equity, student academic achievement, and teaching practice. the focus of research is gradually shifting from value-oriented to curriculum practice (du, 2018). with the rapid development of stem education on a global scale, china “has also entered the vigorous development stage of stem education, and has made significant progress in educational practice, theoretical research and educational policy” (chinese academy of educational sciences, 2017). in practical research of stem courses, higher education is the main research object and followed by elementary and middle school education there are also comparative studies on china-american stem education. however, less research has been done on stem education courses in areas with rural economic conditions in china. rural areas in china account for 94.7% of the country’s land area, but this vast land area is economically behind and weaker in basic education than urban areas (zhang, 2015). in recent years, china has implemented education poverty alleviation policies and education investment in rural areas has been strengthened (yu, 2006). however, due to various factors, such as economics, humanities, family and geography, the teaching of science courses in rural elementary schools is limited, and improvement of students’ knowledge and ability in science remains subpar. this paper studies the teaching practice of stem in the science curriculum of rural elementary schools in china to address the current lack of research on stem education in rural areas with poor economic conditions and designs a reference stem curriculum for rural elementary school students in china. methods practical exploration and research of stem courses funding: 2018 ministry of education humanities and social sciences research planning project “research on the influencing factors and effect mechanisms of stem learning effect of primary and secondary school students” (project number: 18yja880108). conflict of interests: none. s qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 583 jiujiang elementary school in shuangliu district, chengdu is a typical chinese rural elementary school. in recent years, with the continued advancement of balanced development in education, the educational ecology of this school has greatly improved. however, a questionnaire combined with interviews and observations investigating the current status of the school’s science curriculum revealed the following. (i) due to excessively traditional teaching methods, students’ learning initiative and creativity are low. (ii) students’ knowledge is narrow, and their hands-on ability is weak. (iii) due to inadequate family instruction about the concepts of natural phenomenon, students are easily affected and confused to them. (iv) although students have a strong interest in science classes, their scientific literacy is low. here, we focus on the characteristics of elementary school students in rural china, and explore whether, in the science curriculum, stem teaching has more advantages in training students’ knowledge and ability than traditional teaching. this experimental study addresses the following two questions regarding the integration of stem education into the elementary science curriculum: (i) are stem courses effective in improving students’ knowledge and ability? (ii) are stem courses better than traditional class teaching at improving students’ knowledge and ability? experimental design the research involved five steps, as outlined below. (i) from fifth grade students of jiujiang elementary school in shuangliu district, 200 students of comparable learning level were divided into a control and experimental groups of 100 each. (ii) teaching on “buoyant force” for eight class hours was designed for both traditional and stem courses. (iii) students in the control group experienced the traditional science teaching method, while students in the experimental group experienced the stem teaching method. (iv) questionnaire surveys were given to all students before and after the course study. these tested the students’ knowledge and ability. statistics and analysis on survey responses were done and conclusions drawn. (v) through discussion and analysis of survey responses, the content of the courses was modified to improve the teaching design based on the trial teaching, and the final teaching courses formed. teaching design of stem unit courses on “buoyant force” in this study, the “buoyant force” unit in the fifth-grade science class was selected as the theme for stem curriculum design. this course has a total of 8 class hours (table 1). compilation of questionnaire qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 584 table 1. stem course content. ch theme content & process sci. tech. engi. math. 1st preliminary understanding of buoyancy 1. teamwork: put the foam block in the water, discuss why the foam will float on the water, and complete the guided learning sheet; 2. introduce buoyancy and visually understand the concept of buoyancy through video; 3. student cooperation: divide the foam block to guide students to explore the influence of the same object on the heave and weight (and complete the record form); 4. the group conducts communication summary and report (the impact of object volume, etc. on sinking and floating). the floating objects made of the same material in the water are independent of their weight and volume. cut objects as required use the concept of fractions when cutting 2nd what factors are involved in floating? 1. teachers lead students to think by guiding students to observe the floating experiment of putting different shapes of play dough into the water; 2. brainstorming: the teacher allows students to boldly guess the factors affecting the floating, and sort the object’s according to their own guesses; 3. in-depth exploration: predict the floating of different materials in the water and conduct experimental verification in groups to complete the guided learning sheet; 4. the group conducts exchanges and summarizes and reports (factors affecting floating). explore the factors that affect floating number and sort as required 3rd the floating of play dough in the water 1. teachers guide students to observe and think by demonstrating the floating of a piece of play dough in water; 2. student's operation: shape the play dough freely, predict and verify the their floating; 3. brainstorming: based on the results of the experiment, students guess the reasons that affect floating; 4. the teacher introduces the concept of "drained water", through experiments to verify the hypothesis and complete the guided learning sheet. the volume of water drained by an object in the water is called the amount of water discharged pinch the play dough into different shapes different shapes will affect the floating of play dough read the amount of water drained from the measuring cup 4th build a small boat 1. the teacher introduces the history of the development of the ship through a short film, and let students guess why the ship can float on the water; 2. students make hands-on production: everyone uses the same amount of play dough to make boats in different shapes, and observe the their floating in the water; why can a boat float on the water? make different shapes of boating by play dough how to make a floating boat? how to make the boat carry more weight? measure and record the maximum weight that carried objects qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 585 3. the group's exploration and research: thinking about how to make improvements to make the boat carry more weight; 4. students improve the boat and conduct a boat show. 5th buoyant force 1. experiment introduction: let students experience the concept of buoyancy by themselves; 2. discussion by the group: whether the volume of the object in the water affects the buoyancy, make an exploration research table; 3. cooperative learning: learn to use dynamometer to measure buoyancy force correctly and verify the record form; 4. summarize the factors that affect the buoyant force. understand the concept of buoyant force use spring dynamometer to test buoyant force the principle of testing buoyant force by spring dynamometer reading of spring dynamometer 6th will sink objects be affected by the buoyant force of water? 1. teachers guide students on the method of learning experiment verification; 2. teamwork: complete the experiment and fill in the record form; 3. in-depth exploration and research: the amount of buoyant force experienced by different stones; 4. analyze and summarize the stress on the stones and foam by drawing: whether the sinking object is affected by buoyant force. learn how to verify the experiment control the volume of objects immersed in the water calculate the magnitude of buoyant force by reading the value of the dynamometer 7th the floating of potatoes in the liquid 1. teachers demonstrate the floating of potatoes in different liquids through experiments, and introduce the effects of different liquids on the floating of objects; 2. guess and verify "what is the liquid in the experiment"; 3. teamwork: set up a control group to verify the effect of different liquids on the floating of objects; 4. analyze the rules and draw conclusions. different effects of different liquids on the buoyant force of objects evaporate the liquid with an alcohol lamp and observe measure the amount of water and dissolve it with different amounts of table salt 8th explore the causes of sinking and floating of potato 1. under the guidance of teachers, students make guesses about the reasons that affect the floating of potatoes, design and make exploration and research records; 2. teamwork: verify the reason, complete exploration and research record form; 3. analyze the rules and draw conclusions. the same object will experience different buoyant force in different liquids use the balance correctly to weigh the weight the principle of balance to scale weight reading the value of the weight of the balance scale note: ch: class hour; sci: science; tech: technology; engi: engineer, math: mathematics. qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 586 the questionnaire used in this experiment includes two parts: basic knowledge (questions 1-10) and ability expansion (questions 11-14). questions 1-10 are 4 points each, questions 11-12 are 10 points each, and questions 13-14 are 20 points each for a total of 100 points. an example basic knowledge question is: (multiple choices) when the object buoyant force (_) gravity in the water, it sinks. a) less than; b) greater than; c) equal. an example capacity expansion question is: what would our life be like if we lost the buoyant force of water? try to write a reasonable scenario, the more reasonable the better. scenario one: __; scenario two: __; scenario three: __; scenario four: __. the content of the questionnaire was discussed with teachers several times, and the questionnaire gradually refined. cronbach’s  coefficient was used to test the reliability of the questionnaire. the basic knowledge and ability expansion of the entire questionnaire had a cronbach’s  > 0.8, indicating that the questionnaire has high reliability. after analysis by teachers in science, the questions designed by this questionnaire were found to meet the purpose and requirements of the measurement. the basic knowledge questions and ability expansion of the questionnaire are significantly correlated with the content of each question, indicating that the questionnaire is highly effective. participants and steps in jiujiang elementary school, shuangliu district, chengdu, 200 fifth-grade students were selected, including 108 boys (the control: 57, the experimental: 51) and 92 girls (the control: 43, the experimental: 49). to reduce non-experimental variance in the experiment, the knowledge background and learning ability of the teachers and students participating were made roughly the same for the control and experimental groups. (i) before the experiment, students in the control and experimental groups completed a questionnaire survey to collect pre-treatment data. (ii) the students in the experimental group studied stem courses, while students in the control group studied traditional courses. (iii) after the experiment, students in the control group and the experimental groups again completed the questionnaire survey to collect post-treatment data. statistical analysis all data processing and analysis were done using spss v20.0. assuming that both pre and post-experiment questionnaire data of the control group meets the normal distribution, we continued to use the independent sample t-test to compare the control group before and after learning, including testing on the student’s total score, basic knowledge, and ability expansion. results pre-experiment data analysis qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 587 before the experiment, there are no significant differences in knowledge (effect = 0.037), ability expansion (effect size = -0.065) or total score (effect size = 0.063, p > 0.05) between the experimental group and the control group (table 2). comparison between preand post-experiment data of the control group students in the control group differed significantly in the total score, basic knowledge and ability expansion before and after learning (p < 0.01; table 3). the average score of the control group after learning was better than before learning. the effect size was moderate in both preand post-experiment tests. this shows that traditional courses can improve students’ knowledge level and ability. comparison between preand post-experiment data of the experimental group students in the experimental group differed significantly in total score, basic knowledge and ability expansion before and after learning (p < 0.01; table 4). the average score of the experimental group after learning was greater than before learning and the effect size was large in both preand post-experiment. this shows that stem courses can improve students’ knowledge level and ability. post-experiment data analysis an independent sample t-test compared the experimental and control groups after learning, including testing on the student’s total score, basic knowledge, and ability expansion (table 5). after separate learning, students in the two groups differed significantly in total score, basic knowledge and ability expansion (p < 0.01; table 5). overall performance ability expansion had a moderate effect size, and the basic knowledge effect size was large. thus, the stem teaching course has advantages over the traditional course when integrated into the science curriculum. discussion the experimental data reveals that the teaching practice of stem used in this study was effective in improving the science curriculum knowledge and ability of elementary school students in rural china and had advantages over the traditional science curriculum. the core features of stem are that it is interdisciplinary, interesting, experiential, situational, collaborative, artistic, empirical, and technologically enhanced. the stem education curriculum is designed to engage students in learning based on activities, projects, and problem solving that provide a hands-on classroom experience (wang, 2016). in response to the characteristics of rural elementary school students in china, the teaching design of the stem science curriculum is as follows. (i) multidisciplinary qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 588 table 2: independent sample t test of the pre-experiment data. control group experimental group t p cohen’s d overall score 46.67±22.01 48.03±20.91 -0.448 0.449 -0.063 basic knowledge 17.79±7.52 18.06±7.03 -0.262 0.220 -0.037 ability development 28.90±17.36 29.96±15.42 -0.457 0.087 -0.065 note: data are presented as mean ± sd, p < 0.05 means statistically significant. table 3: level analysis of the control group before and after learning. pre-experiment post-experiment t p cohen’s d overall score 46.67±22.01 61.26±28.09 -4.088 .000** -0.578 basic knowledge 17.79±7.52 23.14±8.27 -4.787 .000** -0.037 ability development 28.90±17.36 38.12±21.98 -3.292 .000** -0.466 note: data are presented as mean ± sd, **p <0.01 table 4: level analysis of the experimental group before and after learning. pre-experiment post-experiment t p cohen’s d overall score 48.03±20.91 71.19±19.14 -8.170 .000** -1.155 basic knowledge 18.06±7.03 29.96±5.83 -12.438 .000** -1.759 ability development 29.96±15.42 45.75±14.58 -7.441 .000** -1.052 note: data are presented as mean ± sd, **p <0.01 table 5. independent sample t test of the post-experiment data. control group experimental group t p cohen’s d overall score 61.26±28.09 71.19±19.14 -2.921 .000** -0.413 basic knowledge 23.14±8.49 29.96±5.83 -6.622 .000** -0.937 ability development 38.12±21.98 45.75±14.58 -2.893 .000** -0.409 note: data are presented as mean ± sd, **p < 0.01. qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 589 knowledge should be integrated into real situations that are interesting and closely related to life. students use brains, hands, and cooperation to improve class participation, develop innovative thinking, and improve problem-solving skills (sun, 2018). (ii) by providing rich perceptual knowledge, students are stimulated to create “confusion,” find new explanations, form new concepts, and this promotes students to change from original concepts to scientific concepts (lin, 2014). (iii) through the experience of stem science courses, students’ internal motivation is stimulated, scientific knowledge is accurately understood, advanced thinking is developed, and their ability to solve problems is improved (chen, 2019). stem education has become a hot topic of common concern in current international education research and reform, providing innovative ideas for the new round of basic education science curriculum reform in china. the elementary school stage is a critical period for children’s knowledge and ability expansion. at this stage, students have not yet fully formed their own ways of thinking and problem-solving, and thus this is the best period to cultivate innovative ability (long & zhao, 2015). an increasing number of empirical studies suggest that children’s scientific interests are formed before the age of 14 years (tai et al., 2006). rural areas in china can combine their own characteristics with the existing practices of related cities in china and advanced foreign experience (zhu & lei, 2018) to actively promote the exploration of stem education, carry out stem education actions, and improve the ecology of stem education construction. this requires gathering all social forces, including schools, libraries, science centers and museums, extracurricular tutoring institutions, enterprises, higher education institutions, communities, and families, etc. (chen et al., 2019). how to cite: qiao, x., zhou, x. (2020) research on the integration of stem education into the rural elementary school science curriculum: an example from rural elementary schools in western china. best evid chin edu, 5(1):581-590. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar034. references capraro, r.m., capraro, m.m., & morgan, j.r. translated by wang x. (2016) project-based stem learning: an integrative science , technology, engineering and mathematics learning methods. shanghai sci tech edu press, (1):iii-6. chen, l. (2019) activity-based stem classroom management strategy for elementary qiao & zhou. integration of stem into rural elementary curriculum in china vol.5, no. 1, 2020 590 schools. shanghai edu eval res, (02):45-48 + 70. chen, p., tian, y., & liu w. (2019) polaris project: global innovation talent cultivation with stem education as the core – analysis of “developing a successful route: american stem education strategy” (2019-2023). dist edu j, 37(2): 3-14. chinese academy of educational sciences. (2017) china stem education self-book (essential edition). beijing: chinese academy of educational sciences. du, w. (2018) analysis of hot topics and characteristics of foreign stem education research. audiovis edu res, 39 (11):120-128. fu, q., liu, p. (2016) from verification to creation study on the application model of stem education in elementary and secondary schools. chin audiovis edu, (04):71-78 + 105. li, y., wang, k., & xiao, y. (2019) the current status and development trend of stem education research: a review of papers published in journals from 2000 to 2018. j math edu, 28 (03):45-52. lin, z. (2014) analysis and application of prescience concepts. edu, (12):50-50. long, m., zhao, z. (2015) american national competitiveness: contribution of stem education. modern univ edu, (02): 41-49 + 112. sun, y. (2018) integration of stem education in elementary school science curriculum. edu sci forum, 446 (32):45-48. tai, r.h., liu, c.q., maltese, a. v., & fan, x. (2006) planning, early for careers in science. science, 312 (5777): 1143-1144. yu, s., hu, x. (2015) stem education concept and interdisciplinary integration model. open edu res, 21 (04):13-22. yu, y. (2006) national investment and educational development in china. theor guide, (9):70-72. zhang, m. (2015) analysis of the characteristics and reform suggestions of basic education in china. higher edu res southwest univ sci tech, (3):27-29. zhu, z., lei, y. (2018) national policy analysis and practice model of stem education. audiovis edu res, (1):75-85. received: 16 february 2020 revised: 02 april 2020 accepted: 06 april 2020 article-xinyizhou-bece_title_12may2020 article-xiyizhou-bece_maintext12may2020 vol.8, no.2, 2021 1079 classic reflection in best evidence in chinese education editorial office of best evidence in chinese education n the long history of educational development, many representative figures have emerged, and many representative works and expositions have been circulating. these characters and discourses have had a huge impact on the development of education. plato’s utopia, comenius’s large teaching theory, and dewey’s democracy and education were representative of them. many commendable representative figures and discourses have also appeared in the history of china’s education development. for example, the world’s earliest educational monograph xue ji was born in china. seriously studying these celebrities’ masterpieces is of great practical significance to the development of today’s education, helping us to further understand the relationship between history and modernity, and to understand the inheritance and innovation of the development of contemporary education. as an academic educational journal, best evidence in chinese education is dedicated to the introduction of chinese educational practice and research results; the journal offers a new column of “classic reflection”. it is an attempt to introduce the best modern chinese education researchers and their representative works to the world through this column, in order to let the world better understand the results of china’s educational practice and research. due to the differences between eastern and western cultures and education systems, many researches in china focus on different issues from those of the west. these research results may be somewhat different from western research methods in research methods, but these research results point to the same, that is, in order to enable the next generation to receive better education and cultivate more talents for the development of human society. these results are a long time ago, but due to the limitations of the specific language © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. i vol.8, no.2, 2021 1080 of the original journal, these research results may not be widely understood by the world. for this reason, the editorial office of the journal welcomes researchers from all over the world to recommend the outstanding researches of outstanding chinese scholars to the journal, and they will be published in english to spread them out for the world. the journal would like to express its sincere gratitude to the authors of these outstanding results, and also to the original contributions of those outstanding research results! correspondence to: editorial office best evidence in chinese education united states of america email: editorial.office@bonoi.org conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.e026 mailto:editorial.office@bonoi.org bece. newsletter vol.11, no.2, 2022 1541 factors influencing mathematics grades of junior secondary students: an analysis based on the hierarchical linear model by tian, y., liu, z. j., zhao, m. z., & cui, t. correspondence to: yan tian, central china normal university, china. e-mail: tiany@ccnu.edu.cn owadays, how to improve student classroom learning efficiency has always been an important issue in education. both students’ internal factors and the classroom environment, one of the important external factors, affect their academic performance. this study (published in educational research and experiment) surveyed eighth-graders from 10 classes of a middle school in beijing and adopted the hierarchical linear model to explore the factors influencing math grades of junior secondary students. student math grades were used as the dependent variable and the student individual academic level and the class average academic level as independent variables. the nested model was employed to examine individual and class factors influencing individual math grades. the findings of the study are as follows. first, there is no significant gender difference in student math grades, but boys’ self-concept and academic self-efficacy in math are remarkably higher than girls’. this may be due to girls’ identification with gender stereotypes in math learning. second, at the individual level, student self-concept and self-efficacy in math can significantly and positively predict their math scores. third, at class level, class cooperation positively predicts student math grades, but class competition has no significant effect on student math scores. fourth, class cooperation and student self-concept in math have a significant influence on the cross-layer interaction of their math grades. in the class of low-level cooperation, student self-concept in math can significantly affect student math grades, but in the class of high-level cooperation, the effect is not significant. according to the above research results, encouraging classroom cooperation is a feasible and effective measure for mathematics learning. in the junior secondary stage, students are experiencing a critical phase of the development and transition of individual self-consciousness, and students acquire higher-order emotional experience and self-acceptance based on selfevaluation. in a good class atmosphere, student self-concept in math is easier n mailto:tiany@ccnu.edu.cn vol.11, no.2, 2022 1542 to maintain at a high level. at the same time, as the focus of student selfconsciousness is undergoing a transition from physiological needs to inner psychological quality and social communication, the sense of belonging to class is better aligned with students’ social psychological needs. therefore, in junior secondary mathematics teaching, cooperative learning should be encouraged to create a good classroom climate. source: educational research and experiment, 2022; 2022(2):107-112. bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1069 can investment in vocational education increase the income of the rural labor force? by qi, z., & xie, j. correspondence to: qi, z., shaanxi normal univeristy, china. email: qizhanyong@snnu.edu.cn revious researches prove that vocational education is highly coupled with the development of the economy and society in rural areas. however, the rate of returns in vocational education on rural labor force with various income levels still requires further investigation. on the basis of data from china family panel studies (cfps) 2018, recently a study published in educational research explored the validity of vocational education in promoting the increase of different income level of the rural labor force, through the counterfactual estimation based on propensity score matching (psm) and the expanded mincer equation. the results are as follows:  to some extent, vocational education indeed played the role of promoting the increment of the rural labor force, which shows a significant effect on the economic benefits of rural labor.  secondary vocational education has effectively promoted the increase of rural labor income, but the marginal rate of returns of relative income has gradually reduced.  regarding higher education, the positive effects of investments in higher vocational education are generally lower than those of undergraduate education.  the rural labor force cultivated by vocational education is more in line with the demand of the employment market. this study showed that vocational education can promote the increase of the rural labor force, but the potential of income increase needs to be further improved. this requires thinking outside the box, other than trapped in the economic model of whether the rural labor income increase and investment vocational education are cost-effective, but to consider the two-way coupling between the benign interaction and symbiotic development from the perspective of symbiosis. to be specific, suggestions have been put up as follows: broaden the appeal for rural educators on vocational education; consolidate the foundational status of secondary vocational education; reasonably p vol.8, no.1, 2021 1070 arrange higher vocational education; give full play to the advantages of effective linking vocational education with the labor market. source: educational research, 2021; 42(2):97-111. bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1063 how do learning and teaching strategies improve students’ academic performance? by tang, y., wang, c., & hu, y. correspondence to: hu, y., faculty of education, beijing normal university, china. email: huym0718@bnu.edu.cn study published in journal of east china normal university (educational science) analyzed the three questions, including which teaching strategies are more effective, which learning strategies are more effective, and whether the teaching strategies can improve learning strategies. teaching strategies can be divided into individualized teaching strategies (its), participatory teaching strategies (pts), and guided inquiry teaching strategies (gts). meanwhile, learning strategies are consisting of cognitive strategies (cs), metacognitive strategies (ms), and inquiry strategies (is). researchers used the hierarchical linear regression model and the coarsened exact matching (cem) to design the quasi-experimental and then adding variables of teaching strategies and learning strategies to compare the results through effect size calculation. the research results are as follows:  the results of the hierarchical linear model show that the cognitive strategy has the most significant influence among the three learning strategies, which means it is necessary for students to master the methods of information processing, in this way can information be efficiently accessed in memory.  among the three teaching strategies, the guided inquiry strategy turned out to be the most significant. to be specific, when teachers guide students to discuss a certain problem, it is suggested that teachers could connect the teaching content with daily life, guiding students to think and put forward their own views, and encouraging students to solve problems in different ways, as a result, to effectively promote students’ academic performance.  the results prove teaching strategies can significantly promote various students’ learning strategies. but there was a significant difference between elementary and middle school. cognition and inquiry strategies were significantly affected by teachers’ teaching strategies in elementary school, while metacognitive strategies were significantly affected by teachers’ teaching strategies in junior middle school. a vol.8, no.1, 2021 1064 in summary, researchers suggest that parents and teachers should have a deep understanding of the impact of learning strategies and teaching strategies on elementary and middle school students’ learning, focusing on improving students’ academic performance through more effective strategy guidance. at the same time, it is necessary to follow the tendency of international education evaluation and drive the reform of basic education examination assignment in china more innovative and cooperative. source: journal of east china normal university (educational science), 2020; 38(3):93-105. is it reliable for physical education teacher to be a head teacher? a mixed-method study* ping bai, 1 jiacheng zhang, 1 jijun yao 2 1. lianyungang huajie experimental school, lianyungang 222000, china. 2. nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china abstract. to discuss physical education (p.e.) teachers serving as head teachers, it should be reasonable and evidence-based. previous studies did not provide sufficient scientific evidence to answer this hotly debated question. therefore, this study first adopted rigorous experimental research methods, focusing on analyzing whether a p.e. teacher serving as a head teacher would affect student performance. on this basis, the robustness of the experimental results was verified through qualitative research. the results showed that a p.e. teacher serving as a head teacher would not adversely affect students’ academic performance and maybe more conducive to students’ overall development. based on this conclusion, we further suggested how to improve the appointment and management of head teachers. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 7(2):949-960. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.or019. how to cite: bai, p., zhang, j., & yao, j. (2021). is it reliable for physical education teacher to be a head teacher? a mixed-method study. best evidence in chinese education, 7(1):949-960. keywords: physical education teacher, academic performance, experimental research about the authors: ping bai, director-general, lianyungang huajie experimental school, lianyungang 222000, china. email: 2691285308@qq.com. bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no.2, 2021 950 about the authors: jiacheng zhang, principal, lianyungang huajie experimental school, lianyungang 222000, china. email: 1983167366@qq.com. correspondence to: jijun yao, professor, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, no. 122, ninghai rd., nanjing 210024, china. email: yaojijun_njnu@163.com. funding: this study was one of the accomplishments of nanjing normal university’s horizontal project “quality school construction based on evidence-based education research” (sponsor: jiangsu huajie education group). meanwhile, this study was also funded by the “jiangsu university advantage discipline construction project funding project” (papd). conflict of interests: none. *: a head teacher, aka ban zhu ren in chinese, is a teacher who is fully responsible for the learning, health, and life of the students of a class in a school. she/he is the organizer, leader and educator of a class, as well as the coordinator of teaching and education work of all the teachers in a class. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 951 question hether a physical education (p.e.) teacher can serve as a head teacher is not a new question. on the one hand, “non-core subject” teachers, including p.e. teachers, have long been used as head teachers; on the other hand, there has never been any policy or regulation in china that prohibits p.e. teachers from serving as head teachers. however, in reality, “non-core subject teachers,” including p.e. teachers as head teachers, have indeed become a “problem.” in recent years, the topic of p.e. teacher serving as head teacher has become a hot topic of public attention. students tend to “despise” non-core subjects psychologically, regard non-core subject classes as relaxing time; their teachings of non-core subject teachers are also ignored. it creates numerous obstacles to the class management of non-core subject teachers (shi, 2021). what is more, parents complained to the local administrative department because the school arranged a p.e. teacher as the head teacher and worried that this would affect the student’s academic performance. although the government and schools do not support such complaints, the incident itself reflects parents’ anxiety about class management under the fierce academic competition (zhao, 2020). in this case, merely dismissing the complaint or giving a general explanation is often challenging to eliminate the parents’ doubts; simplistically accusing the parents of “unreasonable” is even more detrimental to the problem’s solution. when dealing with such problems, administrators should not only be rational but also have evidence. if we can come up with more evidence of the effectiveness of p.e. teachers as head teachers, regardless of whether this evidence is in line with our expectations, it will make our decision-making and management based on science, which can dispel doubts and improve class management. so far, researchers have analyzed the phenomenon of p.e. teachers serving as head teachers. this kind of authors are mostly front-line managers and teachers, and related researches were basically theoretical discussions and experience summaries. in terms of research content and conclusions, most of them discussed the advantages, strategies, and significance of p.e. teachers as head teachers. they thought that the p.e. teacher’s role as a head teacher was a breakthrough p.e. teacher’s spiritual character, life attitude, and sports emotions make the obvious superiority for p.e. teacher to be a head teacher (qi & wang, 2020). some studies also explored from the perspective of moral education and the cultivation of students’ core literacy. it is believed that p.e. teacher as a head teacher helps to shape students’ positive, tenacious and unyielding mental outlook with rich sports emotions, and then cultivate students’ good moral qualities, thereby promoting students’ all-round development (gong & zeng, 2020). at the same time, some studies have discussed the shortcomings of p.e. teacher as a head teacher. for example, because the p.e. teachers have fewer class hours, she/he often does not have enough grasp of the classroom situation, and it is difficult to have more in-depth contact and understanding of students. p.e. teachers’ knowledge has limitations, which is not conducive to helping students improve their academic performance. the relatively “weak” status of p.e. teachers is not conducive to coordinating the relaw bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 952 tionship with other teachers in the classroom, thereby affecting the authority of class management (chen, 2014). what needs to be pointed out is that despite the constant discussion about who the head teacher is, in reality, there is a need to evaluate the effectiveness of p.e. teacher as the head teacher. nevertheless, so far, there are few rigorous empirical studies on this issue in existing studies. relevant discussions are mostly experience summaries or value discussions. the lack of rigorous scientific evidence makes it difficult for both researchers and managers to respond effectively to this problem in the class management process. in response to this, this research will analyze the effect of p.e. teacher as a head teacher through an experimental study, supplemented by qualitative research evidence, especially its impact on students’ academic performance. while responding to public concerns provide a scientific basis for optimizing head teachers’ staffing and improving class management. experimental methods ideas although in reality, the influence of head teachers on students is manifold. however, considering that the current public opinion is mainly concerned with the impact of p.e. teacher as a head teacher on student performance, the dependent variable investigated in this study was student academic performance. the core question to be answered was: will a p.e. teacher acting as a head teacher hurts students’ academic performance as some parents worry about? to this end, our primary research idea was to analyze the impact of pe teacher as a head teacher by comparing the academic performance of pe teacher as a head teacher class and non-pe teacher as a head teacher class under the control of related confounding variables. in this study, since many factors affect student performance, the head teacher candidate is the only one-factor affecting student performance. if the relevant influencing factors are not controlled, the results obtained are not reliable how to eliminate the influence of confounding variables and get more robust conclusions that can reveal causal (rather than related) relationships have always been complicated in social science research. however, experimental research is often a common way to solve this problem. the current leader in evidence-based education research, professor robert slavin of johns hopkins university in the united states, believes that well-designed experimental research can control confounding variables and reveal causality. therefore, it is very suitable for the value judgment of different educational interventions (slavin, 2020). the basic principle is to construct an experimental group and a control group with small differences in confounding variables and the intervention variables to evaluate the intervention’s effect. because of the samples constructed in this way, there is no significant difference in the confounding variables between the experimental and control groups. if, after the end of the experiment, there is a significant difference between the two groups of experimental results, it can be judged that the intervention variable is most likely to be the cause of the difference (angrist & pischke, 2009). bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 953 based on this idea, in the research process, we regard different head teacher candidates as the basis for grouping. the class with p.e. teacher as head teacher is regarded as the experimental group; the class with the non-p.e. teacher as head teacher is regarded as the control group. in the case of well-controlled confounding variables, the influence of p.e. teacher as a head teacher on students’ academic performance was investigated by analyzing the difference in academic performance between the two during the experiment period. subjects this research object is the middle school department of lianyungang huajie experimental school affiliated with nanjing normal university. the school is a nine-year consistent private school, of which the middle school has 54 classes and 11 p.e. teachers. the average age of school teachers is about 27 years old, and most teachers have a teaching experience of 4-5 years. the reason for choosing a middle school is that middle school students in china face more significant pressure to enter high school than elementary school students. in this case, schools and parents will be more cautious when facing p.e. teachers as head teachers. previous studies have also shown that because middle school students are in a rapid physical and mental development stage, teachers’ management styles often significantly impact students (wang et al., 2009). since the school is a boarding school, head teachers’ workload is relatively large, and most are female teachers. there are often teachers who are unable to undertake class management due to personal or family reasons. in response to this situation, the school has reformed head teacher selection many years ago, boldly enabling p.e. teachers to take up the work of head teachers. at present, except for two female p.e. teachers who are not head teachers due to pregnancy; all other p.e. teachers are head teachers. in the three grades of the middle school, including the graduating class, p.e. teachers serve as head teachers, which provide a good research foundation for this study. study procedures a well-designed experimental study has stricter standards, including control of pre-test differences and confounding variables, sufficient sample size, and a long experimental period (cheung & slavin, 2016). based on the above research ideas, we will use one academic year to carry out experiments from september 2019 to june 2020. to control the differences between groups, the school randomly sorted students and teachers into classes based on the seventh-grade placement test results and the final results of the eighth and ninth grades of the previous academic year. it aimed to ensure no significant differences in each class’s pre-test scores, the teacher’s teaching experience, ability, and the students’ family background. during the experiment, we collected five results, including the results of the placement test, the midterm, and the final results of the two semesters. simultaneously, through interviews, field observations, text and video analysis, and other qualitative bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 954 research methods, the head teacher’s work materials are obtained to more robustly verify the experimental results and describe their work more comprehensively. results in june 2020, after an academic year of experiments, we obtained the final experimental results. to eliminate the influence of the test paper’s difficulty and the distribution of data, we processed the original score of the test and converted it into a percentile. the advantage is that the academic progress or regression of students can be evaluated according to the changes in their percentile grades, so as to eliminate the influence mentioned above caused by different testing tools (kolen & brennan, 2014). table 1 shows that at the beginning of the experiment, the performance gap between the experimental group and the control group in each grade was tiny, and all independent sample t-tests were not significant. to measure the difference between the experimental and control groups more accurately, we also calculated the effect size of the difference between the groups based on the results of the independent sample t-test. the reason for estimating the effect size was that the traditional null hypothesis test results were often greatly affected by the sample size, and the effect of independent variables could not be measured. cohen believed that people often only paid attention to whether the results were “significant.” it seems that as long as the p-value was less than 0.05, the study results were valuable. this confused the difference between significance and practical effect. even if the experimental result was significant, it did not mean that the independent variable’s effect was sufficiently “large” (cohen, 1992). therefore, the calculation of effect size was first introduced in psychology, and different types of effect sizes were used to express the size of experimental effects. in this study, cohen’s d value was used as the effect size to measure each stage’s practical effect. the specific calculation method is: (1) among them, and are the mean values of the experimental and control groups, respectively, and is the pooled variance. the larger the value of d, the more significant the difference between groups caused by the independent variable. cohen once suggested using 0.2, 0.5, and 0.8 as critical points to distinguish small, medium, and large effect sizes and combine previous research and actual conditions to interpret the observed effects (zheng et al., 2011). based on this, we calculated the results of the independent sample t-test of each test and calculated the effect size. the specific calculation results are shown in table 1. table 1 shows that the difference between each grade group’s effect size is minimal at the pre-test. this means that we have the reasonable control of the pre-test differences. after randomization, there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group. the difference between the experimental and control groups was mainly due to the head teacher’s different subjects. if there was (or no) bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 955 table 1. experimental results of the influence of physical education teachers as head teachers on student performance. 7th grade 8yh grade 9th grade placement test placement test placement test no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es exp 202 0.50 0.29 0.07 0.01 125.00 0.50 0.30 -0.13 -0.01 201.00 0.50 0.29 0.05 0.00 ctrl 805 0.50 0.29 711.00 0.50 0.29 613.00 0.50 0.29 2019-2020 school year first semester 2019-2020 school year first semester 2019-2020 school year first semester no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es exp 199 0.53 0.29 1.67 0.13 131.00 0.46 0.29 -1.84 -0.17 206.00 0.52 0.29 1.19 0.10 ctrl 861 0.50 0.29 723.00 0.51 0.29 616.00 0.50 0.29 2019-2020 school year end of the first semester 2019-2020 school year end of the first semester 2019-2020 school year end of the first semester no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es exp 197 0.53 0.30 1.70 0.13 129.00 0.48 0.31 -0.92 -0.09 206.00 0.52 0.29 1.29 0.10 ctrl 854 0.49 0.29 719.00 0.51 0.29 614.00 0.49 0.29 2019-2020 school year second semester 2019-2020 school year second semester 2019-2020 school year second semester no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es exp 195 0.51 0.30 0.53 0.04 124.00 0.46 0.28 -1.74 -0.17 204.00 0.52 0.29 1.10 0.09 ctrl 836 0.50 0.29 708.00 0.51 0.29 608.00 0.50 0.29 2019-2020 school year end of the second semester 2019-2020 school year end of the second semester 2019-2020 school year end of the second semester no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es no. avg sd t es exp 196 0.51 0.30 0.44 0.03 126.00 0.46 0.30 -1.58 -0.15 202.00 0.51 0.29 0.72 0.06 ctrl 838 0.50 0.29 708.00 0.51 0.29 595.00 0.49 0.29 note: the t value in the above table results from the independent sample t-test of the experimental group and the control group. the p values corresponding to all t values are more significant than 0.05, which is concise. no p-value is reported in the table. exp: experiment; ctrl: control; avg: average; sd: standard deviation; es: effect size; t: t value. significant (or insignificant) difference in performance between the experimental and control groups during the experiment or at the end of the experiment, we could judge that the difference in selecting head teacher caused this change. the results in table 1 show that the difference between the experimental group and the control group’s previous examination results is not apparent in the entire experiment process. among them, when the seventh grade was divided into classes, the experimental group had a fragile performance advantage compared to the control group; the ninth grade experimental group and the control group had almost the same performance, and the effect sizes of the two grades were 0.01 and 0, respectively. by the end of the study in june 2020, the independent sample t-test results of the two grades were still not significant, and the effect sizes had become 0.03 and 0.06, respectively, indicating that the experimental group where the p.e. teacher served as head teacher had further expanded its performance advantage compared with the control group, but the expansion of such advantages were fragile and did not show statistical significance. in the bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 956 pre-test of the eighth grade, the experimental group had an extremely weak disadvantage compared with the control group, and the difference was also not significant (t = -0.13, p > 0.05). at the end of the study, the effect size of the eighth grade changed from -0.01 to -0.15, indicating that the performance disadvantage of the experimental group was getting bigger, but it was still tiny, and the performance difference with the control group was still not significant (t = -1.58, p > 0.05). further verification and discussion of experimental results this study indicates no adverse effect on student performance in this experimental school due to the large number of p.e. teachers being used as head teachers. compared with previous theoretical discussions, this study was based on a relatively rigorous experimental design, which provided a scientific basis for answering the question “is it reliable for p.e. teacher to serve as a head teacher?” however, as some scholars have pointed out, although experimental research can accurately assess intervention variables’ effects and make causal inferences, it is challenging to demonstrate educational practice’s richness (lather, 2004). although we have evaluated the effect of p.e. teacher as a head teacher through experimental research, we still have no way to answer under what circumstances and why p.e. teacher as a head teacher will help students grow? in response to such problems in social science research, researchers are paying more attention to the application of mixed-method research. it is hoped that through the comprehensive application of quantitative research and qualitative research, the advantages of both can be fully utilized to provide more robust evidence for research problems (creswell & clark, 2017). while implementing the experiment, this study also collected relevant qualitative data to verify the experimental results’ reliability further. before and during the experiment’s implementation, we conducted interviews with school-level leaders of the experimental school, p.e. teacher as a head teacher, and randomly selected students through semi-structured interviews. the interview’s main questions focused on the school’s class management system and measures, the work mode of the p.e. teacher as a head teacher, and the effectiveness of class management work. the basic situation of the interviewees is shown in table 2. through such interviews, we hope to characterize further the work characteristics and internal mechanism of p.e. teachers as head teachers. in fact, not many schools use p.e. teachers as head teachers on a large scale like the experimental school observed in this research. there are many reasons why this school can do this and achieved good results: first, the school does not treat p.e. teachers differently in terms of management philosophy. it fully trusts p.e. teachers and provides them with opportunities to manage classes to achieve better development. p.e. teacher was initially used as a head teacher to solve the head teacher shortage caused by female teachers’ pregnancy and childbirth. in the beginning, the school was under much pressure. fortunately, the initial attempts have achieved good bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 957 table 2. basic situation of interviewees. serial number identity description interview time xld01-03 school leader including the school principal, the deputy principal in charge, and the school director completed many times. it takes about 40-80 minutes per person, for a total of about 160 minutes. bzr01-11 head teacher a physical education teacher serving as a head teacher 20-30 minutes per person, totaling about 270 minutes. some of the interviewed class teachers provided written materials. xs01-18 student six people were randomly interviewed in each grade, from the first to the third grade. 10-15 minutes per person, about 200 minutes in total. results. this makes us more confident in appointing p.e. teachers as head teachers, from the initial passive response to the active arrangement. on the one hand, it solves the problem of head teacher shortage; on the other hand, it also dramatically mobilizes pe teachers’ enthusiasm to work and provides more for the development of “non-core subject” teachers, including pe teachers. letting all p.e. teachers serve as head teachers has become routine management of head teachers in our school. (xld01) in 2020, the first pacesetter head teacher selection, the school had a total of seven head teachers selected, of which there are four p.e. teachers. these p.e. teachers stood out from head teachers’ work and become role models for head teachers throughout the school. (xld03) second, this school also adopts a series of management measures such as formulating and implementing the head teacher work standards, establishing head teacher work files, forming a class management and work team led by the chief head teacher and strengthening head teacher work evaluation and incentives to ensure that all head teachers can complete their work tasks with high quality. in the long-term management practice, we have realized that which subject the head teacher teaches is not a decisive factor in determining the head teacher’s performance. instead, it needs to rely on a complete set of head teacher management systems so that anyone can achieve the expected results in the position of the head teacher. regarding the p.e. teacher as the head teacher, in terms of system design, we strive to ensure the head teacher’s core position in the class management process and give the head teacher greater weight in class management. simultaneously, to prevent head teachers from using their powers to allocate more time to their subjects, in the design of the incentive system, we adopt a way of rewarding the team and not individuals for class management. that is, no matter how good the head teacher’s subject is, it is useless. only when the class work is promoted as a whole, and the students develop in a balanced manner in all aspects, the class management team will be rewarded. (xld01, xld02) bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 958 we attach great importance to the regular management of head teachers. since the teachers in our school are relatively young, they generally have the problem of inexperience in class work. in response to this, on the one hand, we adopt the oldfashioned and model-setting approach to promote the growth of head teachers. on the other hand, we have established a complete standardization process for head teacher work to ensure that no matter who serves as a head teacher, we will ensure the “bottom line” as long as we follow this standard” achievement. there will be no severe deviations in class management due to individual differences in head teachers. (xld03) third, the school organized a large number of targeted training so that p.e. teachers could obtain the support of relevant management knowledge and skills through learning and training before and after taking on the head teacher position. in addition to regular full-staff training and expert lectures, we will implement the “head teacher qinglan project” in a voluntary and designated manner within one month of the beginning of each new school year, based on the configuration of the class management team. through targeted assistance from experienced head teachers, we can improve young head teachers’ working abilities and accelerate their professional growth. p.e. teacher will encounter various problems in the actual class management work. the school has a dedicated person to collect the difficulties and confusions encountered by head teachers in class management by grades, summarize and sort out common problems; use head teacher studios, seminars, and other forms to conduct discussions. in this way, the head teacher can effectively solve the problem through multiparty consultation. (xld03) finally, in the field investigation process, we also found the unique phenomenon of p.e. teachers as head teachers mentioned in the previous literature. for example, we found that the classes managed by p.e. teachers pay more attention to sports activities, the ways of teacher-student interaction are more flexible and diverse, and the class atmosphere and teacher-student relationship are more harmonious (xs01-18). this means that in addition to grades, a p.e. teacher acting as a head teacher can also bring more benefits to students for all-round development. this may also be the reason why the p.e. teacher’s class performance as a head teacher did not fall behind (zhou et al., 2018). children like sports. as a head teacher, p.e. teacher makes it easier to give play to their professional skills and talents, win the recognition and love of children, and create a good teacher-student relationship and class atmosphere. (bzr03, bzr05) p.e. teacher as a head teacher has advantages. because p.e. teacher does not need to correct homework, the pressure of schoolwork is not as tremendous as the core subject teacher. this gives us more energy to pay attention to students and put more time and energy into class management. (bzr01, bzr02, bzr11) p.e. teacher serves as a head teacher because it rarely forms a competitive relationship with other teachers in performance appraisal, appraisal, and title promotion, so it is easier to coordinate the teacher’s relationship. moreover, because p.e. teacher is relatively abundant in time and energetic, she/he often invests more in home-school cooperation. over the years, no one of our school’s parents questioned the p.e. teachbai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 959 er’s role as a head teacher, and parents have highly recognized this management measure. (bzr01-08, xld03) these survey results further explain why p.e. teacher serves as a head teacher and why it does not cause students’ academic disadvantages. at the same time, it also shows to a certain extent that p.e. teacher has unique advantages when engaged in class management. however, since we failed to measure the teacher-student relationship and class atmosphere during the experiment, we can only obtain empirical observation results at present. more detailed studies in this area are needed in the future. conclusions and suggestions the most critical finding and conclusion of this research are that a p.e. teacher serving as a head teacher will not affect students’ academic performance. not only that, in terms of promoting the overall development of students, may p.e. teacher has more advantages as a head teacher. our study provides scientific evidence for the discussion of general topics and improves the head teacher’s configuration and management. first of all, at the conceptual level, prejudice and discrimination against “noncore subject” teachers, including p.e. teachers as head teachers, should be eliminated. fundamentally speaking, the reason for this understanding is mainly due to the onesided pursuit of academic performance. in management, the school should adhere to the correct teaching concept, strengthen the communication and exchange with parents, guide the parents with correct educational concepts, do an excellent job of clearing and explaining, and dispel unnecessary parents’ anxiety. second, optimize the head teacher management to provide a good atmosphere and environment for p.e. teachers to serve as a head teacher. this research has proved that who is the head teacher may not be an essential issue. the critical question should be how to make anyone in the head teacher position indeed do an excellent job as a head teacher and grow. in this study, the experimental school has ensured the head teacher’s management work’s quality and effectiveness through training, incentives, and system construction. this may be a useful experience worth learning from. third, give full play to the role of “non-core subject” teachers in educating people and realizing their work’s value. this requires appointing “non-core subject” teachers like p.e. teachers as head teachers and giving full play to these subject teachers’ expertise. this enables them to use more colorful class management methods to create a united and progressive class atmosphere, achieve the educational goals of establishing morals and nurturing people, and promote students’ all-round development. bai et al. reliability for physical education teacher to be a head teacher. vol.7, no. 2, 2021 960 references angrist, j.d. & pischke, j.s. 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[chinese] received: 26 february 2021 revised: 01 march 2021 accepted: 09 march 2021 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1671-1572.2014.12.032 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1671-1572.2014.12.032 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.3102/0013189x16656615 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.3102/0013189x16656615 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.155 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.155 https://doi.org/10.16655/j.cnki.2095-2813.2020.12.164 https://doi.org/10.16655/j.cnki.2095-2813.2020.12.164 https://doi.org/10.1080/0141192042000279486 https://doi.org/10.1080/0141192042000279486 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-jjss202007099.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-jjss202007099.htm https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.or003 https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1611432 https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1611432 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xlkx200906046.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xlkx200906046.htm https://xw.qq.com/cmsid/20201017a0ct9i00?f=newdc https://xw.qq.com/cmsid/20201017a0ct9i00?f=newdc http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlkxjz/cn/y2011/v19/i12/1868 http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlkxjz/cn/y2011/v19/i12/1868 originalarticle-jijunyao-bece_title_march2021 originalarticlearticle-jijunyao-bece_maintextmarch2021 family time and money inputs in education and teenager development: interpretation of social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education jiali li, 1 ruizhu he 2 1. school of education, shanghai normal university, shanghai 200030, china 2. faculty of education, the chinese university of hong kong, hong kong, china this paper utilizes data from the china education panel survey 20132015 to examine the effects of family time and money inputs in education on adolescent academic performance from the perspectives of home social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education. home time input in education is more vital to teenager academic progress than money input. domestic social capital and cultural capital as well as weekend shadow education positively impact child academic results. home-based parental participation as a key component of domestic social capital has the most significant influence on teenager academic improvement, while weekend supplementary tutoring generates the weakest effect; workday extracurricular tutoring even negatively affects student academic achievement. school-based parental involvement differs among families of different classes, with a significant negative effect on academic results of teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds. due to the absence of heterogeneity effects of home time input in education on academic progress of students from various social backgrounds, parental time investment should be taken as the most effective means to improve academic performance of adolescents from underprivileged classes. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(1):1455-1460. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab002. how to cite: li, j., & he, r. (2022). family time and money inputs in education and teenager development: interpretation of social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education. best evidence in chinese education, 11(1):1455-1460. li & he. family time and money inputs in education and teenager development. bece, vol.11, no.1, 2022 1456 keywords: family educational inputs, social capital, cultural capital, shadow education about the author: jiali li, school of education, shanghai normal university, shanghai 200030, china correspondence to: ruizhu he, faculty of education, the chinese university of hong kong, hong kong, china. e-mail: estherho@cuhk.edu.hk conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:estherho@cuhk.edu.hk http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ li & he. family time and money inputs in education and teenager development. bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1457 previous studies on family educational investment mostly focus on one single dimension such as parental participation, cultural capital, or shadow education. few of them integrate home time and money inputs in education in one discussion, despite that the two are generally concurrent. the differences in home time and money investment in child education among families of different classes as well as the impact of the inputs on teenagers and its power are worth exploration. based on data from the china education panel survey 2013-2015, we discuss the social stratification of home educational investment and the effects of differential family inputs on adolescent development. to be specific, this paper addresses the following topics: 1) the current state of time and money inputs in education by families of different social status and disparities in social capital, cultural capital, and access to shadow education among differentiated family backgrounds (such as the family economic status, parental education level, parents’ professional status); 2) the impact of social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education on teenager academic performance and its power; 3) the impact of time and money investment in education by families of different social strata on child academic achievement and heterogeneity effects of social capital, cultural capital and extracurricular tutoring on the development of students with different family backgrounds. research data and variables this study uses data from ceps 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 to investigate the impact of home time and money inputs in education on teenager academic achievement. ceps 2013-2014 randomly selected 438 classes (roughly 20,000 students) from 112 schools in 28 county-level administrative regions in china. in the academic year of 2014-2015, it succeeded in following up 9449 students who were the 7th graders in 2013-2014. their average score of mathematics, chinese, and english is treated as the dependent variable. core explanatory variables include social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education. social capital consists of domestic activities such as parental company, parent-child communication, parental supervision and external events like school-parent communication, parents’ meetings, inter-parent interactions. cultural capital includes parents’ time input in reading (reading habit) and money input (book collection). shadow education refers to both monday-friday and weekend extracurricular tutoring. individual attributes, family backgrounds, and school features are used as control variables. individual attributes include gender, hukou, the only child of the family or not, early ability, parental and self-education expectations, and parents’ expectations of child academic performance; family backgrounds refer to home economic status, parents’ highest education level and occupational position; school features cover the regional level of the school location, school type, and school ranking. methodology this study adopts descriptive statistical methods such as chi-square test and f test to analyze the status quo of and differences in social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education among families with different backgrounds. moreover, ordinary ols regression is used to investigate the effect of different family educational inputs such as parental participation, cultural capital and shadow education on adolescent academic performance, and shapley decomposition is used to analyze the influence of family money li & he. family time and money inputs in education and teenager development. bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1458 and time investment in education on the gap in adolescent academic performance. furthermore, the interaction terms of parameters such as family backgrounds (family economic status, parents’ occupational position and education level), social capital, cultural capital and shadow education are incorporated into the analysis to ascertain the heterogeneity of impact of home time and money investment in education on the academic achievement of adolescents from different social classes. research results descriptive statistics the average academic results of children from socioeconomically advantaged families (with high economic status and high parental education level and occupational position) are significantly superior to those of children from disadvantaged families (with impoverished or manual-worker parents of education background below senior secondary level); the former score 10 points higher than the latter in mathematics, chinese, and english tests on average. there are substantial differences in time and money inputs in education among families of different backgrounds. socioeconomically advantaged families from the middle and above classes have significantly higher economic and time investment in education than their disadvantaged counterparts. nonetheless, there is no remarkable difference in parental company between them. the differentiated effects of home educational inputs on adolescent academic performance extracurricular tutoring on workdays (from monday to friday) imposes a significant negative effect on adolescent academic results, while that on weekends has significant positive impact. cultural capital such as the family book collection and parental reading habit affects adolescent academic achievement positively. domestic social capital such as parental company and parent-child communication has a significant positive impact on adolescent academic performance; the higher the frequency of parental participation, the better the child academic performance; parental supervision has a significant negative influence on adolescent academic results. external social capital such as parents’ meeting and inter-parent communication is not correlated with adolescent academic performance; the higher the frequency of home-school communication, the lower the student academic performance. differentiation of effects of social capital, cultural capital, and extracurricular tutoring on adolescent academic achievement by the shapley decomposition method shows that social capital and cultural capital account for average score gaps among students (6.94% and 6.10%, respectively) more than extracurricular tutoring (2.58%). to be more specific, domestic social capital has a significantly higher accountability rate (5.82%) than the external social capital (1.43%); parent-child communication has the greatest impact, with an accountability rate of 3.82%. in terms of cultural capital, weekend extracurricular tutoring accounts for average score disparities among students (1.86%) more than weekday tutoring (0.38%), but significantly less than parent-child communication, book collection size and parental reading habits. li & he. family time and money inputs in education and teenager development. bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1459 heterogeneity effects of family educational investment on academic performance of teenagers with different family backgrounds parental supervision and home-school communication have significant heterogeneity effects on academic performance of adolescents from families with different economic status; the interaction term between parental supervision and home economic status is significantly negative, indicating that the negative impact of parental supervision on adolescent academic achievement decreases with lowered family economic status; the interaction term between home-school communication and family economic status is significantly positive, indicating that the positive effect of home-school communication on adolescent academic performance decreases with lowered family economic status. home book collection sizes and parents’ meetings have significant heterogeneity effects on academic results of adolescents with parents of different occupational positions, and the positive effects of these two variables on adolescent academic results increase with lowered parents’ occupational positions. weekend extracurricular tutoring, book collection sizes, parents’ meetings, inter-parent communication have significant heterogeneity effects on academic performance of adolescents with parents of different education levels; the interaction terms between parents’ education level and weekend extracurricular tutoring, the home book collection size, and the parents’ meeting are significantly negative, while the interaction term between parents’ education level and inter-parent communication is significantly positive, indicating that weekend extracurricular tutoring, book collection sizes, parents’ meetings have a greater positive effect on academic achievement of teenagers having parents with education background of senior secondary level or below, and that inter-parent communication had a greater positive effect on academic performance of adolescents with highly educated parents. conclusions and discussion  there exist class differences in home time and money inputs in education. parents of middle-class or above not only spend more money in acquiring off-campus educational service and resources for their children, but also spare more time to accompany their children than those in manual labor force with education backgrounds of senior secondary level or below and poor incomes. therefore, home time and money inputs in education by the advantaged classes are significantly higher than those by the disadvantaged classes.  family time input in education is the primary factor affecting child academic performance. relatively direct time input on children by parents in the form of home social capital such as parent-child communication exerts the greatest effect on adolescent academic achievement. there is timing difference in the impact of shadow education on student progress. extracurricular tutoring between monday and friday fails to improve or even impairs teenager academic performance, while attending extracurricular tutoring on weekends can significantly improve adolescent academic results. li & he. family time and money inputs in education and teenager development. bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1460  heterogeneity effects of home time investment in education in some specific forms are most pronounced on adolescent academic performance. the negative impact of parents’ meetings on student academic results lessens with lowered parental education levels and occupational positions; there is the possibility that academic results of teenager students from working class with education background of senior secondary level or below are positively correlated with parental attendance of parents’ meeting. the positive effect of parent-teacher and inter-parent communication on student academic progress increases with the elevation of family economic status and parents’ education level. economic inputs in weekend extracurricular tutoring and home book collection have a negative impact on the academic performance of adolescents from advantaged families, but a positive impact on the academic achievement of those from disadvantaged families. the chinese version of this article has been published in china youth study, 2019(8):97-105. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 李佳丽, 何瑞珠. (2019).家庭教育时间投入,经济投入和青少年发展:社会资本,文化资本和影 子教育阐释. 中国青年研究, 2019(8):97-105. received: 01 april 2022 revised: 18april 2022 accepted: 09 may 2022 2-absbract-ruizhuhe-bece_title_may2022 2-absbract-ruizhuhe-bece_maintextmay2022 bece. newsletter vol.8, no.2, 2021 1155 research on the home-school collaboration reform mode in the post-epidemic era by bai, r., zhang, w., guan, y., & xie, q. correspondence to: zhang, w., beijing normal university, beijing, china, 100875. email: 11212016005@bnu.edu.cn ome-based learning during the epidemic period has brought challenges to home-school cooperation and also the opportunities to review the home-school relationship. in order to further reveal the influence of family support factors on students’ home-based learning and clarify the relationship between the depth of parental involvement in home-based learning and students’ home-based learning achievements, this study took the primary school students as the research object and conducted an empirical investigation through the questionnaire survey. the results are as follows:  home-based learning performance was significantly different among pupils who were accompanied by different family members. to be specific, the performance level of pupils’ home-based learning accompanied by their parents was significantly higher than those accompanied by other guardians or those unaccompanied.  pupils’ home-based learning performance is correlated with factors of the student, school support, and family support, but among all the factors parental involvement shows the strongest correlation.  the overall family support has a significant impact on home-based learning performance; still, parental involvement has a greater influence.  according to the characteristics of parental involvement, family members were classified into three types: companions, instructors, and spectators. the average learning performance of pupils with family members as companions was significantly higher than those as instructors or spectators. what are more, different types of family members showed unique characteristics in terms of attitude and behavior, which were influenced by various factors, such as parents’ educational concepts, occupations, and family burden?  above all, it is concluded that the overlapping influence of homeschool collaboration is very crucial, while parental involvement is an important guarantee for students to study at home. therefore, the reh vol.8, no.2, 2021 1156 searchers put forward the implementation strategy of home-school cooperation from four aspects: first, guarantee the institutionalization development through laws and regulations, because the institutional guarantee is the foundation of establishing home-school cooperation; second, technology should be used to realize the connection of a multi-education community, and it is also important to support the precision and individuation of home-school collaboration. third, schools should lead the generation of new forms of homeschool collaboration; fourth, improve the empirical research through the efforts in a policy-making promotion. source: china educational technology, 2021; 2021 (03):30-37. “school’s out, but class’s on”, the largest online education in the world today: taking china’s practical exploration during the covid-19 epidemic prevention and control as an example longjun zhou, 1,2 fangmei li, 3 shanshan wu, 3 ming zhou 4 1. jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, china 2. engineering research center of digital learning support technology, ministry of education, changchun 130000, jilin, china 3. nanjing dianji institute of psychological education, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china 4. jiangnan school, zhenjiang 212008, jiangsu, china abstract. online education is a hot topic that is widely concerned in various countries today. in the era of mobile internet, countries around the world have made various effective attempts at online education, but online education is more of a supplement to school education, and largescale normal online education lacks cases. the “school’s out, but class’s on” campaign launched by the chinese government during the covid-19 epidemic created a large-scale, normal online education application. we analyzed the background of this large-scale online education, clarify the foundation of large-scale online education, and reveal the impact of the largest online education activities on society and education. best evid chin edu 2020; 4(2):501-519. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar023. keywords: online education; covid-19 epidemic; school’s out, but class’s on; practice; foundation about the authors: longjun zhou, professor, jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu; and research scientist, engineering research center of digital learning support technology, ministry of education, changchun 130000, jilin, china. email: 294437034@qq.com. zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 502 -learning, distance education or online learning, refers to the method of content dissemination and rapid learning through the application of information technology and internet technology. the “e” of e-learning stands for electronic learning, efficient learning, exploratory learning, experiential learning, expanded learning, extended learning, easy-to-use learning, and enhanced learning. the united states is the birthplace of e-learning. after 1998, e-learning has been being spread worldwide, and has rapidly expanded from north america and europe to asia. online education is one of the important education methods today. it has developed rapidly around the world and has gradually become an important category of school education. countries around the world are actively exploring how to effectively educate students through the internet, and many good examples of online education have emerged, resulting in many valuable experiences in online education. although online education is developing rapidly around the world, more applications of online education are used as a supplement to regular school education. in the normalized education and teaching practice, more students go to schools to participate in traditional classroom teaching, and large-scale online education lacks practical application scenarios. the outbreak of covid-19 in wuhan, china, at the end of 2019, was a major public health emergency that had the fastest spread, the widest scope of infection, and the most difficult to prevent and control in china since its establishment (xinhuanet, 2020). affected by the epidemic, the government requires departments at all levels to organize forces to limit or stop crowd gathering, and requires non-essential enterprises to suspend production and business operations, and normal economic and social activities were greatly affected (guangming.com, 2020). the world health organizationchina joint expert expedition calls the powerful public health measures china has taken in response to the covid-19 epidemic, which may be “the most ambitious, flexible and active disease control in human history” (people’s network, 2020). while blocking the spread of the covid-19 epidemic to schools, in order to reduce the impact of the epidemic on education, since february 4, 2020, the leading group of the ministry of education of china to respond to the covid-19 epidemic has issued the “about guiding opinions on online teaching organization and management of general colleges and universities during the period, notice on supporting education and teaching with information technology during epidemic prevention and control, and several suggestions on targeted teacher work during epidemic prevention and control notice”. it is proposed here that during the covid-19 epidemic, about the authors: shanshan wu, nanjing dianji institute of psychological education, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china. email: 378233525@qq.co. ming zhou, jiangnan school, zhenjiang 212008, jiangsu, china. email: 929883506@qq.com. correspondence to: fangmei li, nanjing dianji institute of psychological education, nanjing 210000, jiangsu, china. email: 1037576462@qq.com. conflict of interests: none. e zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 503 schools use internet platforms to guide students to realize “school’s out, but class’s on”, i.e., “school is closed, but student learning is continuing online” or “online home study” (this refers to the official website of the chinese ministry of education: http://en.moe.gov.cn/). against this background, offline education and training institutions nationwide suspended their courses, elementary and middle schools postpone the start of 2020 spring semester, and actively conducted online teaching activities such as online teaching and learning as required by the ministry of education. this provides necessary learning support services for elementary and middle schools students’ home study, guarantees the teaching progress and teaching quality during the covid-19 epidemic prevention and control, and achieves the goal of “school’s out, but class’s on”. although the chinese government’s decision is an education measure that must be taken as a last resort, the activity itself has had a profound impact. according to the official data of the ministry of education in 2019, china has 270 million students at all levels and nearly 20 million faculty members at all levels (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2019). so many teachers and students carry out educational activities through the internet for a period of more than six weeks, which is a great initiative of online education in the world. based on the implementation status of “school’s out, but class’s on”, we are trying to summarize the reasons for the smooth development of large-scale online education activities based on the development results of modern education in china. the effective implementation of the preface provides reference and inspiration. origin of large-scale online education activities due to the need to prevent and control the covid-19 epidemic, schools postponed the start of 2020 spring semester, so students cannot study at school during normal school hours. the ministry of education requires local education departments and schools to do a good job of “school’s out, but class’s on” during the postponed period, to provide students with learning resources and learning support services to help solve practical difficulties. (china education daily, 2020) on february 28, 2020, the ministry of education issued the “notice on coordinating in the education system during covid-19 epidemic prevention and education reform and development”, which states that “school’s out, but class’s on” is essentially through modern education technology. guide online elementary and middle school students to study through online education, and replace the interruption of teaching behavior caused by the covid-19 epidemic through online education. the relevant documents of the ministry of education pointed out: “school’s out, but class’s on” is a broad-based learning, and online teaching is only one of the ways. we must further improve the construction of elementary and middle schools online learning platforms, continuously enrich learning resources, and prevent normal classrooms from being copied of the teaching methods, duration and arrangements (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2020). zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 504 regarding how to carry out this activity, the ministry of education clearly pointed out: to clarify the current teaching “what to teach” and “how to teach”, and to continue to explore the organic combination of classroom teaching and online education after school. at the same time, it is proposed to “adhere to the combination of school teachers’ online guidance and assistance with students’ home-based self-learning” and “strengthening home-based study guidance, help students to scientifically formulate home-based learning plans, rationally select resources, and focus on developing students’ autonomous learning ability (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2020). on march 6, 2020, the ministry of education issued the “notice on the ministry of education’s deployment of elementary and middle schools” school’s out, but class’s on “. the summary of the notice promoted the typical experiences and practices of “school’s out, but class’s on” in the previous stage of each place, and provided a reference for the next step of the work. 1. making overall use of television and network resources to achieve complementary advantages, resource sharing, and comprehensive coverage, especially to meet the learning needs of students in remote rural areas where the network is lacking or signal is weak. 2. coordinate curriculum learning and special education on fighting against the “epidemics”, and strengthen the guidance of patriotism education. focus on the education of advanced deeds and epidemic prevention knowledge, life education, public safety education, and mental health education as important learning content. guide students to correctly understand the relationship between humans, society and nature, to respect the objective world, to act scientifically and rationally, and to cultivate students’ patriotism, love for people, and socialism. 3. coordinate the characteristics of online learning and the actual needs of students, prevent normal classroom teaching methods, duration, and teaching arrangements from being copied, and strengthen study guidance for different grades and disciplines. 4. make overall use of local resources and national platforms, and guide local and schools to make good use of national elementary and middle schools network cloud platforms and china education television channel 4 classroom air learning resources. 5. coordinate the role of backbone teachers and all other teachers, organize outstanding backbone teachers for course recording, resource provision and online teaching guidance, and organize all teachers to participate in students’ online learning guidance, answering questions, and home-school communication in a variety of ways. 6. combining overall planning and active promotion with standard implementation, we pay attention to timely and standardizing online teaching behaviors. it is strictly forbidden to generally require teachers to broadcast or record classes live. students must not be forced to “clock in” and upzhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 505 load learning videos on the internet every day. try to avoid temporary home purchase of equipment due to print assignments or study materials, which will increase the financial burden on students’ families (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2020). after the documents of the ministry of education were issued, the provincial education departments actively responded and promulgated specific local implementation plans according to relevant documents of the ministry of education. taking zhejiang province as an example, the province actively used the advantages of informatization of basic education, and used the internet and informatization methods to comprehensively organize and implement online education and teaching activities in elementary and middle schools in the province. according to the latest survey report by the provincial teaching and research office, 96.0% of middle school students in zhejiang province participated in or are participating in online teaching activities organized by the school (zhejiang teaching and research office, 2020). the province has made clear regulations for online teaching during specific implementation (leading group for prevention and control of pneumonia epidemic situation of covid-19 infection in zhejiang provincial department of education, 2020): 1. adhere to the five-core educations (morality, intelligence, sports, aesthetic, and labor) and comprehensive development. 2. push curriculum resources, electronic textbooks, previews and homework manuals, and online homework operation manuals in a timely manner. 3. online teaching is organized by class as a unit and two-way interaction. it is mainly based on recording and broadcasting, and adopts the form of “recording + online q & a”. conditional schools can take the form of live broadcast + online q & a. after-school tutoring can take the form of on-demand or online q & a. 4. scientifically and reasonably grasp the schedule of online teaching. the teaching time for each lesson is about 20 minutes in elementary school and about 30 minutes in middle school. allow a certain amount of time for preview and practice in each class. 5. multiple forms of homework should be arranged for online teaching, and the students’ content should be examined and evaluated in a timely manner. the local education administration departments have formulated the specific implementation plan of “school’s out, but class’s on” according to the spirit of the documents of the ministry of education and the education administration departments of their respective provinces. taking the education bureau of guangzhou city, guangdong province as an example, on february 29, 2020, the guangzhou education bureau put forward work guidelines for online learning of elementary and middle schools in the city (guangzhou education bureau, 2020): 1. adhere to the five-core educations (morality, intelligence, sports, aesthetic, and labor) at the same time and formulate online education programs. zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 506 2. scientifically grasp the progress and arrange work and rest reasonably. 3. combine online and offline to avoid increasing student burden. 4. establish “television classrooms” to do a good job in supporting the city. 5. accurately analyze the academic situation, and ensure the connection of back to school. 6. strengthen classified guidance and implement online education in secondary vocational schools. 7. take measures to ensure the smooth progress of online learning. as provinces, municipalities, and districts successively promulgated the detailed rules for online learning at home during the epidemic prevention and control period, schools in various places based on the school situation and made corresponding implementation plans based on the actual situation of the school. elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and universities in various places have given specific plans for “school’s out, but class’s on” during the epidemic prevention period, starting from the development needs of students in different semesters and the actual situation of the school. based on the online learning practices in various places, there are mainly seven online methods provided by each school: live broadcast, recording broadcast, resource package, live broadcast + recording broadcast, live broadcast + resource package, recording broadcast + resource package, live broadcast + recording broadcast + resource package, etc. the foundation of the largest online education campaign large-scale online education activities need to be guaranteed by a well-established internet infrastructure. without strong infrastructure, large-scale online education activities cannot be carried out. after nearly three decades of construction of the internet in china, the internet infrastructure has been basically improved, providing a basic guarantee for large-scale internet education. achievements of national and educational informatization since the mid-1990s, the construction of the “information superhighway” has begun globally, the internet has begun a large-scale commercial process, and information technology has ushered in the second wave of vigorous development (mei, 2018). to catch up this big wave, in 1993, china established the national economic informatization joint conference chaired by vice premier jiahua zou, and established the guiding ideology of advancing the implementation of informatization projects and driving industrial development with informatization. therefore, china’s informatization construction was officially launched. in october 2000, the chinese government reviewed and approved the “recommendations of the central committee of the communist party of china on formulating the tenth five-year plan for national economic and social development”. the zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 507 tenth five-year plan clearly lists “strengthening national economic and social informatization” as a major strategic, macroscopic, and policy issue that must be researched and resolved at the beginning of the 21st century (xinhuanet, 2000). the “tenth five-year plan” key special development plan” and the “industry tenth fiveyear plan outline” have been successively promulgated, providing more specific action guidelines for accelerating the advancement of informatization. in 2012, informatization china was identified as one of the strategic goals of the new modernized country. the chinese government gradually promoted informatization construction from top to bottom by constructing an informatization system framework and demonstration pilots (zhao, 2016). in 2017, china set the development goal of “promoting the deep integration of the internet, big data, artificial intelligence and the real economy, building a network power, digital china, and a wisdom society”, opening a new era in which the network power is moving towards a network power (xinhuanet , 2017). after decades of development and construction, china’s industrialization and informatization have made great progress. all aspects of informatization infrastructure, network scale, digital economy, and network governance have been prepared from quantitative change to qualitative change. in 2018, the number of internet users was 829 million, the internet covering rate was 59.6%, the digital economy scale was 31.3 trillion yuan, and the proportion of gdp reached 34.8% (chen, 2019). the number of online government service users reached 394 million, accounting for 47.5% of the total internet users (yang, 2019). the total value of domestic and overseas internet listed companies in china is 7.89 trillion cny (china internet network information center, 2019). the development level of national informatization and its global influence continue to increase. china’s education informatization exploration initially participated in the education and teaching reform in the form of “electronic education”. in 1978, the ministry of education issued the “preliminary plan on e-education work” (discussion draft), which is the first time to deploy education informatization at the national level (hu, 2019). subsequently, the ministry of education successively introduced such strategic plans as the “national ninth five-year plan” for electrification education, the “action plan for the revitalization of education for the 21st century”, and the “tenth fiveyear development plan (outline) for education informatization”. this means that china is progressing from the initial stage to the rapid development stage (zhong, et al., 2017). with the further innovation of modern science and technology, especially the development of next-generation information technologies such as the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence, education informatization has led to the modernization of education, which has become a strategic consensus for the development of education in china (zhong, et al., 2017). in 2018, the ministry of education released the “action plan for educational informatization 2.0”, announcing that china’s education informatization has entered the 2.0 stage. in the 1.0 stage of education informatization, it is mainly based on the conzhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 508 struction of education informatization. the focus is on the construction of “three links and two platforms”, that is, the realization of “broadband network for every school, high-quality resource for every class, and online learning space for everyone.” and build a public service platform for education resources and a public service platform for education management (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2012). with the transformation and upgrading of information construction, education information construction has entered the 2.0 stage, that is, to promote the integration and innovation of information technology and education and teaching, and to reconstruct the education ecology. put forward “taking education informatization as an endogenous variable of systemic reform of education”, “promote the reform of education through the integration and innovation of technology and education and teaching”, and then “build a networked, digital, intelligent, personalized, lifelong education system to build a learning society that everyone can learn, can learn everywhere, and can learn from time to time, and achieve more open, more suitable, more people-oriented, more equal, and more sustainable education.” (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2018). the “education informatization 2.0 action plan” marks china’s construction of education informatization from equipment construction to integration and application with technology and education, focusing on extending and expanding teaching content, innovative teaching methods, changing teaching evaluation, and changes through modern technology. education supply mode to promote the ecological transformation of the education system (china education news, 2019). in 2019, in the “china education modernization 2035” document, for the first time, the state raised the construction of education informatization to the height of education modernization, indicating the direction for the construction of education informatization (xinhuanet, 2019). with the continuous support of the country, china has continuously promoted the construction of education informatization with “three links and two platforms” as its core. china has successfully completed the “full coverage of digital educational resources for teaching sites” project, which has provided teaching sites in china, including rural remote areas, with modern teaching equipment and nationally prescribed curriculum resources (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2015). according to the official statistics of the ministry of education, as of 2019, 98.4% of elementary and middle schools (including teaching sites) in china have achieved network access, and 90.1% of elementary and middle schools have multimedia classrooms, with the number reaching 3.74 million, of which 70.2% elementary and middle schools achieve full coverage of multimedia teaching equipment; the national education resource public service system has access to 150 online platforms, which include 1 national platform, 25 provincial platforms, 52 municipal platforms, and 72 district / county platforms (cyber security and informatization leading group of the ministry of education of china, 2020). in addition to the public resource platform built by the state, educational platforms such as tencent class, netease open class, chinese university mooc, homework help, xueersi online school, ape coaching, and vip kid are emerging. according to the “china online education industry market outlook and inzhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 509 vestment strategic planning analysis report”, as of december 31, 2018, 11 “unicorns” were born in china’s online education sector, with a total valuation of 16.95 billion us dollars (china economic time, 2019). especially after entering the 2.0 stage, china’s informatization construction has paid more attention to innovation and leading china’s education development, knowledge creation and cultivation of innovative talents. maker education, steam education, artificial intelligence education, robot education, etc. have become important means to promote the development of education informatization. the smart learning environment to promote knowledge innovation has gradually become a new trend in the construction of learning environments. three-dimensional (3d) resources, holographic resources, simulation resources and other intelligent learning resources that are immersive, interactive, realistic, highly intelligent, and highly experiential make learners have unprecedented new experiences (wang, et al., 2019). with regard to the overall improvement of information literacy, the ministry of education launched the national elementary and middle school teachers’ information technology application ability enhancement project 2.0 in 2019. annually hold advanced seminars, teachers’ informatization teaching ability improvement training and other activities to improve the application of education informatization (the people’s republic of china’s leading group of cyber security and informatization, 2020). since the 1990s, china’s education informatization has been underway for 30 years. from a global perspective, breakthroughs have been made in china’s education informatization work. this has created a modern education environment for 1/5 of the world’s population, made an important contribution to the balanced development of global education, promoted human lifelong learning, and improved population quality (huang, 2019). in the past three decades, the achievements of national informatization construction, especially the achievements of education informatization construction, have provided a strong technical guarantee for the development of this large-scale online education activity. colorful teaching resources the development of large-scale online education activities must be supported by colorful teaching resources suitable for students of all grades. without suitable online teaching resources, large-scale online teaching activities will not be carried out. after more than 20 years of unremitting efforts, the construction of online teaching resources in china has also been fruitful. with the development of information technology, in early 2000, the ministry of education’s “modern distance education engineering resources construction fundamental education project” was formally established. its basic goal was to build a rich, open, national-level basic education resource library to promote comprehensive quality and provide information support for education and the realization of informatization of basic education (zhu, 2010). since then, china has successively released the “schoolto-school link” project, “guiding opinions on the construction of elementary and middle schools’ campus network”, “elementary education resources metadata specizhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 510 fication celts-42”, “requirements for the development of modern distance vocational education resources”, and “modern distance education in rural elementary and middle schools” project that put forward clearer requirements for resource construction, and launched resources such as subject resource websites, various distance education course resources, and various teaching and research topics. at the same time, the enterprise resource library products also developed rapidly during this period. the enterprise education resource library represented by the “k12 educational resource library” and the journal library (cnki) launched by tsinghua tongfang have emerged. in addition to the library of teaching materials, e-books and periodicals resources, online course resources, theme website resources, professional training resources, etc. have been launched in the market, and there is endless stream of teaching resource products (li, 2007). with the comprehensive advancement of information technology, the construction of teaching resources has entered the third stage, that is, the construction of information education resources. a series of documents have been issued around the construction of digital resources. in 2010, china clearly stated in the “outline of the national medium and long-term education reform and development plan (2010-2020)” (the ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2010) that “the development and application of high-quality educational resources” and “the construction of a national education management system “as a key construction content to achieve the goal of” accelerating the process of education informatization. “in march 2012, the ministry of education issued the ten-year development plan for educational informatization (2011-2020), which includes education informationization resources such as “promoting the construction and sharing of high-quality educational resources” and “building a public service platform for continuing education”. the construction content is highlighted (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2012). in 2014, five ministries and commissions, including the ministry of education and the ministry of finance, issued the “implementation plan for an effective mechanism for enlarging the coverage of high-quality educational resources by informatization means”, which called for accelerating the realization of “co-construction and sharing of high-quality digital education resources, comprehensive and deep integration of information technology and education and teaching” (china education information network, 2014). the “china education modernization 2035” issued in 2019 also clearly pointed out the need to innovate the educational service format and establish a digital education resource co-construction and sharing mechanism. the release of a series of documents puts forward goals and requirements for strengthening the construction and application of digital education resources public service system in the new era (cai & chen, 2019). in addition to teaching materials, the construction of teaching resources at this stage also includes a shift from focusing on the content of the resources to a more individualized resource development and application model that emphasizes “peopleoriented”. this includes resource creation tools, resource operating environments, resource construction evaluation and reward mechanisms based on online course resources. zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 511 up to 2019, the national system has extensively engaged in the gathering of high-quality resources for the entire society. a total of 457 teaching applications have been gathered in 290 units. through the “one teacher, one excellent course; one lesson, one excellent teacher” activity, it attracted more than 2.28 million participating teachers, collected 3.14 million online courses, and recommended 17,312 lessons for provincial excellent courses. selected 1,005 ministry-level excellent courses, and generated 8 million resources. these famous teachers and lessons have continuously enriched the country’s construction of one-stop distance open education platform curriculum resources that support millions of students’ online learning. as of 2019, the platform has 1,360 new courses in storage, 4,671 media material resources, 3265 fiveminute courses newly developed, 255 national digital learning resource centers, 7974 sub-center courses, and 95,000 media resources the number of courses has reached more than 4,800 courses (china’s ministry of education network security and informatization leading group, 2020). these national online course resources provided a powerful resource support for this large-scale online learning activity. in addition to the resource construction of the national system, companies and schools everywhere have made explorations. internet giants such as tencent, alibaba, bytedance, iflytek, and dongshi ideal have long been deeply involved in the education industry. in this epidemic response, in addition to providing live broadcast infrastructure, they also integrated existing educational resources with personalized learning resources, and introduced courses ranging from kindergarten to senior high school, including subjects such as chinese, english, and mathematics. and quality education courses such as programming and thinking training (new fortune, 2020). the school combines school-based curriculum with online resources to develop school-based curriculum resources suitable for the school. for example, zhenjiang experimental school in jiangsu province digitized school-based protocol-guided learning materials to form digital guide drafts (xia, 2020). these have provided more targeted teaching materials for online learning during the epidemic and enriched online teaching resources. educational reforms provide a change in concepts and methods for online learning the fundamental goal of education information construction is to promote the development of education. educational information technology must be deeply integrated with education and teaching to truly play its expected role. the development of large-scale online education activities must be based on scientific education concepts and correct teaching concepts. only in the continuous reform of education and teaching, can we give full play to the function of education informatization with the guidance of the correct concept of education and teaching. since the founding of new china, the long-term education and teaching reforms have paved the way for the healthy development of education, especially the eighth reform, which began in 1999, and has profoundly affected the reform of basic education in china. in 2001, the ministry of education issued the “outline of basic education curriculum reform (trial)”. the document clearly proposed to change the tendency of the zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 512 curriculum to place too much emphasis on knowledge transfer, emphasizing the formation of a proactive learning attitude, so that the process of acquiring basic knowledge and basic skills simultaneously becomes a process of learning to learn and forming correct values. it is necessary to change the current status of curriculum implementation with too much emphasis on acceptance of learning, rote memorization, and mechanical training, and encourage students to take an active part, be willing to explore, and be diligent in their work, and cultivate students’ ability to collect and process information, acquire new knowledge, and analyze and solve problems, and effectively communication and cooperation (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2001). in 2019, the state council issued the opinions of the state council on deepening the reform of education and teaching and comprehensively improving the quality of compulsory education, stating that “the teaching methods should be optimized. adhere to the teaching excellence, pay attention to heuristic, interactive, and inquiry-based teaching. teachers should guide students before class preview, the key points and difficulties, the knowledge system should be clarified in the class, and students should be guided to think actively, actively ask questions, and explore independently “(general office of the state council of the people’s republic of china, 2019). this is the first important document issued by the central government and the state council to focus on education and teaching reform at the compulsory education stage. it is a programmatic document for deepening education and teaching reform in the new era and comprehensively improving the quality of compulsory education (people’s daily, 2019). after eight times reforms, china’s education and teaching concepts have undergone tremendous changes. the classroom has changed from knowledge transfer to students ‘active learning, and “teaching and learning” has undergone profound changes (china education news, 2019). as president xi jinping pointed out at the national education work conference on september 18, 2018, after 40 years of exploration, we have a series of understanding of china’s education reform and development, and our education concept has also developed to a new height (xiang, 2019). impact of the largest online education campaign the “school’s out, but class’s on” event, which was adopted because of the new crown epidemic, is the largest normal online education event in the history of modern education. in a teaching period of more than one and a half months, nearly 270 million colleges, high school, middle school and elementary school students in china have conducted normal course studies online. nearly 20 million universities, high school, middle school, and elementary school teachers have carried out teaching activities through the internet, creating the largest number of online students and refreshing the online concurrency of internet use. “school’s out, but class’s on” is not just a crisis response plan, it is more like an exploration of a new type of education and teaching model in the spirit of reform (wang, et al., 2020), by using modern information technology transforming student learning methods and teacher teaching methods has an impact on the reconstruction of ecological education models in china and even worldwide. zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 513 speed up the integration of educational technology and teaching the ministry of education’s “notice on coordinating and coordinating educational system covid-19 epidemic situation and educational reform and development work” clearly states that “schools conduct online education and teaching on a largescale and established basis during the epidemic prevention and control period. a test of the ability of major public health emergencies is of great significance to use information technology to promote education and teaching reform.” (ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, 2020). “school’s out, but class’s on” is a test of the achievements of china’s informatization construction, especially education informatization construction. the implementation of this activity proves that china’s informatization construction has achieved world-renowned achievements, and it also proves that education informatization construction and its application have reached a new level. professor dehuan liu of peking university once commented that this “largescale online live classroom is the largest experiment in the history of human education in 40 years.” (thepaper.cn, 2020). in this huge online teaching activity, the national basic education resources public service platform, china university mooc and other mainstream mooc platforms are meeting together with alibaba, tencent education, bytedance, dongshi ideal and other educational information enterprises to integrate all types of online education resources at all levels, to achieve full coverage of the platform, and share all resources. online learning breaks the limitation of study time and space and the limitation of the source flow of offline teaching students. it makes full use of the advantages of modern education technology to provide online education with high-quality, nondelayed, multi-form live interactive classrooms, and realizes live teaching in multiperson online classes. in online teaching, teachers use cutting-edge internet technology to restore real teaching actions, and use massive electronic teaching resources to enrich teaching content, thereby realizing richer, practical and interesting live teaching (luo, 2019). students use the internet to make learning choices more diverse and personalized, to make learning content and activities more free, and to make information technology and teaching more closely. online teaching is considered an important part of the future teaching model. however, since the emergence of online learning in 2013, online learning has not become one of the popular teaching formats in china (wang, 2019). the successful launch of this large-scale online education activity provided valuable experience for the further implementation of online education, enriched people’s understanding of online education, and increased the stickiness between educational technology and education and teaching. it is foreseeable that after the normal start of school, the use of the internet for autonomous learning and after-school supplementary learning will become an important way for students to learn. online teaching through the internet will become zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 514 an important form of teacher teaching, and teaching management using the internet will also become an important form of school management. promote the reconstruction of ecological teaching model the implementation of this large-scale online education objectively proves the effectiveness of china’s education reform. the implementation of “school’s out, but class’s on” made all the people who are connected with education and rely on determination and inertia to stop at the old track (wang, 2020). it changes the teaching environment under normal conditions, allowing teaching activities to move from offline to online, teacher’s teaching from face-to-face to online cloud teaching, and student’s learning from classroom listening to home-based autonomous learning. “school’s out, but class’s on” has completely changed the learning methods of students and the teaching methods of teachers, and has overturned the traditional teacher-centered teaching model in traditional teaching. “school’s out, but class’s on” is not simply transplanting normal classroom teaching or offline education scenarios to the internet platform. its essence is a largescale and far-reaching education and teaching practice in china. online education is a combination of modern education technology, education concepts and traditional education to form a new model suitable for educational needs (ji & sun, 2019). in order to ensure the quality and effectiveness of online teaching, it is not only necessary to change the form of learning and teaching, but also to redesign the online teaching model (wang, 2020). in the teaching process, taking the student as the center and the goal of promoting student development, teachers should select the corresponding digital education resources according to the nature of the discipline and the needs of student development, appropriately intervene and regulate the student’s learning process, and rationally design and use learning activities to guide students to learn independently. therefore, the large-scale online education activities under the background of “school’s out, but class’s on” have stimulated the exploration of online teaching models and promoted the reconstruction of ecological teaching models. for students, online education promotes the transformation of learning models. students have a more autonomous and personalized learning experience, allowing students to grasp the learning progress and choose the learning environment according to their own knowledge and ability level. for teachers, there is a need to rebuild the curriculum structure, improve teaching methods, and diversify classes. for schools, the new technology makes teaching management more effective, and also blurs the school’s geographical boundaries, changes the structure of the school’s curriculum, and makes it have the characteristics of “lead teacher + teaching assistants + technical staff”. the implementation of “school’s out, but class’s on” has brought new opportunities to china ‘s overall education reform, brought about new changes in teaching methods, learning methods, and management modes, and put forward new requirements. promote the integration of home education and school education zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 515 affected by the epidemic, during the “school’s out, but class’s on” period, the teacher-student relationship and parent-child relationship encountered the modern dilemma with discrete time and space. students cannot go to school to receive teacher guidance. in order to cooperate with their children’s autonomous learning, many parents have supervised their children to study instead of teachers. parents became important partners of students’ autonomous learning during this special period. in this process, the relationship between parents and teachers was closer, and school education and family education were further integrated. “school’s out, but class’s on” really opened the way for family-school co-education. online learning during “school’s out, but class’s on” is not only an academic education, but also a “life education, belief education, science education, moral education” (zheng, 2020). during the growth of students, ‘school’s out, but class’s on’ is not eager to master new knowledge of subjects in online courses, nor is it eager to take the opportunity to “overtake the peers”, but to comprehensively improve the quality education of students to meet students need to grow. at this stage, schools strengthen home-school ties, guide parents to establish a scientific concept of child rearing, learn scientific child rearing methods, and establish harmonious family relationships. through home-school collaborative management, guide students to learn self-planning, independent learning, and self-management to achieve more valuable autonomous growth (yu, 2020).” schools and families are indispensable subjects in the healthy growth of children. building a harmonious home-school relationship and forming a pattern of cooperative education can guarantee children’s healthy growth (people’s daily, 2019). the implementation of “school’s out, but class’s on” has provided more time and space for teacher-student relations and parent-child relationships, and has closer links between schools, families and students. this really promotes the integration of home education and school education, creates a good environment for students to learn independently, and promotes students to achieve more valuable growth. conclusions in this sudden epidemic, the implementation of “school ‘s out, but class ‘s on” enabled 270 million students in china to learn online. many places and schools across the country actively use the “cloud” technology to independently choose online live classrooms, online on-demand teaching, tv video learning and other methods for online teaching. make full use of relevant national, local, and school-related teaching resources to provide online learning with rich, diverse, selectable, and high-quality online teaching resources covering all regions. such a large-scale, established system of online teaching activities is a test of china’s education system facing major emergencies. the test results prove that china has basically completed the infrastructure of the internet through the construction of informatization and education informatization in the past three decades. this provided the basic technical guarantee and resource guarantee for this large-scale online education. at the same time, through continuous deepening of education reforms, education zhou, et al. largest online education practice with covid-19 epidemic in china. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 516 and teaching concepts have been improved, and a “student-centric” education model has been basically established, creating possibilities for the occurrence of this online learning. through the implementation of “school’s out, but class’s on”, it has provided valuable experience for accelerating the integration of technology and education and for reforming the teaching methods of education in the new situation. however, in the implementation process, online teaching also reflects some problems. for example, in online teaching, some teachers copy classroom teaching content to online teaching courses, ignoring subjective guidance, lacking teacher-student interaction, and poor teaching results. at the same time, some students, due to lack of self-control and self-learning ability, lacked face-to-face teacher or even parental supervision, online learning became a form, and the autonomous learning effect was not satisfactory. these questions put forward new requirements and new goals for online learning:  how to better integrate technology and education;  how to make students learn more autonomously in online teaching, teacher teaching is more effective, and online teaching models are more reasonable;  how to make home education and school education more closely linked through online learning, these are the problems that need to be solved in online teaching. references cai, h., chen, m. 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(2020) the first large-scale online during the epidemic. on-line teaching survey report is coming! with 20 practical suggestions for online teaching in junior high school and high school https://www.sohu.com/a/375340691_689627 ,02-23/2020-03-11 zheng, b. (2020) the ninth press conference on the prevention and control of new crown pneumonia in henan province. http://www.haedu.gov.cn/nyqfbh/index.html, 02-14/2020-03-11 zhong, z., zeng, r., zhang, x. (2017) research on the evolution of china’s educational informatization policy (1989--201 6 years). e-learn edu res, (09): 14-23 zhu, z. (2010) progress report on china’s basic education informatization. chin electr edu, (09): 6-12. received: 27 february 2020 revised: 02 march 2020 accepted: 10 march 2020 report-longjunzhou-bece_title_15mar2020 review-longjunzhou-bece_maintext30mar2020 bece, vol.11, no.2, 2022 1473 how to retain rural preschool teachers? yuhua luo, suojun yuan, longjun zhou jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, china “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” –william butler yeats s a result of the accelerated urbanization and the improved remunerations of urban teachers, a large number of rural teachers have been pursuing employment in urban areas, resulting in a severe shortage of rural teaching staff. this phenomenon is particularly pronounced in developing countries. disadvantages in rural school working and living situations such as low pay, poor living conditions, heavy workloads, limited professional development has made teacher recruitment and retention extremely challenging tasks. the unbalanced urban-rural distribution of teachers, especially high-quality teachers, have become barriers to rural education development and further exacerbated the disadvantaged situations of rural students. due to the exclusion of preschool education from china’s compulsory education and a lack of professional identity among rural preschool teachers (yu & liang, 2008), the turnover rate of rural kindergarten teachers has been worse than that of rural primary and secondary educators. in order to alleviate the economic burden of farmers, rural kindergartens typically charge low fees. they are mainly funded by donations of various sources or by its founder(s). on the one hand, due to the high kid-teacher ratios, a rural kindergarten teacher often has multiple roles to play, including the head of the kindergarten, teacher, child-care worker, and even cook. their workloads are © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. a http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ bece, vol.11, no.2, 2022 1474 far more intense than those of their urban counterparts. on the other hand, the salary of a rural kindergarten teacher is even lower than the average income of local farmers, and most of them are not entitled to medical insurance, endowment insurance and other welfare benefits. as a consequence, they have difficulty maintaining a decent life. furthermore, few rural preschool teachers are accorded with the bianzhi (a system of publicly funded posts in china) membership, which make them feel excluded from the current education system. how to revitalize rural education and encourage high-competence rural teachers to devote themselves to education has become a global concern. governments around the world have implemented a series of strategies to ensure supply of qualified teachers for rural educational institutions including rural kindergartens. for example, in 2013, china initiated the national teacher training program which was open to kindergarten, primary and secondary school teachers all over the country. the program provides teachers with training in various aspects such as basic educational theory, teaching methodology and class management. in the following three years, about 10,000 principals and teachers from rural kindergartens received this nationlevel training. more recently, china’s ministry of education introduced a professional ranking system for preschool education to evaluate teachers’ qualifications and ability and tie their salaries to their professional rankings (wang et al., 2020). in bangladesh, the government not only increased training expenditures for rural preschool education, but also encouraged rural teachers in pilot kindergartens to experiment new educational methods (opel, 2009). such initiatives help improve rural preschool teachers’ working conditions and increase retention rate of rural kindergarten teachers in developing countries. boosting rural preschool teacher supply necessitates more pertinent research from academia. factors influencing the turnover intention of rural preschool teachers in the context of rural revitalization: an analysis based on a moderated mediation model in this issue examined the status quo of preschool teacher turnover in china’s rural areas and identified the impact of work stress on rural preschool teachers’ turnover intention via the mediating effect of job apathy. the moderator role of bianzhi membership was emphasized. this study recommended that a series of reforms should be carried out to restrict the workload of rural preschool teachers to a reasonable level, increase their salaries and compensation, create a teacher-friendly environment, and allocate adequate bianzhi memberships to rural kindergartens with the aim of lowering the turnover rate and promoting the supply of rural preschool teachers (wang et al., 2022). bece, vol.11, no.2, 2022 1475 references fan, x. z. (2015). fundamental issues of rural education development. journal of central china normal university (humanities and social sciences), 2015(5):146-154. opel, a., ameer, s. s., & aboud, f. e. (2009). the effect of preschool dialogic reading on vocabulary among rural bangladeshi children. international journal of educational research, 48(1):12-20. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2009.02.008 wang, l., dang, r., bai, y., zhang, s., liu, b., zheng, l., yang, n., & song, c. (2020). teacher qualifications and development outcomes of preschool children in rural china. early childhood research quarterly, 53:355-369. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2020.05.015 wang, t., li, m., liu, s., & zhang, x. (2022). factors influencing the turnover intention of rural preschool teachers in the context of rural revitalization: an analysis based on a moderated mediation model. best evidence in chinese education, 11(2):15231527. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.ab005 yu, d. q., & liang, h. m. (2008). major issues of rural preschool staffing in china and countermeasures. studies in preschool education, 2008(2):13-16. correspondence to: longjun zhou, ph.d. jiangsu second normal university nanjing 211200 jiangsu china e-mail: 294437034@qq.com about the authors: yuhua luo e-mail: luoyuh@126.com & suojun yuan e-mail: lukesj64@126.com jiangsu second normal university nanjing 211200 jiangsu china. conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.co012 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2009.02.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2020.05.015 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.ab005 mailto:294437034@qq.com mailto:luoyuh@126.com mailto:lukesj64@126.com patterns of bullying victimization among adolescents in china: based on a latent profile analysis yumin wei 1 , jiashu xie 1 , zhuorong zhu 2 1. hunan normal university, changsha, china 2. case western reserve university, cleveland, oh, usa abstract. this study was to explore potential patterns of bullying victimization among adolescents in china. by cluster sampling, delaware bullying victimization scale-student (dbvs-s), patient health questionnaire-9 (phq-9) and generalized anxiety disorder scale-7 (cad-7) were administered to 3,761 school adolescents in hunan province. latent profile analysis (lpa) was conducted on victimization by verbal, physical, social and cyberbullying. we found that (i) there is a high degree of co-occurrence among four subtypes of bullying victimization. four latent classes were identified, including an all-type (traditional and cyber) bullying victimization class (1.5%), a traditional victimization class (3.9%), a mild traditional victimization class (14.9%), and a nonvictimization class (79.6%). (ii) males, middle school students, rural students and poor students were more likely to be all types of victims. (iii) there was a graded relationship between the four latent classes and the level of depression as well as anxiety. best evid chin edu 2019; 3(2):361-375. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1270. keywords: bullying victimization; co-occurrence; latent profile analysis; adolescent; psychological health correspondence to: jiashu xie, cognition and human behavior key laboratory of hunan province, hunan normal university, changsha 410081, china. email: xjiashu@hunnu.edu.cn. about the author: yumin wei, cognition and human behavior key laboratory of hunan province, hunan normal university, changsha 410081, china. email: 504068520@qq.com. zhuorong zhu, case western reserve university, cleveland, oh 44106, usa; email: 741853660@qq.com. funding: hunan province natural science foundation project "tracking the relationship between adolescent bullying victims and depression: a study based on a mixed growth model of latent variables" (2017jj2184). conflict of interests: none. wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 362 introduction ullying victimization refers to the phenomenon that an individual is bullied or injured by one or several peers for a long time or repeated times (olweus, 1993), with the characteristics of power imbalance, deliberateness, repetitiveness, and harmfulness (smith & wilson, 1998), and is an essential risk factor affecting the physical and mental health of children and adolescents (gini & pozzoli, 2009, hawker & boulton, 2000). studies have shown that victims of bullying have higher risks in social and emotional problems, and are more prone to psychological introversion problems such as depression and anxiety (li et al., 2012; menesini et al., 2009). among the various types of people who are involved in the bullying, the proportions of victims of bullying are the highest. a survey of tens of thousands of elementary and middle school students in norway found that about 15% of students were involved in bullying, of which about 9% were victims of bullying (olweus, 1993). zhang (2002) found that nearly one-fifth of elementary and middle school students in china were involved in school bullying, and 14.9% of students were victims of bullying. a comparative study of bullying in china and the us show that 22.05% of american students and 21.77% of chinese students have been bullied (xie et al., 2016). for the victims, bullying is a serious life event. compared with ordinary life events, repeated and persistent bullying produces a negative impact on individual’s body and mind more profoundly. besides, there are many forms of bullying including verbal, relational, physical, and cyber-bullying (crick & grotpeter, 1995; olweus, 1993; björkqvist, 1994; smith et al, 2008). accumulating data have shown that there is a high degree of symbiosis between various forms of bullying (raskauskas & stoltz, 2007; li, 2007; smith, mahdavi et al, 2008; nylund et al., 2007; wang et al., 2010; zhang et al., 2014). most victims often suffer from more than one form of bullying. within the victims, the forms of bullying and their combinations are different, the severity of bullying is different, and the victims are heterogeneous. previous studies on campus bullying include the demographic characteristics of victims, the impact of bullying on individual mental health, introversion and extroversion, etc (zhang et al., 2000; schwartz et al., 2001; zhang, 2002; chen & le, 2002; chen et al., 2013; wu et al., 2016). regardless of the results, there was a problem that ignores the heterogeneity within the victims. positive psychology, especially psychological elasticity research, showed that the difference in mental health among disadvantaged individuals was more noteworthy than the difference among different groups (rutter, 2000; wan & tang, 2016; zhang et al., 2016). understanding the heterogeneity within the victims can help people differentiate the different nature of the victim subgroups. on this basis, the study of different models of sub-groups was carried out to provide more targeted programs for different sub-groups in the formulation of bullying prevention and intervention programs. we explored the model of bullying in school, which was based on the characteristics of the heterogeneity of bullying, and the demographic characteristics and mental health of various types of bullying. b wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 363 latent class analysis (lca) has been being used widely in heterogeneous group classification in many fields such as sociology, biomedicine, and psychology. lca is a technique based on the response of individual manifest variable to the tendency to divide individuals into a few mutually exclusive latent class variables (qiu, 2008). lca classification can ensure the greatest difference among latent classes and the smallest difference within the class. at the same time, the latent characteristics of each class can be judged according to the response modes of each item in the scale, and the proportion of the population of each class in the whole group can be understood, and explore the heterogeneous classification mode within the group. of the studies of latent class of bullying, a lca of the incidence of physical bullying, verbal bullying, social exclusion, rumors, and cyberbullying in american teenagers divided the subjects into three classes: full-type victim groups (9.7% for men and 6.2% for women), verbal/social victim group (28.1% male, 35.1% female), and uninjured group (62.2% male, 58.7% female) (wang et al., 2010). zhang (2014) conducted potential class analysis on the occurrence of physical bullying, verbal bullying and relational bullying among students of grades 4, 6 and 8, and divided the subjects into four classes: verbal-body bullying (10.8%), verbal-body-social bullying (10.6%), verbal-social bullying (5.8%) and victimless bullying (72.9%). li (2015) analyzed the subjects in grades 7, 8, 10 and 11 of two schools and found three types of bullies: all types of bullying (10.3%), cyber/verbal/social bullying (47.5%) and non-bullying (42.2%). these study tools, involving the crowd, and concluded that the results were inconsistent; for the victims, the bullying measurement used in the study were scored higher, if use the lca, the original score points to 0/1 class for subsequent analysis. due to the lack of accuracy of discrete data (zhang et al., 2010), data information will be lost when continuous data is converted into discrete data resulting in deviation of classification results. therefore, this study will use the latent profile analysis (lpa) to extend the method of latent variables, so as to explore the pattern of chinese bullying victimization more accurately. therefore, our study intends to study the co-occurrence characteristics of the detection of four common forms of bullying victimization, including cyberbullying, and then build an lpa model based on the data of the four forms of bullying victimization, to explore the different bullying victimization patterns and their main demographic characteristics of chinese adolescents. based on the consideration of the heterogeneity within the bullying-victimized group, the psychological introversion of different bullying victimization patterns (depression, anxiety) and their differences were further discussed. objects and methods objects the method of cluster sampling in eight areas of hunan province was used. a total of 3,788 middle to high school students (age range of 11 to 20 years old, m = 15.03, sd = 1.685) from 20 schools (including 13 city schools, 7 township and rural schools) were wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 364 included. to remove the demographic variable information (such as gender), recycling effective questionnaire was 3,761, and the effective rate was 99.29%. detailed sampling information is shown in table 1. research tools delaware bullying victimization scale-student (dbvs-s) dbvs-s (2016 chinese edition) was adopted. the scale has a total of 17 items, which are divided into four dimensions: verbal bullying (4 items), physical bullying (4 items), social/relational bullying (4 items) and cyber bullying (4 items). item 13 “i was bullied in this school” is a screening item, which is not included in the data analysis (bear et al., 2016). the scale was introduced by xie (2015). the chinese edition of the latest revision was adopted in this study (xie et al., 2018). the cronbach’s α coefficient of dbvs-s was 0.906, and the fitting factor of the four-factor model confirmative factor analysis was good (cfi = 0.922, rmsea = 0.043 [0.040-0.046]). the scale uses the likert six-point score, “1” = “never”, “2” = “occasionally”, “3” = “one or two times a month”, “4” = “once a week”, “5” = “multiple times a week” and “6” = “every day.” the higher was the score, the more serious was the bullying. patient health questionnaire depression scale -9 (phq-9) phq-9 was used to assess the frequency of depressive symptoms in the past two weeks. the scale has a total of 9 items, of which the 9th item “whether there is suicidal or selfmutilation thought” is not a clinical intervention for this study, and suicide or selfmutilation was detected. the investigator could not provide further evidence for subjects who have a positive answer. based on ethical considerations and referring to the practices of similar studies, we did not include it, and only the first 8 items were used in the test. the scale uses the likert four-point score, “0” = “nothing at all”, “1” = “with a few days”, “2” = “more than half of the number of days”, “3” = “almost every day”. the higher the rate was, the more severe the depressive symptoms were. cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.850 when phq-9 was revised (hu et al., 2014). the cronbach’s α coefficient of phq-9 in our sample data was 0.834, and the fitting factor of the onefactor model confirmative factor analysis was good (cfi = 0.933, rmsea = 0.074 [0.068-0.080]). generalized anxiety disorder scale-7 (cad-7) gad-7 was used to understand the frequency of anxiety symptoms such as stress and anxiety in the past two weeks. the scale consists of 7 items in total, and the scale adopts likert four-point score, “0” = “none”, “1” = “several days”, “2” = “more than half of the days”, and “3” = “almost every day”. the higher the score was, the more serious the anxiety symptoms were. cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.93 when gad-7 was revised (qu & sheng, 2015). the cronbach’s α coefficient of gad-7 in our sample data was 0.884, and the fitting factor of the one-factor model confirmative factor analysis was good (cfi = .973, rmsea = 0.063 [0.056-0.071]). wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 365 table 1. participants distribution information. 7th grade 8th grade 9th grade 10th grade 11th grade 12th grade total male 197 244 234 462 310 376 1,823 female 224 233 254 459 414 354 1,938 total 421 477 488 921 724 730 3,761 procedure all data were collected by the paper questionnaire, and the class was taken as the unit for a group test. before the test, we communicated fully with the sample school, obtained support from the school and informed consent from the parents (or guardians) of all the sampled students. the experimenters were specially trained graduate students in psychology, and each class was equipped with 1-2 experimenters. the test time was during the school break or self-study class, and the time for the participants to complete the questionnaire was about 15 minutes. the head teacher is required to be present during the test (only present without patrolling). the experimenter explained the instructions and sample questions to the participants in detail. of the instructions, experimenter explained the meaning of the survey and emphasized that the test content was only used for scientific research. the questionnaire was collected and taken away by the experimenters on the spot and would not be reviewed by the school or teachers. the sampling began in early december 2016 and lasted about one month. statistical analysis mplus 7.4 was used for latent profile analysis, and spss 22.0 was used for multiple logistic regression analysis and variance analysis of latent profile analysis results. results incidence and co-occurrence percentage of different types of bullying during data processing, as long as the score of each item in dbvs-s was ≥ 3, that is, the participants selected “once or twice a month” or more were considered to have been bullied by the dimension represented by this item. individuals subjected to verbal, physical, and social bullying of any kind or more were classed as traditional bullying victims. the incidences of four types of bullying victims were: verbal bullying, 31.53% (male 37.74%, female 25.70%); physical bullying: 20.55% (27.65% for males and 13.88% for females); social bullying 19.60% (22.65% for males and 16.72% for fewei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 366 males); cyberbullying, 4.3% (5.76% for males, 2.94% for females). verbal bullying is the most common type of bullying among males, followed by physical bullying; verbal bullying is the most common type of bullying among females, and social bullying is the second most common type. the percentage of victims of each type by other types is shown in table 2: when cyberbullying occurred, the probability of traditional bullying occurring at the same time was 87% (89.5% for males and 82.5% for females); when traditional bullying occurred, the probability of simultaneous cyberbullying was 9.8% (11.4% for males and 7.7% for females). from the perspective of the co-occurrence characteristics of the four types of bullying victims, the co-occurrence rate of verbal bullying was the highest. victims of physical, relational and cyber bullying were usually victims of verbal bullying. the three types of traditional bullying victimization have high co-occurrence. the occurrence of cyberbullying among chinese teenagers was often accompanied by traditional bullying. the results of latent profile analysis of adolescent bullying victims to further explore patterns of bullying victimization among adolescents, we then conducted lpa based on the occurrence degree (i.e. frequency) of each type of bullying. the fitting indexes of 2-5 classes were extracted and summarized in table 3, and conducted a model test. the model adaptation test indexes mainly include: information evaluation index aic, bic, sample size-adjusted bic, abic, entropy index, likelihood ratio test index lmr-lrt and likelihood ratio test index based on bootstrap (blrt). the smaller the three information evaluation indicators are, the better the model fits. entropy ranges from 0 to 1, and entropy closer to 1 indicates the more accurate the classification. entropy < 0.60 is equivalent to over 20% of individuals with a classification error, and entropy = 0.8 indicates an accuracy of over 90%. the p-values of the two indexes of lmr-lrt and blrt reach a significant level, indicating that the k classes’ models are significantly better than the k-1 classes of models (qiu, 2008). the data showed that the conclusion of the various information indicators was not consistent. the entropy values of the five models exceed 0.8, and the bic is the smallest when the five classes are retained. however, the lmr-lrt values are not significant when the 5th class are retained, indicating that the 5th class are not excellent. in the 4th class, the lmr-lrt and blrt indicators of the 4th class are significant, and the average probability (column) of the 4th class of the adolescents (rows) comprehensive consideration, the 4th class is selected as best model (nylund et al., 2007). the estimated conditional mean and individual value distribution on the 4 latent class model on the 16 items of bullying (reordering by dimension after removing the 13th question of the original scale) is shown in figure 1. from figure 1, the mean conditions of the four latent classes on the 16 items of the four factors of bullying victimization are significantly different, showing different characteristics. among them, class 1 (c1) has a high mean value in the four bullying dimensions, accounting for 1.5% of the total subjects. according to its score charac wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 367 figure 1. estimated conditional means of four latent class of bullying victims. teristics, c1 is defined as “all-type (traditional and cyber) bullying victimization class”. in class 2 (c2), the mean value of the conditions in the dimension of cyberbullying was significantly lower than c1. the score trend and mean value of the conditions in items 1-12, namely the three dimensions of traditional bullying victimization, were similar to c1, which was defined as “a traditional victimization class”, accounting for 3.9% of all subjects. the score trend of class 3 (c3) in the three dimensions of traditional bullying victimization was similar to that of c2, but the mean value of the conditions was lower than c2. the mean value of the conditions in the dimension of cyber bullying was consistent with c2. therefore, c3 was named as “a mild traditional victimization class”, accounting for 14.9% of all subjects. class 4 (c4) was named “non-victimization class”, accounting for 79.6% of all subjects. multivariate logistic regression results of demographic variables for four latent classes this research further explored the demographic characteristics of bullying victimization patterns based on the results of lpa. lpa results as dependent variables, gender (female as a reference), grade (high school as a reference), school type (city as a reference), boarding situation (day reading as a reference), and self-evaluation academic record wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 368 table 2. the prevalence of all four types of bullying.a traditional types of bullying victims cyberbullying (%) verbal bullying (%) physical bullying (%) social bullying (%) traditional bullying (%) b total (n=3,761) traditional bullying (n=1,436) 9.8 verbal bullying (n=1,186) 53.7 c 50.1 c 10.6 c physical bullying (n=773) 80.9 62.0 15.5 social bullying (n=737) 80.6 65.0 16.8 cyberbullying (n=162) 77.8 74.1 76.5 87.0 male (n=1,823) traditional bullying (n=825) 11.4 verbal bullying (n=688) 59.0 50.6 12.1 physical bullying (n=504) 80.6 61.9 16.5 social bullying (n=413) 84.3 75.5 20.1 cyberbullying (n=105) 79.0 79.0 79.0 89.5 female (n=1,938) traditional bullying (n=611) 7.7 verbal bullying (n=498) 44.08 49.4 8.6 physical bullying (n=269) 81.4 62.1 13.8 social bullying (n=324) 75.9 51.5 12.7 cyberbullying (n=57) 75.4 64.9 71.9 82.5 a. the percentage of each type of victim who was bullied by the other type. b. if an individual is bullied by one or more types of verbal bullying, physical bullying or social exclusion, it is considered as the traditional bullying victimization type. c. for example, among the 1,186 victims of verbal bullying, 53.7%, 50.1%, and 10.6% are also victims of physical bullying, social exclusion, and cyberbullying. (successful results as a reference) as self variables were subjected to multiple logistic regression analysis. among them, the non-victimization class (c4) was used as the reference category for comparison, and the odd ratio coefficient was obtained through analysis. the or coefficient reflected the ratios of different genders, grades, urban and rural locations, boarding situations, and self-assessment academic performance in the wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 369 table 3. summary of latent profile analysis fit information. index model number total (n=3761) 2 3 4 5 aic 134,874.143 127,284.693 123,542.594 118,438.308 bic 135,179.532 127,696.034 124,059.887 119,061.552 abic 135,023.834 127,486.318 123,796.153 118,743.799 entropy 0.991 0.988 0.962 0.994 lmr-lrt (p) < 0.001 0.1096 0.0261 0.6154 blrt (p) < 0.001 < 0.001 < 0.001 < 0.001 table 4. multivariate logistic regression results of demographic variables for four latent classes. all-type(traditional and cyber) bullying victimization (c1) a traditional victimization (c2) a mild traditional victimization (c3) or ci (95%) or ci (95%) or ci (95%) gender female 1.000 1.000 1.000 male 4.241 ** 2.3037.809 1.794 ** 1.2752.523 2.338 ** 1.9252.838 grade 12th grade 1.000 1.000 1.000 7th grade 9.471 ** 3.74123.977 15.029 ** 6.63634.038 3.803 ** 2.7035.349 8th grade 3.609 * 1.29610.050 11.070 ** 4.87625.131 3.372 ** 2.4254.689 9th grade 1.991 0.6366.237 8.402 ** 3.65819.295 2.635 ** 1.8833.688 10th grade 1.237 0.4373.500 2.096 0.8705.052 1.084 0.7811.504 11th grade 1.338 0.4464.015 2.147 0.8605.361 1.067 0.7511.517 school location urban 1.000 1.000 1.000 rural 5.238 ** 3.0628.961 4.513 ** 3.2166.331 2.824 ** 2.3403.409 boarding situation day student 1.000 1.000 1.000 boarder 1.342 0.7452.149 1.427 0.9822.074 1.037 0.8541.258 academic record (selfassessed) poor 1.000 1.000 1.000 medium 0.613 0.3371.116 0.563 * 0.3810.831 0.775 * 0.6170.973 excellent 0.400 * 0.1720.935 0.534 ** 0.3260.876 0.751 * 0.5700.990 note. *p<.05, **p<.01. wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 370 potential categories of bullying victims. the results of multinomial logistic regression are shown in table 4. taking the c4 as the reference group, c1, c2, and c3 were compared with it. the or results showed that the distribution of victims of bullying was affected by gender, grade, school location, and student performance, the effect of boarding was not significant. compared with females, males in the groups c1, c2 and c3 were suffered more bullying and victimization. compared with the senior 3 students, in the c1, the bullying of the junior 1 and junior 2 students was more serious. the bullying injury among the junior 3, senior 1, and senior 2 students was not significant from that of the senior 3 students. in the c2 and c3, there are more bullying victims in the three grades of middle school, and the phenomenon of bullying in senior 1 and senior 2 students is not significant from that of senior 3 students. compared with urban students, among the three classes of c1, c2 and c3, there are more bullying injuries among rural students. there was not significance in the victimization of boarding and day students. compared with students with lower graders, there was not significance in bullying among students with poor grades and middle grades in the c1 class. students with higher grades were less likely to suffer from bullying than those with lower grades. among the c2 and c3, students with middle grades and excellent grades were less likely to suffer from bullying than those with poorer grades. comparison of depression and anxiety symptoms among latent classes of juvenile bullying the results of the analysis of variance are shown in table 5. the depression scores of adolescents in different categories of bullying victims (f(3,3757)=104.136, p < 0.01, η 2 = 0.077) and anxiety scores (f(3,3757)=121.953, p < 0.01, η 2 = 0.089) was significant. the multiple comparison results show: the depression and anxiety scores in c1 were significantly higher than those in the other three groups. the depression and anxiety scores in c2 were lower than those in c1, which was significantly higher than that in c3 and c4. the depression and anxiety scores in c3 were significantly higher than those in group c4. discussion the co-occurrence characteristics and heterogeneity of juvenile school bullying model we explored the patterns of four common forms of bullying using latent profile analysis. there were four modes of bullying victimization in the tested adolescents: all-type (traditional and cyber) bullying victimization class, a traditional victimization class, a mild traditional victimization class, a non-victimization class. there were significant differences in the scores and trends of bullying victims in each group indicating the heterogeneity of bullying victims. there are three bullying victimization classes (c1, c2, and c3) wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 371 table 5. comparison of depression and anxiety symptoms among latent classes. c1 (n=58) c2 (n=147) c3 (n=544) c4 (n=3,012) f η 2 depression 11.90±6.072 10.60±5.004 8.80±4.427 6.60±4.037 104.136 ** 0.077 anxiety 10.43±4.946 9.18±4.881 7.54±4.390 5.09±3.949 121.953 ** 0.089 note: data are depicted as mean ± sd. in the four modes, accounting for a total of 20.4%, among which the mild traditional victimization class has the largest number of people and the all-type bullying victimization class has the smallest number. this indicates that bullying and victimization phenomenon is prevalent in chinese schools at present, and the distribution of all classes is pyramid-like, and the more severe the bullying, the less the number of people suffering from bullying. among the three classes of bullying victims, the c1 and c2 were subjected to more serious traditional bullying, and the c3 group was subjected to mild traditional bullying. it can be seen that three forms of traditional bullying usually occur together. in terms of conditional means, verbal bullying is the most common form of bullying, which is consistent with the co-occurrence rate of the various forms of bullying in table 2. in addition, compared with the c2 and c3, only all types of bullying victims have more serious cyberbullying, which indicates that the cyberbullying of teenagers is more serious, and the victims may also suffer or encounter other traditional types of bullying. victims of cyberbullying are often victims of traditional bullying, which is consistent with previous studies (raskauskas & stoltz, 2007; li, 2007; smith et al., 2008). the results also support the hypothesis that cyberbullying is an extension of campus bullying (zhang et al., 2015; zhu et al., 2014). demographic characteristics and analysis of their depression and anxiety indicators of different types bullying victims the analysis of demographic characteristics of victims of different types of bullying showed that there are differences in demographic variables such as gender, grade level, school location, and academic achievements. compared with females, in all three types of bullying mode, males are more likely to be bullied, and the gender differences in bullying patterns are consistent with previous studies (rivers & smith, 1994; zhang et al., 2000; chen & le, 2002; chen et al., 2013). this suggests that more attention should be paid to the bullying of males. of the grade level, the overall bullying is declining with the growth of grades. the bullying in middle school students is significantly more than that of high school students, but it has slightly different in different types. in the c1, bullying and victimization in the first and second grade were much higher than in other wei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 372 grades. in the c2 and c3, the three middle school grades are higher than the high school grades, and the severe bullying and victimization mainly occur in the middle and lower middle grades in middle school. a comparison of urban and rural schools showed that students whose schools are located in rural areas have a higher proportion of bullying than those whose schools are located in urban areas, which supported the previous findings (wu et al., 2016). in practice, national and local governments should strengthen the prevention and control of bullying in rural schools. previous studies regarding the impact of boarding on bullying suggested that the management system of rural boarding schools was not perfect and rural boarding students may lead to more bullying than urban boarding students (wu & hou, 2017; wu et al., 2016). in this study, the comparison between day students and boarders showed that boarding students were more likely to suffer from bullying than day students, but there was no significant difference with the type of bullying. it may be due to the interaction between school location and boarding. the differences between rural and urban school boarding and the underlying mechanisms need further studies. students with different self-assessment performance have different proportions in each bullying mode. in general, students with poor self assessment scores are more likely to be bullied, which is consistent with previous report (schwartz et al., 2001). compared with students with poor and middle-level selfassessment scores, students with excellent self-assessment scores in c1 are less likely bullied, and students with middle and excellent self-assessment scores in c2 and c3 group are less likely bullied than those with poor self-assessment scores. taken together, the self-assessed high academic performance in chinese adolescent students seems to be an advantageous factor in protecting themselves from being bullied. the results of the depression and anxiety scores of different types of victims showed that there were significant differences in the scores of depression and anxiety, and the higher the frequency of bullying suffered, the higher the level of depression and anxiety would be. it is worth emphasizing that the scores of a mild traditional victimization class and the questionnaire on the two scales of depression and anxiety are significantly higher than the non-victimization class, which means that as long as the students have the experience or feeling of being bullied, even if the frequency of bullying is not high, but it will produce a more serious negative impact on individual’s mental health. the results of the depression and anxiety scores of the victims of each model support the “zero tolerance” of bullying on campus (zhao & wang, 2018). education and intervention enlightenment in 2017, china issued the guidance on preventing and controlling bullying and violence among primary and middle school students, which shows the importance of controlling school bullying at the national level (yao, 2017). among the people who are involved in the bullying on campus, the proportion of bullying victims was the highest (hu, 2017), and it has important practical significance. from our study, when students were noticed to have been suffering from a certain type of bullying, they should be paid more attention to the situation, i.e. whether they have suffered from multiple types of bullying at the same time, especially cyber bullying. our findings indicated that the dewei, et al., bullying victimization among adolescents in china. vol.3, no. 2, 2019 373 gree of bullying was relatively more serious than the imagination. the exploration of bullying patterns of victims aimed to understand the qualitative differences within the bullied group. we found that even mild bullying can produce serious negative impact on students’ depression and anxiety. therefore, in daily study life, teachers and parents should pay attention to the signs of bullying and victimization, and should not ignore the stigmatization, malicious mocking and other minor encroachment behaviors in the communication with students, so as to find and stop bullying and victimization in time, and to prevent further deterioration of the situation. in addition, the study also suggests that male, junior in high school, middle school, lower grade, rural schools, poor selfrated academic performance are the demographic characteristics of the high incidence of bullying victimization. conclusions in this study, the potential profile analysis was used to explore the bullying victimization patterns of adolescents at school, and the demographic characteristics and psychological introversion problems (depression and anxiety) were analyzed, and we draw conclusions below:  among the victims of school bullying, the four common types of bullying, namely verbal, physical, relational and cyber bullying, are co-occurring, and there are four typical patterns of school bullying victimization: all-type (traditional and 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(2014). review and latest development of cyberbullying research abroad. china youth stud, 11:80-85. received: 13 august 2019 revised: 19 september 2019 accepted: 17 october 2019 the chinese version of this article has been published in psychol develop edu 2019; 35(1): 95102. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 谢家树, 魏宇民, zhuorong zhu. 当代中国青少年校园欺凌受害模式探索: 基于潜在剖面分析. 心理发展与教育, 2019; 35(1): 95-102. article-jiashuxie-bece_title_30nov2019 article-jiashuxie-maintext-bece_30nov2019 a study of college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning based on the teaching model of sheltered instruction observation protocol chenhua wei guangxi university of foreign languages, nanning 530222, guangxi, china abstract. foreign language anxiety in english learning has always been a major focus of english teaching research. how to relieve english majors’ foreign language anxiety and improve their classroom participation becomes an imperative issue for english teachers. based on the american teaching model of sheltered teaching and observation protocol (siop), this study explores whether the siop teaching model can help relieve english learning anxiety. the experiment on 60 freshmen majoring in business english shows that the siop model can relieve students’ foreign language learning anxiety and improve their classroom participation. the siop teaching model is worth popularizing in business english teaching. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 10(1):1303-1313. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.or010. how to cite: wei, c. (2022). a study of college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning based on the teaching model of sheltered instruction observation protocol. best evidence in chinese education, 10(1):1303-1313. keywords: siop teaching model, foreign language anxiety, college students, english learning, business english wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1304 correspondence to: chenhua wei, guangxi university of foreign languages, a-19 wuhe avenue, nanning 530222, guangxi, china. e-mail: 649008927@qq.com © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:649008927@qq.com wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1305 introduction n recent years, many language colleges and universities have set up business english major and business english teaching and research has been paid increasing attention. the study of business english is different from that of other english majors, because business english students need to master not only the basic english language but also the relevant professional knowledge of business and trade, as well as the business culture of different countries. business english majors who study in local application-oriented universities are educated with more explicit objectives. the importance of students’ practical abilities and english language competence as well as their business knowledge is emphasized so that students can serve the local economic and social development after graduation. however, at present, the teaching mode of business english is relatively simplified. teachers are the dominators in the classroom while students’ role as the pro-active learners has not been highlighted, which is disadvantageous for students’ active learning and the internalization of subject knowledge. as a result, students are prone to lack of enthusiasm in english learning because of the long-term monotonous and rigid teaching mode, which compromises their participation in the classroom and confidence in foreign language learning. as english is not their mother tongue, once they lose interest in it which they have to learn, they will unconsciously gain foreign language learning anxiety. this is an important issue that foreign language teachers should not dodge. anxiety is a common phenomenon in foreign language learning in china, and is one of the key psychological variables in language learning (wang & wan, 2001). the american sheltered instruction observation protocol (siop) teaching model is based on the input hypothesis of krashen’s language acquisition theory, swain’s output hypothesis and cummins’ common underlying proficiency (cup) hypothesis (august & shanahan, 2006). according to august and shanahan, the possibility of foreign language learning lies in the fact that the cognitive ability in native language learning can be transferred to second language learning, resulting in the deep sharing of cognitive ability. they insist that the effect of classroom teaching depends on the deep sharing of input language content and on the comprehensibility and interest of input language content and there is a close relationship between language knowledge acquisition and skill acquisition. other researchers confirmed that the siop model is of high reliability and validity (echevarria, 2007). it focuses on the subject contents, and various sheltering teaching strategies are flexibly used in teaching to combine the learning of subject knowledge with the cultivation of language competence. one of the major functions of the siop model is to alleviate students’ anxiety caused by their incompetence in using english. the application of sheltered teaching strategies such as cooperative learning, group learning and peer guidance aims at creating a non-threatening participation classroom environment for students so that they can participate more confidently in english classroom. students with different language proficiency and cultural background will help one another in group work or even across groups. and in such a friendly environment, they are definitely more confident and participating in class activity (yin, wang, & zhao, 2020). business english majors aim for both business-related knowledge and english language proficiency in the courses of comprehensive business english, and the siop teaching model is aligned with such teaching requirements. this study explores effectiveness of siop model in business i wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1306 english teaching, focusing on whether siop model can help ease students’ foreign language anxiety and improve their classroom participation. a brief introduction to sheltered instruction observation protocol (siop) definition the sheltered instruction observation protocol was developed by researchers at the center for research on education, diversity & excellence (short, 2013). it is a validated model of sheltered instruction, which helps teachers plan and deliver lessons that enable learners to develop their english while acquiring academic knowledge. this model makes it easier for students to understand the professional contents in courses taught in english through various teaching strategies and improves students’ academic english at the same time (echevarria & graves, 2007). the model is called sheltered teaching because various strategies are constantly used to embellish the teaching. a non-threatening sheltered language environment are created for the students; classroom teaching conforms to english learners’ language level, which makes the teaching contents easier to be understood and accepted (august & shanahan, 2006). the “decoration” in this teaching model includes providing students with various diagrams, extensive supplementary materials and adapted course content suitable to students’ language ability. meantime, students’ listening, speaking, reading and writing skills are honed in interactive and meaningful classroom activities based on scaffolding teaching. what’s more, student’s critical thinking is developed in discussion, questioning and argument in a non-threatening sheltered learning environment, thanks to cooperative learning, group study and peer guidance (echevarria et al., 2004). components eight components are included in the siop model, that is, lesson preparation, background building, comprehensible input, strategy implementation, class interaction, practice and application, lesson delivery, review, and assessment. each part is equipped with corresponding teaching strategies with elaborations on concrete operation methods as well as teaching evaluation. at the stage of lesson preparation, teachers should explain learning objectives of the course to students clearly to stimulate students’ enthusiasm and initiative. it is emphasized that the contents of the course should be aligned with the students’ language ability and educational background, and various teaching aids can be used to help students better understand the contents. at the stage of background building, teachers can help students to connect the existing knowledge with the new knowledge, that is, to transfer the existing knowledge and skills in their mother tongue to english learning, to make them think coherently and critically. this process helps students form their own views and perspectives. at the stage of strategy implementation, students are provided with sufficient opportunities to implement a variety of learning strategies, such as cognitive, communicative, emotional learning strategies. with the help and guidance of scaffolding teaching, students’ ability of independent thinking and problem-solving can be gradually developed. at the stage of interaction wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1307 and application, students are given enough time to think, read, speak, and write. all students are encouraged to participate actively in discussion. teachers also provide relevant teaching materials or tools to enable students to use their language in group discussions and collaborative activities, to improve their critical thinking and verbal expression. at the stage of review and assessment, teachers evaluate students’ performance by observing their classroom interaction and participation in class activities, and also provide timely feedback to individual students for self-reflection (wu, 2014). siop teaching concepts are consistent with the trends of foreign language teaching in china, providing reference for teachers in improving their bilingual teaching skills and implementing english teaching reform. further efforts are required to localize siop teaching model. foreign language anxiety according to horwitz, horwitz, and cope (1986), foreign language anxiety is not just a complex emotion derived from fear of foreign language learning, but rather a conceptually distinct variable in foreign language learning related to students’ self-concept, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors. numerous empirical studies indicate that anxiety has a negative impact on language learning and is also a major factor affecting foreign language learning initiative and achievement. horwitz, horwitz, and cope conducted a study and identified three major factors affecting students’ anxiety in foreign language classes, that is, communication anxiety, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation from classmates and teachers. based on their study, foreign language classroom anxiety scale (flcas) was developed to measure the breadth and depth of foreign language anxiety. flcas standardized the measurement of language learning anxiety (guo & xu, 2014). since then, teachers worldwide have applied flcas to conduct research on foreign language learning anxiety. many studies show that most foreign language learners have experienced significant foreign language anxiety (fla), and foreign language learning anxiety has a negative impact on students’ foreign language performance (dewaele & thirtle, 2009; dogan & tuncer, 2016; horwitz, 2001). some studies focus on how foreign language anxiety affects students’ learning confidence and achievements. in a study of english learners at a london school, dewaele and thirtle (2009) gave students two options, either to continue or drop out of foreign language learning. the research showed that students who choose to give up foreign language learning were those who had severe foreign language learning anxiety. similar results were found in the research by doğan and tuncer (2016). they carried out a correlational study to investigate the relationship between foreign language classroom anxiety and foreign language achievement. participants were engineering students from turkish universities studying english-required courses. flcas was adopted throughout the research and the results showed that there is a negative correlation between classroom anxiety and foreign language achievement. in china, current research focuses on whether students’ foreign language anxiety can be alleviated under different teaching models. huang (2021) conducted a study on 210 english students in one semester by means of longitudinal case study, questionnaire survey, and interviews, and reached the results that the use of flipped classroom teaching model can significantly alleviate the overall classroom anxiety, expression wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1308 anxiety and classroom teaching anxiety, and increase students’ confidence in their use of language. tao and he (2021) conducted a survey of foreign language anxiety among 108 chinese students and 72 mexican students in english class from the perspective of language distance and the results showed that chinese efl learners have higher foreign language anxiety than mexican efl learners. it means that the higher cognitive decoding effort is required for second language learners who have greater language distance. at present, research on the correlation between foreign language anxiety of college english majors and the siop teaching model is insufficient in china. it is hoped that this paper will inspire more research on this topic. methodology research questions this study tries to answer the following two questions: i) whether the students’ foreign language anxiety can be relieved under the siop teaching model; ii) whether business english majors’ classroom participation can be improved under this model. participants two classes of students, a total of sixty business english majors in guangxi university of foreign languages participated in the study. one of the classes is the experimental class and the other is the control class. each class has 30 students. research methods and instruments methods the method of quasi-experimental designs is used in this study. the independent variable is the teaching design and implementation of comprehensive courses for business english majors under the siop model; the corresponding dependent variables are business english majors’ foreign language learning anxiety and students’ classroom participation. in this study, both experimental and control class were taught by the same teacher. in addition, the study tried to avoid the influence and interference of nonexperimental factors by ensuring that the two selected classes have the same teaching hours and the same teaching materials. and the only variable experimental factor was different teaching modes: the experimental class was taught with the siop teaching model while the control class with the conventional language teaching mode, to examine the effects of the experimental factor on business english majors’ english anxiety and classroom participation. the following measures were implemented to guarantee the reliability and validity of this experiment. reliability after questionnaire a was finalized, the reliability was tested in a small scope by retest method. questionnaire a was retested in 30 students, andαwas 0.87, which met the standard requirement. in the process of questionnaire design and implementation, the wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1309 following measures were taken to ensure the reliability of the questionnaire: (i) the number of questions should be as small as possible and limited to one page; (ii) the language should be as plain and concise as possible. the majority of questions are multiple-choice ones, with a few blank-filling ones; (iii) anonymous filling in the questionnaires; (iv) handing out and filling in the questionnaires without teachers’ presence. validity after the design of questionnaire, experts were asked to decide whether the questionnaire can cover the research topic and whether it is suitable for the validity test, and the rate of expert identification is 91.72%. as for questionnaire b, flcas has been proved to be of high reliability and validity in many years of teaching and research. instruments questionnaire a: the classroom participation questionnaire for business english majors (the questionnaire is designed to serve research purposes); questionnaire b: flcas developed by e. k. horwitz, m.b. horwitz, and j. cope. flcas was compiled in 1986 focusing on communication anxiety, test anxiety and negative evaluation anxiety. procedure this teaching experiment covers three stages. at the first stage, the students of selected classes (experimental class and control class) were asked to fill in the questionnaire a before the implementation of the siop teaching model. at the second stage, the two selected classes were taught in different teaching modes. in the experimental class, the siop teaching model was integrated with regular teaching so that the siop’s sheltering strategies were flexibly applied in the whole teaching process according to the teaching contents of specific units and students’ learning situation. at this stage, the construction of pre-class background knowledge and the input of comprehensible business knowledge were key tasks. effective classroom activities were designed to stimulate students’ desire for exploration and autonomous learning, which ensure the acquisition of business knowledge and english language competence. in the control class, however, the teaching mode remained conventional. at the third stage, questionnaire a and questionnaire b were distributed to two selected classes (experimental class and control class) for the second time, to verify the influence of experimental factor in this study: whether the siop model can relieve the students’ foreign language anxiety and improve the students’ classroom participation. data collection questionnaire a and questionnaire b were distributed and collected in the classes of comprehensive business english and the key instructions were explained clearly to ensure the validity of data. 120 questionnaires were distributed, and 120 questionnaires wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1310 were collected, which was conducted from october 2020 to december 2020. all statistics and analyses were treated by software spss17. results and discussion the siop model can relieve the foreign language anxiety of business english students. according to the data collected after the first stage (table1), there was no significant difference in students’ english learning anxiety between the two selected classes before adopting different teaching modes. as shown in table 1, differences in test anxiety (t = 1.345) and negative evaluation anxiety (t = -1.321) between the experimental and the control classes were very slight, though the difference in communication anxiety (t = 3.328, md = 0. 35*) was noticeable. overall, the foreign language anxiety levels of the two classes were roughly the same. however, the data and sequential analysis at the third stage (table 2) showed great differences in the anxiety level. after the experiment, that is, after the siop teaching model implemented, there were significant differences between the two classes in the three factors related to foreign language learning anxiety: communication anxiety (t = 5.873), test anxiety (t = 7.021) and negative evaluation anxiety (t = 5.408). meanwhile, foreign language anxiety of the experimental class was significantly alleviated: communication anxiety (md = 0.61*), test anxiety (md = 0.89*) and negative evaluation anxiety (md = 0.47*). the above data indicate that the application of the siop model can alleviate students’ foreign language learning anxiety in the comprehensive business english courses. the figures of the experimental class in terms of communication anxiety, test anxiety and negative evaluation anxiety were significantly smaller than those of the control class, indicating the experimental class experienced a significant decrease in foreign language anxiety after the siop teaching, while the control class underwent increased foreign language anxiety. under the siop teaching model, thanks to the effective pre-class input, class activities and after-class review, the students’ language ability and communication skills in the experimental class were trained in a better way, and their business knowledge was more easily acquired. as a result, their self-confidence and selfconsciousness in learning were improved, and their foreign language anxiety in business english learning decreased significantly. therefore, the application of the siop teaching model in business english teaching can alleviate students’ foreign language anxiety. siop model is helpful to improve business english students’ classroom participation comparative analysis of the data in table 3 indicates that the experimental class had slightly higher participation than the control class (md = 0.25*) before the application of the siop teaching model, yet the difference was not significant. there were significant differences in student’s classroom participation (t = 4.789, df = 96, p < 0.05) between the experimental class and control class after adaptation. the experimental class (md = 0.65*) had significantly higher participation than wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1311 table 1. a comparison of english language anxiety between experimental and control classes at the first stage. class n mean sd t df sig. md communication anxiety control 30 2.7473 0.53251 -3.328 96 0.001 -0.35254 experimental 30 3.2167 0.50023 test anxiety control 30 2.4832 0.74864 -1.345 96 0.149 -0.23021 experimental 30 2.7431 0.87256 negative evaluation anxiety control 30 2.8715 0.40535 -1.321 96 0.155 -0.12516 experimental 30 3.0206 0.45012 table 2. a comparison of english language anxiety between experimental and control classes at the third stage. class n mean t df sig. md communication anxiety control 30 3.5534 5.873 96 0.000 0.61061 experimental 30 3.0316 test anxiety control 30 3.5353 7.021 96 0.000 0.89897 experimental 30 2.6336 negative feedback anxiety control 30 3.3020 5.408 96 0.000 0.47816 experimental 30 2.8162 table 3. a comparison of classroom participation between experimental and control classes at the first stage. classroom participation class n mean sd t df sig. md contrast 30 2.6113 0.70521 -2.076 81.306 0.0.30 -0.25134 experimental 30 2.8432 0.43103 table 4. a comparison of classroom participation between experimental and control classes at the third stage. classroom participation class n mean sd t df sig. md contrast 30 2.6032 0.63564 -4.789 96 0.000 -0.65138 experimental 30 3.2751 0.70663 wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1312 the control class (table 4). in addition, if we compare the data vertically, we can find that there are remarkable differences between the two classes before and after the reform of teaching modes. on the average, after a semester’s siop teaching, the students’ participation of the experimental class has increased significantly, whereas the control class did not show remarkable changes. therefore, the results prove that the application of siop teaching model can effectively improve the classroom participation of business english majors. conclusion comparative analysis of the above data revealed that students’ foreign language anxiety in the experimental class has been alleviated in that semester because of the application of the si0p teaching model, and those students have also made great progress in their classroom participation. in contrast, the foreign language anxiety of the control class was not relieved under the conventional teaching mode, and the students’ classroom participation also remained unchanged, though the two classes were taught by the same teacher, with the same teaching materials and the same teaching time. thus, this teaching experiment well answers the two questions we set at the beginning of this research. the siop teaching model helps relieve business english students’ foreign language anxiety and improve their classroom participation. business english majors can better decode the course contents through relevant learning skills from the siop model. moreover, the repetitive use of siop teaching strategies not only enables students to master the declarative knowledge of the subjects, but also develop their language learning skills, curriculum learning strategies and critical thinking (wu, 2015). in the context of new liberal arts construction in china, the reform of foreign language education is constantly advancing. in the siop teaching model, foreign language teaching can be integrated with knowledge of specialties. while facilitating students’ acquisition of the specialized knowledge of the relevant subjects, it can also expand their horizon, and cultivate their cross-cultural competence and global vision. in this model, listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation are treated as a natural and holistic learning process to improve the students’ language proficiency (yuan, 2011). when the si0p model is applied in business english teaching, it can effectively improve the business english majors’ confidence in foreign language learning, foreign language proficiency and comprehensive competence. there are several limitations to the current study. first, as the sample size is small, the statistical power of the analysis is limited. second, after completion of this teaching experiment, the researcher did not follow up the 60 business english majors, and the level of foreign language anxiety in the control class may change to some extent. therefore, based on the results of this study, the curriculum design and implementation of the siop model in business english teaching will be further improved in the followup experimental research. wei. college students’ foreign language anxiety in english learning. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1313 references august, d., & shanahan, t. (2006). developing literacy in second-language learners: report of the national literacy panel on languageminority children and youth. center for applied linguistics, lawrence erlbaum associates: mahwah, nj. dewaele, j., & thirtle, h. (2009). why do some young learners drop foreign languages? a focus on learner-internal variables. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 2009(12): 635-649. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050802549656 dogan,y., & tuncer, m. (2016). examination of foreign language classroom anxiety and achievement in foreign language in turkish university students in terms of various variables. journal of education and training studies, 2016(4): 18-29. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/jets.v4i5.1337 echevarria, j., & graves, a. (2007) sheltered content instruction: teaching english leaners with diverse abilities. new york: pearson. echevarria, j., vogt, m., & short, d. (2004). making content comprehensible for english learners: the siop model (2nd edition). boston: allyn & bacon. guo, y., & xu, j.f. (2014). a multidimensional study on english learning anxiety of nonenglish majors. foreign language world, 2014(4):2-10. horwitz, e.k. (2001). language anxiety and achievement. annual review of applied linguistics, 21:112-126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0267190501000071 horwitz, e.k., horwitz, m.b., & cope, j. (1986). foreign language classroom anxiety. the modern language journal, 70(2):125-132. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.15404781.1986.tb05256.x huang, d.m. (2021). an empirical study on the effect of flipped classroom on college students’ english learning anxiety. journal of pla university of foreign language, 2021(9):26-32. short, d. (2013). training and sustaining effective teachers of sheltered instruction. theory into practice, 2013(52):118-127. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2013.7703 29 tao, j.f., & he, z.m. (2021). foreign language anxiety and causal orientation of language learning difficulties. foreign language research, 2021(2):78-83. wang, y.q., & wan, y.s. (2001). foreign language anxiety and its impact on foreign language learning. foreign language teaching and research, 2001(2):122-126. wu, s.s. (2014). on the enlightenment of american siop model to bilingual teacher education in china. shanxi education, 2014(10):43-45. wu, s.s. (2015). american siop model and the development of critical thinking ability of chinese foreign language majors. foreign language education, 36(4):60-63 yin, h., wang, m.j., & zhao, j.h. (2020). an empirical study on the application of siop model for english teaching in universities for nationalities. new west, 2020(18):3. yuan, p.h. (2011). immersion bilingual education in the university of ottawa and its implications for college english teaching in china. foreign language world, 2011(4):75-82. received: 14 december 2021 revised: 21 december 2021 accepted: 04 january 2022 https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050802549656 http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/jets.v4i5.1337 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0267190501000071 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1986.tb05256.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.1986.tb05256.x https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2013.770329 https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2013.770329 orignialarticle-chenhuawei-bece_title_jan2022 originalarticle-chenhuawei--bece_maintextjan2022 bece. newsletter vol.12, no.1, 2022 1597 will internet use increase farmers’ household investment in education? micro evidence from chfs2019 by cui, b. y. & cheng, y. q. correspondence to: baoyu cui, school of economics, anhui university, china. e-mail: cby00662003@aliyun.com ublished in agricultural technology economics, this study examines the impact of internet use on rural households’ investment in child education and its mechanism, using data from china household finance survey data 2019 (chfs2019). the results of the study are as follows:  the benchmark regression reveals that the positive effect of internet use on rural education outweighs the negative impact, and that the internet use can significantly increase the farmers’ investment in child education.  the heterogeneity effect analysis indicates that for the internet use plays a greater positive role in boosting farmers’ educational investment among households with lower educational levels, lower income levels and lower educational investment levels. the internet use increases the opportunities for academic success of rural children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  the mediation effect test demonstrates that farmers’ social capital and risk taking mediates the relationship between the internet use and their investment in child education. the moderator effect test shows that a decline in public education satisfaction plays a positive moderating role in increasing farmers’ investment in child education through the internet use. based on the above findings, this study puts forward the following recommendations: (1) increase the awareness of internet use among farmers and their children; (2) accelerate the integration of internet and education through distance education and online tutoring; (3) push the construction of information infrastructure in central and western china and in other backward rural areas, help disadvantaged farmers to improve their internet literacy, and bridge the “digital divide”; (4) educate farmers on the importance of the internet use in child education and enhance their willingness of investment in education (5) vigorously promote balanced distribution of educap mailto:cby00662003@aliyun.com vol.12, no.1, 2022 1598 tional resources in urban and rural areas and improve the farmers’ satisfaction with public education. source: journal of agrotechnical economics,2022; doi: 10.13246/j.cnki.jae.20220809.001 bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1065 effects of parental academic involvement and academic pressure on early adolescents’ academic engagement by zhang, y., chen, j., yang, m., ren, p., & liu, s. correspondence to: yang, m., beijing normal university, china. email: ym907728@ 163.com ow can parents actively involved in children’s academic engagement while avoiding negative influences, for the purpose of students’ better adjustment to the requirements of junior high school and forming a benign development? a study published in psychological development and education, with 2,487 first-year junior students as research objects, respectively analyzed the effects of parental academic involvement and academic pressure on early academic engagement of adolescents, which provides certain assistance for improving the academic engagement level of adolescents from the perspective of family. the results are as follow:  parents’ influences on children’s academic development generate from cultivating children’s learning motivation. parental academic involvement can help the adolescents stimulate internal motivation, so as to put more effort into learning. under this circumstance, students are involved, interested, and aiming for self-improvement.  parental academic pressure leads to adolescents’ academic burnout and even disengaging from the learning situation. in order to make the adolescents more focused on learning, parents could actively participate in their children’s study, providing their children with learning tools and emotional support, and also paying attention to avoid putting pressure on their children.  when parents participate in the education of their children, especially for those with good grades, it is suggested that they reduce compulsory or negative behavioral intervention to release students’ burden. as for students with poor grades, parents’ help and support should concentrate on personally practice on children’s education process, in this way can they help their children cultivate suitable achievement goal orientation, enhancing intrinsic motivation, and promoting academic engagement. source: psychological development and education, 2021; 37(2):211-221. h bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1076 impact of stem education on students’ academic achievement by zeng, z., & yao, j. correspondence to: yao, j., nanjing normal university, china. email: yaojijun_njnu@163.com recent study published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), analyzing the impact of stem education on students’ academic achievement as an example of how to use meta-analysis to synthesize existing empirical research. results show that: the study provides firm evidence of the effects for stem education, which proves that stem education is conducive to students’ academic achievements (d = 0.410), and factors like educational methods, students’ educational stage, location, and sample all have notable affection on the effects. in terms of the methods, this study explores how to obtain reliable evidence through a literature review to support educational reform, and demonstrates that “meta-analysis” can be more effective, objective, and normative than traditional subjective literature review methods, as a result of “metaanalysis”, which enjoys many advantages like sorting out general and regular conclusions from the literature review. regardless of the type of research, the evidence obtained through the scientific analysis and comprehensive induction of the existing research literature conducted by the meta-analysis method is undoubtedly more general and instructive, and more in line with the requirements of “best evidence”. stronger evidence effectiveness, which helps relevant research based on a more solid foundation. to this end, the author makes the following comments and suggestions: vigorously strengthen and promote domestic educational experimental research. only by carrying out strictly designed experimental research can people get general conclusions through meta-analysis and other techniques on the basis of more empirical research. advocate for the “evidence” awareness of literature review research. many current types of education research have problems such as incomplete reviews, inaccurate processes, and unreliable conclusions. a subjective literature review focusing mainly on academic inquiry and opinion expression, it a vol.8, no.1, 2021 1077 is difficult to provide direct, effective, and robust “best evidence” for practical work. from this perspective, the meta-analysis method may provide an effective path for enriching the educational literature review and research, and better serving educational practice exploration. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2020; 38(6):70-85. bece. newsletter vol.12, no.1, 2022 1603 how does transformational leadership of principals affect teacher organizational commitment? an empirical analysis based on mediating and moderating effects by zhang, w. y. & mao, y. q. correspondence to: yaqing mao, faculty of education, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: maoyaqing@bnu.edu.cn n recent years, the decline in the appeal of school organization and teaching profession has attracted wide attention in educational community. published in the education research, this study employed the interaction ritual chains theory to examine the influence of transformational leadership of principals on teacher organizational commitment in the school context, and its influencing mechanism via the mediating and moderating effects. teacher organizational commitment refers to teachers’ mindset of identifying with the values of the school, being committed to its development, and aspiring to continue working in the school. the research findings:  transformational leadership of principals has a significant positive predictive effect on teacher organizational commitment, which supports the argument that the positive predictive effect of transformational leadership on the organizational commitment of subordinates has cross-industrial and cross-cultural adaptability. transformational principals attach importance to the social and emotional needs of teachers and can motivate their selfactualization by conveying the school visions.  teaching efficacy plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between transformational leadership of principals and teacher organizational commitment; in other words, transformational leadership affects teacher organizational commitment via its influence on teaching efficacy. visions projected by transformational principals can improve teachers’ self-efficacy; the higher their teaching efficacy, the more committed they are to the school.  teachers’ social and emotional skills play a positive moderating role in the relationship between transformational leadership of principals and teacher organizational commitment. in other words, the higher the teachers’ social and emotional skills, the stronger i vol.12, no.1, 2022 1604 the effect of the transformational leadership on teacher organizational commitment, and vice versa. as a result, the study suggests boosting teachers’ confidence in their roles and enhances their teaching efficacy; encouraging the change in the principals’ roles and continuously improving their transformational leadership level; placing premiums on and promoting the development of teachers’ social and emotional skills. source: education research, 2022; 43(6):134-147. bece. newsletter vol.11, no.1, 2022 1471 can teacher participation in school governance improve student academic performance? by fan, y., & fan, g. correspondence to: guorui fan, east china normal university, china. e-mail: grfan@ecnu.edu.cn his study published in modern education management uses the data of 9,841 students from the program for international student assessment (pisa) 2015 in four provincial administrative regions of china as sample to analyze the impact of teacher participation in school governance on student academic performance. since there are significant differences in student academic performance among various schools, the multi-layer regression model is adopted to address the question “whether teacher participation in school governance can improve student academic performance”. the findings are as follows.  teacher participation in school governance significantly affects student academic performance. the results of the two-layer regression model show that raising teacher participation level is conducive to improving students’ overall academic results. it means that teacher participation in school governance has a positive effect on school education quality. besides, high level of teacher competence as well as adequate school education resources and teacher supply positively affects student academic performance.  teacher participation in personnel and curriculum management can effectively improve student academic achievement. descriptive statistics show that chinese teachers engage intensively in curriculumrelated decision-making but have a low participation in personnel and financial management. the results of the two-layer regression model indicate that teacher participation in both personnel and curriculum management can significantly promote student academic performance, indicating that the clarification of teachers' rights in school affair administration is beneficial to improving the quality of teacher participation, thus promoting student academic progress.  high competence of teachers can significantly enhance student academic performance. the results of empirical research show that the regression coefficient of the interaction term between teachers' competence and teacher participation is positive (a positive coefficient of t mailto:grfan@ecnu.edu.cn vol.11, no.1, 2022 1472 interaction term means the effect of independent variables on dependent variables increases with strengthened moderating variables). in addition, the coefficient of interaction term between teacher competence and teacher participation in teaching administration is also significantly positive, which demonstrates that participation of high competence teachers in student assessment, student discipline, and other affairs can effectively improve student academic performance. based on the research results, the study suggests that schools should integrate the theory of good governance and the idea of co-governance into school internal administration. besides, schools should optimize the mechanism to encourage teacher participation in school governance and implement law-abiding school governance. meanwhile, teachers should increase their awareness of pro-active participation in school governance and place a premium on professional development in order to enhance the quality of their participation and to promote student academic progress. source: modern education management, 2022; 2022(2):84-93. bece. newsletter vol.10, no.2, 2022 1417 the impact of parents’ marital quality on children’s prosocial behavior by wang, s. l., zhao, b. x., wu, h., & zhao, w. correspondence to: hong wu, college of teacher education, guizhou normal university. e-mail: wuhong@gznu.edu.cn ublished in psychological development and education, the study attempts to explore the relation between children’s prosocial behavior and parents’ marital quality, emotional expression, and parenting behavior. the research uses the couples’ adaptation scale, parental emotional expression scale, parenting behavior scale and strength scale to investigate 442 parents of school-age children in grades 1-6 from two schools in a city in guizhou province. the findings are shown as follows.  parents’ marriage quality is significantly and positively correlated with children’s prosocial behavior. however, the direct relation between parents’ marriage quality and children’s prosocial behavior is not significant when mediating variables included, which indicates that the relation may not be independent and needs to be moderated by other conditions.  parents’ positive emotional expression and parental acceptance and company play intermediary roles between parents’ marriage quality and the children’s prosocial behavior, through three intermediary paths: the independent mediation of parental positive emotional expression, the independent mediation of parental company and acceptance, and the chain mediation of parents’ positive emotional expressionparental company and acceptance.  there are gender differences in the chain mediation of parents’ positive emotional expressionparental acceptance and company. the mediation of parents’ positive emotional expression works among both boys and girls, with a greater effect for the group of girls, whereas the mediation of parental acceptance and companion only works for the boy group, which may stem from the differences in children’s personal factors and parenting behavior. the study also proposes several suggestions: first, parents should adopt constructive strategies to improve the quality of their marriage and increase intimacy. second, they are supposed to develop a disposition of positive emotional expression at home and provide emotional behavior parap mailto:wuhong@gznu.edu.cn vol.10, no.2, 2022 1418 digms such as love, reciprocity, and cooperation for family members in order to cultivate children’s prosocial motivations and behaviors. third, they should exert both rigorousness and tolerance in parenting behavior to help children learn rules and regulations, develop empathy, build interpersonal trust, and show more prosocial behavior. finally, parents should keep pace with the times, learn more scientific gender education knowledge, and improve their personality and gender education skills. source: psychological development and education,2022; 2022(3):1-8. the impact of high school entrance examination competition on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring in the compulsory education period: an empirical analysis based on the data of china family panel studies haiping xue, 1 chenchen fang 2 1. capital normal university, beijing 100048, china 2. peking university, beijing 100871, china abstract. we used the hierarchical linear bernoulli model based on china family panel studies (cfps) 2016 data and provincial high school acceptance rate data. we explored the relationship between provincial high school entrance examination competition and students’ extracurricular tutoring participation during compulsory education. the study found that the high school acceptance rate and occupational high school acceptance rate have no significant effect on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring in the compulsory education stage. however, the high school acceptance rate has a significant positive impact on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring, and there is a heterogeneous effect on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring from families of different social classes. the higher the high school acceptance rate, the greater the probability of students from families with higher social strata participating in extracurricular tutoring. the demonstration high school acceptance rate has a significant negative impact on students’ extracurricular tutoring participation rate. it has a heterogeneous influence on students’ extracurricular tutoring participation in different school stages and social class families. the education administration department should actively expand high-quality, high school educational resources and increase the demonstration high school acceptance rate. and to increase the number of admissions for the demonstration high school to disadvantaged families with lower social strata to alleviate the pressure of families and stuxue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no.2, 2021 1082 dents from the high school entrance examination competition. this can not only reduce the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring during the compulsory education stage, but also promote the equalization of high-quality high school entrance opportunities for children of different classes of families. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 8(2):1081-1102. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.or040. how to cite: xue, h., & fang, c. (2021). the impact of high school entrance examination competition on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring in the compulsory education period: an empirical analysis based on the data of china family panel studies. best evidence in chinese education, 8(2):1081-1102. keywords: extracurricular tutoring, high school acceptance rate, high school, demonstration high school, education competition about the author: chenchen fang, graduate school of education, peking university, beijing 100871, china. email: fcc1121@pku.edu.cn correspondence to: haiping xue, college of education, capital normal university, beijing 100048, china. email: xuehaiping_416@163.com conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:fcc1121@pku.edu.cn mailto:xuehaiping_416@163.com xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1083 introduction ducation equity is an essential foundation of social equity. china’s high school education has made remarkable achievements. the gross enrollment rate of high school has increased from 1.1% in 1949 to 91.2% in 2020; simultaneously, the gross enrollment rate of higher education in china in 2020 is 54.4% (chu, 2020; ministry of education, 2020). it can be seen that there is not a significant gap in entrance opportunities for high school education in china. however, there is still a big gap in entrance opportunities for higher education. from a dynamic perspective, the gap in higher education enrollment opportunities is the accumulation and continuation of unequal opportunities for basic education. receiving an excellent elementary education will help students enter a better middle school and a high-quality high school, giving them a tremendous advantage in entering universities and even elite universities. the result of gradual stratification means that students entering different levels of schools will have different educational outcomes, which will directly affect their subsequent academic mobility and even social mobility (yang, 2000). in the hierarchical diversion, middle school is the critical stage. after graduating from middle school, most students receive high school education, some receive secondary vocational education, and a small number directly enter society. it can be seen that the diversion effect of the high school entrance examination is pronounced. since the admission rate of middle school entering high school is much higher than that of high school entering university, entering a “good high school,” that is, demonstration high school, 1 receiving high-quality high school education becomes especially important for middle school students. because the demonstration high school is loved by parents and students and recognized by society, for children to gain an advantage in the high school entrance examination competition and receive high-quality high school education, extracurricular tutoring has become an important choice for parents and students. as an essential way of education competition and family education investment, extracurricular tutoring or shadow education has evolved into a worldwide phenomenon, particularly in developing countries and east asian countries (bray & kwok, 2003; dang & rogers, 2008; song et al., 2013). in china, the extracurricular tutoring rate of middle school students has reached 47.3%, and nearly half of middle school students have participated in extracurricular tutoring (xue, 2016). extracurricular tutoring is becoming an effective means of competition between students and their families (song et al., 2013). however, few scholars currently research the relationship between high school entrance examination competition and students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. this study used cfps 2016 data and collected high school acceptance rate data from various provinces, based on emi and mmi theories, and through the establishment of the hierarchical linear bernoulli model, explored the high school acceptance rate that reflects the intensity of high school entrance examination competition and the participation of students in extracurricular tutoring during compulsory education to provide empirical evidence for better formulation of extracurricular tutoring-related policies. e xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1084 literature review educational competition is an essential social choice, which mainly revolves around educational opportunities, high-quality school education opportunities, and well-paid employment opportunities with different academic diplomas (liu, 2004). for students in the compulsory education stage, since china’s average high school acceptance rate is above 90%, high school education opportunities are not the focus of education competition. the educational competition mainly revolves around obtaining high-quality high school education opportunities. therefore, to gain an advantage in the competition, families with higher socioeconomic status will receive additional educational resources through extracurricular tutoring (lee & shouse, 2011). wu (2014) found that because china’s high school and university admissions follow the competitive principle of merit-based admissions, qualified families purchase points, “abilities,” and “opportunities” by purchasing additional educational resources, that is, extracurricular tutoring. this allows students to gain an advantage in the high school entrance examination competition, damages the right of children from families who cannot provide extracurricular tutoring to enjoy high-quality education and interferes with educational equity (wu, 2014). xue (2015) studied the extracurricular tutoring activities of chinese students in the compulsory education stage and found that extracurricular tutoring enabled the children of the superior class to obtain more quantity and higher quality education so that their children could succeed in the future education and employment competition (xue, 2015). zhang and bray (2017) used data from middle school students in chongqing to analyze the relationship between high school entrance examination competition and extracurricular tutoring. they pointed out that china’s college entrance examination is highly competitive and has high stakes. it puts tremendous pressure on high school students aspiring to go to university. consequently, this pressure promotes the school’s competition, making the high school entrance examination a high-stakes examination (zhang et al., 2017). in addition, the uneven distribution of educational resources between regions and schools also forces families to use extracurricular tutoring to gain or maintain a competitive advantage. zhou and wu (2018) pointed out that due to the “hothouse effect,” students have tremendous pressure to improve academic achievement and the pursuit of elite diplomas. this “atmosphere” full of educational competition will lead to extracurricular tutoring demand (zhou & wu, 2018). extracurricular tutoring has become a global phenomenon, especially in southeast asia, which is particularly prevalent and has aroused widespread concern among scholars. the increasingly fierce competition between students and families around extracurricular tutoring has not only aggravated the academic burden of students and consumed a large number of family and social resources, but also may weaken the government’s policy effectiveness in advancing education equity, maintaining and expanding social inequality (xue & ding, 2009; bray, 1999). however, there are few empirical studies on educational competition and students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. because of this, this article uses the hierarchical linear bernoulli model based on the xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1085 cfps2016 data to explore the relationship between the high school acceptance rate reflecting the intensity of high school entrance examination competition and the participation of students in extracurricular tutoring during the compulsory education stage. the research conclusions will help us understand the underlying reasons behind extracurricular tutoring and provide a theoretical basis for the government to govern the extracurricular tutoring problem. theoretical basis and research hypothesis the theory of maximizing maintenance of inequality (mmi) (raftery & hout, 1993) and the theory of effective maintenance of inequality (emi) (lucas, 2001) provide an excellent theoretical idea in the elaboration of the relationship between middle school entry competition and extracurricular tutoring. according to the theory of mmi, when compulsory education is not universally available, the educational opportunities of children of different social classes are various. to maintain their children’s competitive advantage in entering higher education, families with higher social strata will strive to maximize their children’s educational opportunities. only when compulsory education is universally available or reaches saturation can educational opportunities for children of different social strata families decrease. lucas (2001) further proposed the emi theory based on the mmi theory. according to the emi theory, when compulsory education is universally available, due to the imbalance and inadequacy of mandatory education in china, the quality of compulsory schooling differs between urban and rural areas, between regions, and between schools. thus, the core of education competition shifts to the quality of education rather than the only opportunity of an education. because chinese school education needs to take care of every student, it is challenging to achieve differentiated teaching. the teaching time is relatively fixed, which is not very different for students, so extracurricular tutoring has become the “first choice” for parents and students in the education competition. to allow their children to maintain an advantage in the future competition for higher education, families with higher social strata will obtain additional educational resources of higher quality and quantity through extracurricular tutoring. currently, china’s high school enrollment rate has reached more than 90%. when families of different social classes can receive high school education, they no longer seek high school education opportunities but higher quality high school education. therefore, for families of different social classes, the core of their education competition lies in going to a “demonstration high school,” not a “general high school,” let alone a “vocational high school.” as china’s high school education has been universally available, and even the high school enrollment rate in some provinces has reached 100%, there is less competition for high school enrollment opportunities. in addition, due to the low threshold of vocational education, and in recent years, china has vigorously expanded the enrollment of secondary vocational education, so there is less competition around vocational education entrance opportunities. therefore, families of different social classes compete mainly around “high school” and “demonstration high school.” when the high school acceptance rate of some provinces and cities rises, stuxue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1086 dents have a greater chance of enrolling in high school education, which will increase students’ anxiety going to a “better high school.” especially for families with higher social strata, facing the increasing competition in education and the lack of high-quality educational resources, they have aggravated their sense of anxiety and sense of urgency (xue & fang, 2020). therefore, to effectively maintain their social status, families with higher social strata will be more sensitive to the high school acceptance rate and encourage students to participate in extracurricular tutoring, which further increases the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. only when the demonstration high school acceptance rate increases will this ease the education anxiety of families and students, thereby reducing the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. based on this, this article proposes research hypotheses on the relationship among “high school enrollment rate,” “vocational high school enrollment rate,” “high school acceptance rate,” and “demonstration high school acceptance rate” and the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring: research hypothesis 1: the high school acceptance rate has no significant effect on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring during the compulsory education stage. research hypothesis 2: the occupational high school acceptance rate has no significant effect on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring in the compulsory education stage. research hypothesis 3: the high school acceptance rate has a significant positive effect on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring during the compulsory education stage. research hypothesis 4: demonstration high school acceptance rate has a significant negative impact on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring during the compulsory education stage. research hypothesis 5: the high school acceptance rate has a heterogeneous effect on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring of students from different family social classes in the compulsory education stage. as the high school acceptance rate increases, students with higher family social classes are more likely to participate in extracurricular tutoring. methodology data source and variable description the data used in this article all come from cfps data funded by the “985” project of peking university and implemented by the chinese social science survey center of peking university in 2016. the cfps sample covered 25 provinces / municipalities / autonomous regions. the target sample size was 16,000 households, and the survey objects included all family members in the sample households. the sample of this study was compulsory education students, a total of 4,158 students, including 2,935 elementary school students, 1,233 middle school students. xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1087 this study used occupational high school acceptance rate, high school acceptance rate, demonstration high school acceptance rate, and high school acceptance rate to measure the intensity of high school entrance examination competition. the smaller the acceptance rate was, the more intense the high school entrance examination competition was. on the contrary, the larger the value was, the smaller the high school entrance examination competition was. since the participation of students in extracurricular tutoring in 2016 is more affected by the educational opportunities in the past year, this study used the high school acceptance rate in 2015 to measure the high school entrance examination felt by middle school students in the province in 2016 as the intensity of the competition. the total high school acceptance rate of a province in 2015 = the total number of students enrolled in the province’s high school in 2015/the number of middle school graduates in 2015. 2 the vocational high school acceptance rate of a province in 2015 = the number of students enrolled in the province’s vocational high school in 2015/the number of middle school graduates in 2015. the high school acceptance rate of a province in 2015 = the number of students enrolled in the province’s high school in 2015/the number of middle school graduates in 2015. the acceptance rate of a province’s demonstration high school in 2015 = the number of students enrolled in the province’s demonstration high school in 2015 3 / the number of middle school graduates in 2015 (table 1). research methods since whether students participate in extracurricular tutoring is affected by multiple levels and factors such as family, province, and city, the data used in this study has a cofounding relationship. in addition, since whether students participate in extracurricular tutoring is a dichotomous variable. this study established an estimation model for individual students and provinces, and cities:  zero model this model has decomposed the total difference in students’ extracurricular tutoring participation into two levels: individual students and inter-provincial differences. it was mainly used to explore significant differences in students’ extracurricular tutoring participation between provinces. the model is as follows: student layer: yij = β0j+rij, rij~n (0,δ 2 ) (1) provincial level: β0j = γ00+μ0j, μ0j~n (0,τ00) (2) among them, yij indicates whether the i-th student in the j-th province participates in extracurricular tutoring. β0j represents the average participation rate of extracurricular tutoring among students in province j. γ00 represents the overall student partici xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1088 figure 1. variable description. type variable description individual level participate in extracurricular tutoring 0=no,1=yes gender 0=female，1=male schooling stage 0=elementary school，1=middle school family level parent's highest professional status 1=lower，2=middle，3=upper parent's highest education 1=illiteracy，2=elementary school，3=middle school，4=high school， 5=associate，6=undergraduate，7=master’s，8=doctorate net income per capita 1=lowest 20%，2=mid/lower 20%，3=middle 20%，4=mid/higher 20%， 5=highest 20% provincial level gdp per capita in 2015 continuous variable total high school acceptance rate in 2015 continuous variable vocational high school acceptance rate in 2015 continuous variable high school acceptance rate in 2015 continuous variable demonstration high school acceptance rate in 2015 continuous variable pation rate of extracurricular tutoring. μ0j represents the random effect between provinces and cities. δ 2 represents the difference in the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring at the student level. τ00 represents the difference in the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring between provinces and cities.  full model on the basis of the zero model, the student-level and provincial-level variables were added to construct a full model. it was mainly used to examine the influence of variables at the student and provincial levels on students’ extracurricular tutoring participation rate. the model is as follows: student level: yij = β0j+β1jgender+β2jzdx+β3jxxjd+β4jfmzy+β5jfmxl+β6jrjsr+rij, rij~n (0,δ 2 ) (3) provincial level: β0j = γ00+γ01gdp+γ02lqv+μ0j, μ0j~n (0,τ00) (4) the relationship between high school entrance examination competition and students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring table 2 presents the basic situation of the participation rate and high school acceptance rate of extracurricular tutoring in various provinces and cities. the average participation xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1089 table 2. participation rate of extracurricular tutoring and various total high school acceptance rates by provinces and cities. participation rate of extracurricular tutoring (%) total high school acceptance rate (%) high school acceptance rate (%) vocational high school acceptance rate (%) demonstration high school acceptance rate (%) heilongjiang 64.50 96.32 67.76 28.56 9.41 tianjin 62.50 109.41 64.14 45.27 14.37 jiangsu 59.40 89.56 52.20 37.37 4.78 shanghai 58.20 97.83 56.68 41.14 18.41 liaoning 52.90 95.16 62.19 32.96 6.67 zhejiang 49.00 93.45 54.33 39.12 13.78 shandong 37.80 85.52 55.86 29.66 18.69 hunan 36.10 88.33 54.35 33.98 14.20 jilin 35.80 89.69 67.10 22.59 14.72 beijing 35.70 90.38 61.16 29.22 17.73 shanxi 34.00 85.90 58.10 27.80 19.38 anhui 33.80 104.55 56.68 47.86 39.14 hubei 33.30 89.12 60.39 28.74 21.20 henan 32.30 85.59 54.99 30.60 24.21 shaanxi 28.80 97.69 69.64 28.05 6.70 hebei 27.80 94.07 58.92 35.14 33.92 fujian 20.90 98.15 59.38 38.76 9.93 gansu 20.40 84.62 60.00 24.62 20.76 guangdong 18.90 81.97 51.39 30.58 12.57 sichuan 18.90 101.06 55.59 45.47 12.41 chongqing 18.00 97.68 61.08 36.61 43.30 jiangxi 12.40 85.80 57.57 28.23 21.95 yunnan 10.70 77.98 47.56 30.42 15.05 guizhou 8.20 81.38 48.90 32.48 20.36 guangxi 8.10 90.41 49.47 40.94 20.40 average 32.74 91.66 57.82 33.85 18.16 rate of extracurricular tutoring in china has reached 32.73%. the participation rate of compulsory tutoring students in heilongjiang was the highest, reaching 64.5%, and the participation rate of students in guangxi province was the highest lowest, at 8.1%. in general, the participation rates of students in the three northeastern provinces, the yangtze river delta and the beijing-tianjin region, were relatively high. in contrast, the participation rates of students in the central and western areas were relatively low. this was consistent with the results of xue et al. (2019; xue & fang, 2019). the average high school acceptance rate across china reached 91.66%. among them, the high school acceptance rates in tianjin, anhui, and sichuan exceeded 100%. the reason may be that some middle school students returned to high school after working, which caused the number of high school admissions to exceed the number of middle school graduates. the average high school acceptance rate in china was 57.82%, the highest xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1090 was shanxi province, which reached 69.64%, and the lowest was yunnan province, which was 47.56%. the difference between the two was about 20%. the national average vocational high school acceptance rate was 33.85%, the highest in anhui province was 47.86%, and the lowest in jilin province was only 22.59%. china requires the admission ratio of high schools and vocational high schools to be 1:1. at present, the high school acceptance rate was much higher than the professional high school acceptance rate. however, the demonstration high school acceptance rates of different provinces and cities were quite different. the national average demonstration high school acceptance rate was 18.16%, the highest was 43.30% in chongqing city, and the lowest was only 4.78% in jiangsu province. figure 1 presents the trends in the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring, total high school acceptance rate, high school acceptance rate, vocational high school acceptance rate, and demonstration high school acceptance rate of each province/city/autonomous region. the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring in the compulsory education stage of each province increased with the increase of the total high school acceptance rate, high school acceptance rate, and occupational high school acceptance rate of each province. on the other hand, with the increase in the province’s demonstration high school acceptance rate, it had declined. to further explore the relationship between the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring in the compulsory education stage of each province and the total high school acceptance rate, occupational high school acceptance rate, high school acceptance rate, and demonstration high school acceptance rate, pearson correlation was used for analysis. correlation analysis results (table 3) showed that students’ extracurricular tutoring participation during compulsory education in each province was significantly positively correlated with total high school acceptance rate, professional high school acceptance rate, and high school acceptance rate. at the same time, there was a significant negative correlation with the demonstration high school acceptance rate relationship. the impact of high school acceptance rate on students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring using the hierarchical linear bernoulli model to analyze the impact of high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of compulsory education students’ extracurricular tutoring, a zero model without any explanatory variables was first constructed. the results show that the variances of the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring within and between provinces and cities are 0.1167 and 0.0065, respectively, and the intra-group correlation coefficient is 0.0528, indicating that 5.28% of the total variation in the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring came from the inter-provincial difference. at the same time, from the point of view of the significance level, the p-value of the significance test was zero, indicating that the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring had highly significant differences between provinc xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1091 figure 1. participation rate of extracurricular tutoring and total high school acceptance rate. table 3. correlation analysis between participation rate of extracurricular tutoring and total high school acceptance rate. participation rate of extracurricular tutoring total high school acceptance rate vocational high school acceptance rate high school acceptance rate demonstration high school acceptance rate participation rate of extracurricular tutoring 1 0.563** 0.183** 0.462** -0.240** total high school acceptance rate 0.563** 1 0.567** 0.582** 0.015 vocational high school acceptance rate 0.183** 0.567** 1 -0.340** 0.050** high school acceptance rate 0.462** 0.582** -0.340** 1 -0.033* demonstration high school acceptance rate -0.240** 0.015 0.050** -0.033* 1 xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1092 table 4. bernoulli hierarchical linear model analysis of the influence of total high school acceptance rate and vocational high school acceptance rate on participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 model 5 model 6 model 7 model 8 model 9 model 10 student level boy (girl as a reference) -0.257*** (0.083) -0.257*** (0.083) -0.256*** (0.083) -0.257*** (0.083) -0.257*** (0.083) 0.260*** (0.083) 0.260*** (0.083) 0.260*** (0.083) 0.260*** (0.083) -0.260*** (0.083) net income per capita 0.369*** (0.038) 0.450 (0.601) 0.370*** (0.038) 0.369*** (0.038) 0.370*** (0.038) 0.372*** (0.038) 0.501** (0.218) 0.372*** (0.038) 0.372*** (0.038) 0.371*** (0.038) parents' highest education 0.339*** (0.040) 0.339*** (0.040) 0.085 (0.577) 0.339*** (0.040) 0.339*** (0.040) 0.339*** (0.040) 0.339*** (0.040) 0.181 (0.207) 0.339*** (0.040) 0.339*** (0.040) parents' highest professional status 0.294*** (0.064) 0.294*** (0.064) 0.294*** (0.064) -0.632 (0.982) 0.294*** (0.064) 0.299*** (0.064) 0.299*** (0.064) 0.299*** (0.064) 0.430 (0.363) 0.299*** (0.064) middle school (based on elementary school) 0.050 (0.091) 0.050 (0.091) 0.050 (0.091) 0.048 (0.091) -0.401 (1.473) 0.046 (0.091) 0.046 (0.091) 0.047 (0.091) 0.047 (0.091) 0.418 (0.524) provincial level gdp per capita 0.001 (0.001) 0.001 (0.001) 0.001 (0.001) 0.001 (0.001) 0.001 (0.001) 0.001 (0.001) 0.001* (0.000) 0.001 (0.001) 0.001* (0.000) 0.001* (0.000) total high school acceptance rate 3.221 (2.347) 3.531 (3.278) 2.191 (3.317) 1.268 (3.143) 3.055 (2.408) vocational high school acceptance rate -3.123 (2.588) -1.561 (3.669) -5.080 (3.608) -2.271 (3.479) -2.687 (2.649) interaction effect total high school acceptance rate*household income per capita -0.096 (0.711) total high school acceptance rate*parents’ highest education 0.299 (0.678) total high school acceptance rate*parents’ highest professional status 1.092 (1.156) total high school acceptance rate* schooling stage 0.533 (1.732) vocational high school acceptance rate*household income per capita -0.469 (0.780) vocational high school acceptance rate*parents’ highest education 0.571 (0.735) vocational high school -0.470 (1.283) http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=http://www.shehui.pku.edu.cn/upload/editor/file/20180316/20180316085041_4299.pdf&hl=zh-cn&sa=x&ei=uyv3ymmgcpgay9ypoyy3saq&scisig=aagbfm0abw_5yedxt0yigx-87405lth_xa&nossl=1&oi=scholarr xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1093 acceptance rate*parents’ highest professional status vocational high school acceptance rate* schooling stage -1.350 (1.878) intercept -6.374*** (1.906) -6.639** (2.729) -5.493** (2.764) -4.719* (2.600) -6.232*** (1.960) 3.071*** (0.707) 3.512*** (1.019) -2.516** (1.004) 3.309*** (0.960) -3.192*** (0.725) model significance 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 observed value 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 note: 1.*, **, *** indicate significant at the level of 10%, 5%, and 1%, respectively. 2. standard errors are in parentheses. es and cities. therefore, this study constructed a multi-layer linear model to discuss and analyze the factors that affected students’ participation in extracurricular tutoring. table 4 shows that at the student level, the participation rate of boys in extracurricular tutoring was significantly lower than that of girls. the net income per capita of the family, the highest educational background of the parents, and the most elevated occupational status of the parents all had a significant positive impact on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring. there was no significant difference in the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring among students at different school stages. at the provincial level, gdp per capita had no significant effect on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. the high school acceptance rate had no significant impact on extracurricular tutoring. the cofounding items of high school acceptance rate and family income per capita, parents’ highest education level, parents’ highest occupational status, and learning stage were put into the model. it was found that the effects were not significant. this showed that students of different family backgrounds and different stages of the study had no heterogeneity in the pressure brought by competition for high school entrance opportunities. similarly, the effect of vocational high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring had also reached a similar conclusion. table 5 presents the high school acceptance rate and demonstration the high school acceptance rate on students’ extracurricular tutoring participation rate. the results showed that the high school acceptance rate had a significant positive effect on students’ extracurricular tutoring; that is, the higher the high school acceptance rate was, the higher the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring was. the cofounding items of high school acceptance rate and family income per capita, parents’ highest educational background, parents’ highest professional status, and learning stage were added to the model. we found no heterogeneity in the impact of the high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring among students of different family incomes, parents’ highest education level, and learning stage. however, students with other parents’ professional status had heterogeneity in the influence of high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1094 table 5. bernoulli hierarchical linear model analysis of the influence of high school acceptance rate and demonstration high school acceptance rate on participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. model 11 model 12 model 13 model 14 model 15 model 16 model 17 model 18 model 19 model 20 high school acceptance rate 6.212*** (2.178) 4.632 (3.225) 6.729** (3.394) 2.126 (3.228) 5.476** (2.269) demonstration high school acceptance rate 2.789*** (1.520) -3.826* (2.139) -4.206* (2.266) -3.305 (2.086) -2.158 (1.552) interaction effect high school acceptance rate*household income per capita 0.535 (0.802) high school acceptance rate*parents’ highest education -0.160 (0.810) high school acceptance rate*parents’ highest professional status 2.465* (1.426) high school acceptance rate*schooling stage 2.149 (1.989) demonstration high school acceptance rate*household income per capita 0.330 (0.478) demonstration high school acceptance rate*parents’ highest education 0.422 (0.499) demonstration high school acceptance rate*parents’ highest professional status 0.286 (0.795) demonstration high school acceptance rate* schooling stage -1.984* (1.152) intercept 7.300*** (1.269) 6.398*** (1.858) 7.596*** (1.958) 4.975*** (1.855) 6.878*** (1.320) 3.153*** (0.508) 2.967*** (0.574) 2.896*** (0.591) 3.055*** (0.574) 3.285*** (0.511) model significance 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 observed value 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,498 3,496 3,496 3,496 3,496 3,496 note: the above models control gender, household net income per capita, parent's highest education level, parent's highest occupation, schooling stage at the student level, and controls per capita gdp at the provincial level. due to space reasons, it is omitted from the article. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=http://www.shehui.pku.edu.cn/upload/editor/file/20180316/20180316085041_4299.pdf&hl=zh-cn&sa=x&ei=uyv3ymmgcpgay9ypoyy3saq&scisig=aagbfm0abw_5yedxt0yigx-87405lth_xa&nossl=1&oi=scholarr xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1095 in contrast, the demonstration high school acceptance rate had a significant negative impact on students’ extracurricular tutoring participation. thus, it showed that the improvement of the demonstration high school acceptance rate could reduce the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring. after adding the cofounding items of the demonstration high school and different family backgrounds and learning stages, the results showed no heterogeneity in the demonstration high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring among students of diverse family backgrounds. however, students of varying learning stages had heterogeneity in the demonstration high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. in the research mentioned above, there was heterogeneity in the influence of acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring among students of different learning stages and the highest professional status of their parents. to further explore the profound differences of heterogeneity, this study carried out sub-sample regression on different school stages and the highest occupational status of parents. table 6 shows the sub-sample regression results of varying school stages. whether it is the elementary school sample or the middle school sample, the high school acceptance rate and vocational high school acceptance rate significantly affected students’ extracurricular tutoring participation. however, the high school acceptance rate had a significant positive impact on students’ extracurricular tutoring participation. among them, the coefficient of the middle school sample was higher than that of the elementary school sample, indicating that the high school acceptance rate had a more significant impact on the participation rate of middle school students’ extracurricular tutoring than elementary school students. on the other hand, in the elementary school sample, the demonstration high school acceptance rate had no significant effect on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. in contrast, in the middle school sample, the demonstration high school acceptance rate significantly negatively affected the extracurricular tutoring participation rate. the increase in the acceptance rate of the demonstration high school could dramatically reduce the probability of middle school students participating in extracurricular tutoring. because middle school students face direct pressure from high school entrance examination competitions, they are more sensitive to the demonstration high school acceptance rate. however, elementary school students face more competitive pressure from the beginning of middle school, so the increase in the demonstration high school acceptance rate could significantly reduce the participation rate of middle school students’ extracurricular tutoring. in contrast, the impact on elementary school students was not significant. table 7 presents the effect of acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring among students with different parents’ highest professional status. in the samples of the highest occupational status of different parents, neither the high school acceptance rate nor the vocational high school acceptance rate significantly affected the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring. the high school acceptance rate has a significant positive impact on the participation rate of students’ ex xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1096 table 6. bernoulli hierarchical linear model analysis of the influence of total high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring of students in different school stages. elementary school sample middle school sample total high school acceptance rate 2.500 (2.386) 4.416 (2.846) vocational high school acceptance rate -4.039 (2.609) -2.744 (3.209) high school acceptance rate 6.130*** (2.222) 7.158*** (2.562) demonstration high school acceptance rate -2.378 (1.585) -3.575* (1.835) intercept -5.977*** (1.932) -3.060*** (0.705) -7.443*** (1.303) -3.423*** (0.537) -7.062*** (2.308) -2.923*** (0.882) -7.545*** (1.502) -3.423*** (0.537) model significance 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 observed value 2,448 2,448 2,448 2,448 1,050 1,050 1,050 1,050 note: the above models control gender, household net income per capita, parent's highest education and parent's highest occupation at the student level, and controls per capita gdp at the provincial level. due to space reasons, it is omitted from the article. table 7. bernoulli hierarchical linear model analysis of the influence of total high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring of students with different parents’ highest professional status. lower level sample middle level sample upper level sample total high school acceptance rate 2.003 (2.803) 3.854 (2.943) 3.589 (3.001) vocational high school acceptance rate -4.115 (3.118) -3.133 (3.174) -3.458 (3.592) high school acceptance rate 5.292** (2.563) 7.056*** (2.741) 8.179*** (3.156) demonstration high school acceptance rate -4.350** (2.018) -2.388 (1.834) -0.420 (2.164) intercept -4.964** (2.273) -2.391*** (0.850) -6.324*** (1.490) -2.377*** (0.624) -6.536*** (2.403) -2.729*** (0.868) -7.459*** (1.625) -2.839*** (0.649) -5.721** (2.435) -2.125** (0.993) -7.393*** (1.846) -2.820*** (0.776) model significance 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 observed value 1,794 1,794 1,794 1,794 1,326 1,326 1,326 1,326 378 378 378 378 note: the above models control gender, per capita net income per household, the highest education level of parents, and schooling stage at the student level, and controls per capita gdp at the provincial level. due to space reasons, it is omitted from the article. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=http://www.shehui.pku.edu.cn/upload/editor/file/20180316/20180316085041_4299.pdf&hl=zh-cn&sa=x&ei=uyv3ymmgcpgay9ypoyy3saq&scisig=aagbfm0abw_5yedxt0yigx-87405lth_xa&nossl=1&oi=scholarr http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=http://www.shehui.pku.edu.cn/upload/editor/file/20180316/20180316085041_4299.pdf&hl=zh-cn&sa=x&ei=uyv3ymmgcpgay9ypoyy3saq&scisig=aagbfm0abw_5yedxt0yigx-87405lth_xa&nossl=1&oi=scholarr xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1097 tracurricular tutoring. among them, the coefficient of the sample of students whose parents’ occupational status with the upper level was the largest, but that of the samples of students whose parents’ occupational status with the lower level was the smallest. it can be seen that the high school acceptance rate had a more significant impact on the upper samples and had a minor effect on the lower samples. in the samples whose parents’ occupations were classified as more inferior, the demonstration high school acceptance rate had a significant negative impact on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. that is to say, the improvement of the demonstration high school acceptance rate could significantly reduce the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring for students whose parents’ occupational classification was lower. however, in samples whose parents’ occupations were classified as middle and upper levels, the demonstration high school acceptance rate had no significant effect on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. conclusion and suggestion discussion according to the mmi theory, when high school education is not yet widespread, people’s primary goal is to get education opportunities, that is, “going to high school.” now high school education has been universally available. more than 90% of middle school students can receive high school education, and more than 50% can receive vocational high school education. as a result, the attractiveness of high school education opportunities and professional high school education opportunities is significantly reduced. this study found that the increase in the high school acceptance rate has instead promoted students’ extracurricular tutoring participation. only the increase in the demonstration high school acceptance rate can effectively reduce the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. combined with the emi theory, the core of the current high school education competition is not the opportunity to receive education but the quality of education, that is, “a good high school.” thus, going to high school can no longer effectively maintain their children’s dominant position in high school education and future higher education competition for families with higher social strata. moreover, due to the undifferentiated educational opportunities of high schools and the scarcity of high-quality high school educational resources, the expansion of high school enrollment has increased the pressure of education competition from higher-class families in the social class and further aggravated their academic anxiety. therefore, families with higher social strata will try to get their children to participate in extracurricular tutoring, trying to help them build an advantage in the high school entrance examination competition to enter the demonstration high school and receive better high school educational resources. in addition, even if the demonstration high school acceptance rate is increased, it will only reduce the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring for lower social class families. however, students from families with higher social strata still choose to participate in extracurricular tutoring to ensure that they effectively maintain their competitive advantage in high schools. furthermore, some doxue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1098 mestic and foreign studies have found that extracurricular tutoring can help improve students’ academic performance (xue, 2016; dang, 2007). this will increase enrollment opportunities and high-quality high school educational resources for demonstration high schools, which are more enjoyed by children from families with higher social strata. as a result, the differences in admission opportunities for children of different social classes in the demonstration high school have been enlarged, resulting in unequal admission opportunities for the demonstration high school, which is not conducive to social mobility and educational equity. when studying the impact of high school entrance examination competition on compulsory education students’ extracurricular tutoring participation, the high school acceptance rate in the study used 2015 data, while compulsory education students’ extracurricular tutoring participation used 2016 data, which can avoid two-way cause and effect to a certain extent problem. however, the problem was still not solved, leading to a certain deviation in the estimation results. therefore, in follow-up studies, we will try to use tracking data to reduce endogenous interference further. conclusions this study was based on cfps 2016 data and collected data on high school acceptance rates in various provinces. following the mmi and emi theories, by constructing the hierarchical linear bernoulli model, exploring the impact of high school entrance examination competition on students’ extracurricular tutoring participation in the compulsory education stage, the following main research conclusions are drawn. first, the participation rate of students in chinese compulsory education in extracurricular tutoring is 32.74%, and nearly one-third of students participate in tutoring. second, china’s average high school acceptance rate is 91.66%, and most middle school students can receive a high school education. third, china’s average high school acceptance rate is 57.82%, and the average vocational high school acceptance rate is 33.85%. this is quite different from the policy objective of maintaining roughly the same enrollment scale for high schools and secondary vocational schools during the high school stage in china. fourth, the average demonstration high school acceptance rate in china is 18.16%, indicating that china’s high-quality high school education resources are relatively scarce. second, the high school acceptance rate and vocational high school acceptance rate significantly affect students’ extracurricular tutoring participation. increasing the high school acceptance rate and vocational high school acceptance rate cannot reduce the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring. it shows that there is less competition between high school admission opportunities and vocational high school admission opportunities. moreover, students of different family backgrounds and different stages of study have no heterogeneity in the competitive pressure brought by high school education entrance opportunities and vocational high school entrance opportunities. it shows that the core of education competition among families of different social classes is not high school education entrance opportunities and vocational high school education entrance opportunities. xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1099 third, the high school acceptance rate has a significant positive effect on students’ extracurricular tutoring; that is, the higher the high school acceptance rate is, the higher the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring is. fourth, the demonstration high school acceptance rate has a significant negative impact on students’ extracurricular tutoring; that is, increasing the demonstration high school acceptance rate can significantly reduce the student’s participation rate of extracurricular tutoring. fifth, the impact of high school acceptance rate on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring of students from families of different social classes is heterogeneous. the higher the high school acceptance rate, the greater the probability of students from families with higher social strata participating in extracurricular tutoring. the high school acceptance rate has no heterogeneous influence on students at different school stages. whether it is the elementary school sample or the middle school sample, the high school acceptance rate significantly positively affects students’ extracurricular tutoring participation. sixth, the demonstration high school acceptance rate has a heterogeneous effect on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring among students from different social classes. for example, the demonstration high school acceptance rate has a significant negative impact on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring for students whose parental occupation is classified as lower but has no significant effect on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring for students whose parental occupation is classified as middle and upper. finally, the demonstration high school acceptance rate has a heterogeneous effect on students at different school stages. for example, the demonstration high school acceptance rate has no significant impact on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring for elementary school students. still, it has a significant adverse effect on the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring for middle school students. suggestion first, expand high-quality high school educational resources, increase the demonstration high school acceptance rate, and reduce the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring during the compulsory education stage. as china’s high school education has been universally available, the high school entrance examination competition is more about the quality of high school education, that is, “a good high school,” not just “a high school” education opportunity. however, the scarcity of high-quality high school resources has caused cohort crowding in the admission opportunities of demonstration high schools. the supply elasticity of the demonstration high school is relatively small, which makes its competition more intense (bound & turner, 2007). to allow their children to enter the demonstration high school, families with higher social strata seek out-of-school education, that is, extracurricular tutoring, to help their children maintain their advantages in the competition for further instruction. therefore, we must try our best to expand high-quality high school educational resources, increase the supply capacity of demonstration high schools, and increase the acceptance rate of demonstration high schools so that a broader range of families can enjoy high-quality high xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1100 school educational resources. it can relieve the pressure of parents and children from high school entrance examination competitions to a certain extent. it can also reduce the participation rate of students’ extracurricular tutoring during the compulsory education stage. second, to target disadvantaged families with lower social strata to increase enrollment quotas for demonstration high schools, weaken the social reproduction role of extracurricular tutoring, and promote the equalization of high-quality high school enrollment opportunities for children of different classes of families. this study found that to maintain their competitive educational advantage effectively, families with higher social strata let their children participate in extracurricular tutoring to increase their chances of entering the demonstration high school. in addition, the increase in the demonstration high school acceptance rate has reduced the participation rate of extracurricular tutoring for students whose parents’ occupational classification is lower. however, middle-class and upper-class families still choose to participate in extracurricular tutoring. therefore, even if the demonstration high school acceptance rate increases, families with higher social classes will still allow their children to participate in extracurricular tutoring. this will make it easier to increase the number of places in the demonstration high school to be more occupied by higher social class students and expand the inequality of opportunities for children of different families to obtain highquality high schools. at present, some provinces have introduced similar policies, such as the “target to school” and “spot allocation” of beijing high school admission and the “spot allocation to school” policy of shanghai. therefore, while increasing the acceptance rate of the demonstration high school, the enrollment of the demonstration high school should be increased for disadvantaged families with lower social strata to weaken the social reproduction effect of extracurricular tutoring. furthermore, allowing children from more disadvantaged families to enjoy high-quality high school educational resources will promote equalizing high-quality high school enrollment opportunities for children of different classes of families. this will create conditions for breaking the solidification of classes and realizing the rational flow of different social classes. notes 1. demonstration high school is the abbreviation of “demonstrative general high school that implements quality education.” it is the comprehensive implementation of the education policy and the exemplary performance of education laws, regulations, and related policies. school-running ideas are correct, moral education is strengthened, and education and teaching reforms are actively carried out. teachers’ quality and school-running conditions are good, school-running has characteristics, and students’ morality, intelligence, and physical development are comprehensively developed. society and colleges, and universities have a good evaluation of students. the school has a high management level, has a long history of running a school, and has a high reputation in and outside the province (autonomous region, municipality). 2. the total number of high school enrollment in the province and city was vocational high school enrollment and high school enrollment. the number of vocational high school enrollment, the xue & fang. high school entrance examination and extracurricular tutoring. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1101 number of high school enrollment, and the number of middle school graduates were all derived from the 2015 education statistics file of the ministry of education. see: http://www.moe.gov.cn/s78/a03/moe_560/jytjsj_2015/ 3. the number of students enrolled in the demonstration high schools of each province and city is announced by the demonstration high schools of each province and city. references bound, j., & turner, s. 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[chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.10014608.2018.05.010 received: 01 july 2021 revised: 15 july 2021 accepted: 15 july 2021 https://doi.org/10.2307/2112784 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-012-9236-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-012-9236-7 http://qikan.cqvip.com/qikan/article/detail?id=661667526 http://qikan.cqvip.com/qikan/article/detail?id=661667526 https://doi.org/10.19355/j.cnki.1671-9468.2015.03.005 https://doi.org/10.19355/j.cnki.1671-9468.2015.03.005 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1003-4870.2016.02.005 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1003-4870.2016.02.005 https://d.wanfangdata.com.cn/periodical/jyyj200901006 https://d.wanfangdata.com.cn/periodical/jyyj200901006 https://doi.org/10.19512/j.cnki.issn2096-2088.2019.04.005 https://doi.org/10.19512/j.cnki.issn2096-2088.2019.04.005 https://d.wanfangdata.com.cn/periodical/bjdxjypl202003009 https://d.wanfangdata.com.cn/periodical/bjdxjypl202003009 http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-jyky201706012.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-jyky201706012.htm https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1001-4608.2018.05.010 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1001-4608.2018.05.010 originalarticle-haipingxue-bece_title_july2021 originalarticle-haipingxue--bece_maintextjuly2021 bece. newsletter vol.6, no.1, 2020 792 analysis on effects and potential influencing factors of massive online education practice during the covid-19: a case of xiaogan city, hubei province by wang, j.x., cui, y.p., yan, y.t. correspondence to: wang, j.x. email: wjxin@mail.ccnu.edu.cn n this study, xiaogan city, hubei province was used as the research area to explore the effects and potential influencing factors of large-scale online education practice of “school is out, but class is on” during the covid-19 pandemic, trying to form a regular understanding and discovery, and hoping to promote the follow-up work and the providing a reference for the future development of online education. the research mainly includes four aspects: the guidance of education administration departments and leadership, the basic status of online teaching and home study, the satisfaction degree of students, teachers, and parents; the practical effects of online education, and the potential influencing factors. data collection mainly adopted methods such as questionnaire surveys, online classroom observation, online interviews, policy text analysis, and case collection. the research results are as follow:  the basic situation of large-scale online education practice in xiaogan city, hubei province: in terms of organizational management, there are guaranteed; in terms of platforms and tools, regional education cloud platforms are highly used by teachers and students in elementary and junior high schools, the types of platforms used in high schools are relatively diverse, and the use of tools for primary, junior and senior high schools is also showing a diversified trend; primary schools and junior high schools make more use of regional, provincial, and national platform resources. high schools mainly use resources collectively selected and produced by subject groups and resources independently produced by teachers; in terms of teaching content and teaching methods, the teaching content includes subject curriculum and special education. the teaching methods mainly use live broadcast, resource packages, recording and broadcasting resources, organization of independent learning and tv programs, etc. from the perspective of family-school collaboration, parents mostly participate in the student's learning process by paying attention to i vol.6, no.1, 2020 793 notifications, companionship and supervised learning and assignments inspection. in terms of satisfaction degree, students in rural areas are more satisfied than those in cities, and students in the junior high school are the most satisfied, the high school students’ satisfaction degree is the lowest, teachers' satisfaction of online teaching is at a medium level, while parents' satisfaction of online teaching is relatively high.  practical effects: through the guidance and leading of the education administration departments, it has promoted the coordination of multiple departments, improved the educational governance capacity, the construction and application of the online learning space, and laid the foundation for integration and innovation; through implementation and action, the school has promoted the transformation of the school's education concept and methods, and clarified the needs and goals of smart campus construction and smart education practice; through exploration and adaptation, teachers and students actively explored and adopt, which promoted the comprehensive development of teachers and cultivated students' independent learning ability and digital literacy; through the support and service, the education informatization enterprise has demonstrated the enterprise's responsibility, improved the brand reputation, and provided an opportunity for the enterprise to participate in the school education process in an all-round way; through cooperation and participation, families enrich the content of family-school communication and provide opportunities for co-education.  potential influencing factors includes online education concept, online education guarantee and supply, teacher-student literacy and ability, and family-school co-education. through the above analysis, it is looking forward to providing a reference for the theoretical research and practical exploration of future online education in primary and secondary schools. source: e-education research, 2020; 41(6):5-12. practical exploration of school-family cooperative education during the covid-19 epidemic: a case study of zhenjiang experimental school in jiangsu province, china jianping xia zhenjiang experimental school of jiangsu province, zhenjiang 212000, jiangsu, china abstract. as the country fights against the covid-19 epidemic, “school’s out, but class’s on” has been launched in schools everywhere. in order to do a good job in school education services and minimize the impact of the epidemic on normal education and teaching, the zhenjiang experimental school in jiangsu province has closely contacted parents, carried out school-family cooperative education through school and family cooperation, and worked together to ensure students with the quality of learning during the covid-19 epidemic, and jointly promote the all-round development of students. we used zhenjiang experimental school’s practice during the covid-19 epidemic as an example to explore a new path for the integration of home education and school education. best evid chin edu 2020; 4(2):521-528. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.rp003. keywords: covid-19 epidemic; “school’s out, but class’s on”; school-family co-education; practice; middle school correspondence to: jianping xia, principal of zhenjiang experimental school of jiangsu province, zhenjiang 212000, jiangsu, china. email: xwph123@163.com. conflict of interests: none. xia. school-family cooperative education during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 522 chools and families are indispensable subjects in the healthy growth of children. building a harmonious home-school relationship and forming a pattern of cooperative education are of great significance to the development of students. during the covid-19 epidemic, the school’s regular teaching activities could not be carried out normally, and the family became the only place for students to learn. the implementation of “school’s out, but class’s on”, i.e., “school is closed, but student learning is continuing online” or “online home study” (this refers to the official website of the chinese ministry of education: http://en.moe.gov.cn/). made the family and school cooperate much closer. schools and families need to establish a unified goal to ensure the quality of student learning, cultivate students’ autonomous learning ability, and promote the allround development of students. guide parents to actively cooperate with the online teaching activities carried out by the school, participate in student education, create a good learning and education environment for students, and achieve student development goals. zhenjiang experimental school of jiangsu province, through home-school cooperation, gives full play to the important role of family education in the “school’s out, but class’s on” period, guides parents to actively participate in online teaching activities and offline academic guidance, and effectively promotes students’ home study to achieve healthy and happy growth of students. this study used the school-family coeducation practice of zhenjiang experimental school during “school’s out, but class’s on” as an example to explore how to integrate school education and home education during the epidemic. it ensures the quality of students’ home study and promotes their comprehensive and healthy development. meaning of school-family co-education school-family co-education is to cultivate students together through home education and school education, and its fundamental purpose is to promote the all-round development and healthy growth of students. some scholars once defined school-family coeducation as “the principle of mutual respect, cooperation, joint efforts, and coordinated education between schools and families, teachers and parents, and both parties share the responsibility of cultivating students and jointly develop two-way, regular and comprehensive cooperation activities to promote the healthy growth and comprehensive development of students” (wang & dong, 2018). family education is the foundation of school education, and school education is a supplement and extension of family education. this requires families and schools to play their respective advantages to promote effective complementarities between school education and family education, and to form a joint education force (lu & liu, 2019). schools should build platforms and provide guidance for parents to participate in school education and improve parents’ family education. parents should take the initiative to learn about family education, establish a correct concept of family education, actively communicate with the school, actively participate in school management and education, and maintain consistency with school education. s xia. school-family cooperative education during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 523 home-school co-education, as a complementary educational behavior model and relationship model, is a valuable pursuit (wen, 2019), which is of great significance to the cultivation of student morality and the promotion of comprehensive development. therefore, school education should be closely integrated with family education, realize the synergy of education, provide better education methods for students, and promote better growth and development of students. bases of school-family co-education the integration of school education and home education is an inevitable trend of modern education (liu, 2015). achieving school-family co-education requires schools to build platforms for parents and encourage parents to take an active part. during the epidemic, family education became the main form and home-school relationships were closer. schools use the internet to build a platform for school-family co-education, which not only enables teachers and parents to better communicate with their children’s learning, but also provides children with better learning resources and effectively promotes school-family co-education. build school-family co-education platform the school establishes a platform for students’ online learning and the school-family co-education network platform through the provincial, municipal and school platforms. in addition, it implements remote interaction with parents through the public communication platform qq and wechat group, and fully implements the internet-based school-family co-education. use public platforms to build student online learning platforms. during the epidemic, the family became the only place for students to learn. the school set up an online learning platform for students through the provincial, municipal and school platforms. guide students to realize online learning by watching zhenjiang public education platform “zhenjiang wisdom education platform” and jiangsu public education platform “jiangsu famous teachers air classroom”. in addition, in response to students’ learning and answering questions, the jiangsu province teaching and research office organizes teachers to provide students with “one-on-one” online learning answering and tutoring through video calls every day from 15:00 to 16:30. on the public education platform in jiangsu province, teachers are used to provide students with question answering services in the form of teachers’ selfselection. create a school-family co-education network learning platform using a common platform. the public learning platform not only provides platform support for students’ online learning during the epidemic, but also provides a module for school-family coeducation and provides an online learning platform for school-family co-education. xia. school-family cooperative education during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 524 use public communication platform to realize remote and timely communication. the head teachers of each class of the school organize the creation of parent qq and wechat groups, and the group members are the parents of each student, teachers of each subject, and head teachers. during the epidemic, teachers posted learning tasks in groups daily and instructed students on home study methods or related educational information. parents can use qq or wechat groups to communicate student learning trends, problems or solutions encountered, so that teachers and parents, parents and parents can achieve remote interaction through qq and wechat. at the same time, the homeroom teacher can regularly push the epidemic prevention knowledge and other school-family co-education training resources during the epidemic through the wechat public account of the class for parents and teachers to learn in time. this can effectively raise parents and teachers’ awareness of school-family co-education, effectively promote the synergy of education, and provide students with better education methods. school-family co-education resources the construction of home-school resources requires not only school resources, but also parent resources to jointly build home-school cooperative education resources. during the epidemic, the school relied on the municipal and provincial education bureaus to develop online learning resources. at the same time, the school used classes as a unit to dig deeper into parent resources and enrich students’ home learning resources. develop online learning resources by relying on provincial and municipal forces. during the epidemic, the jiangsu provincial teaching and research office organized provincial 8th grade students, special senior teachers, senior teachers, and city-level discipline leading teachers to record review sessions. for the courses of other grades, the jiangsu province department of education organized subject teaching experts to launch a one-week course catalog and broadcast schedule for each subject in each grade and class based on the content of the first week of the spring semester, so that students can follow the catalog with options for online learning. at the same time, for the online learning of junior high school students in zhenjiang, zhenjiang education bureau organized the backbone teachers in the city to record synchronous classroom teaching videos covering all classes and grades (preschool education regardless of age) in units of class hours. the city’s public education platform “zhenjiang wisdow education” was launched. in addition, the school will digitize school-based learning resources based on study guides to provide more targeted learning resources for school students. with the help of parents, promote the rationalization of students’ home study content. xia. school-family cooperative education during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 525 as a special social resource, parents are essential for optimizing curriculum construction. especially during the epidemic, parents have become the most important study guides and companions for students, and have played an important role in the learning effect of students during their homes. the diversification of online resources brings abundant resource guarantees for students ‘home study, but whether it is suitable for the students’ study rules and whether the student’s home study can be completed requires the parents ‘timely guidance and evaluation of the students’ academic work. parents publish online teaching plans and student learning plans through schools to understand students’ learning requirements and progress, and provide offline guidance, supervision and evaluation for students’ academic learning, so as to work with class teachers and homeroom teachers to develop online learning resources and plan. at the same time, the school digs into the resources of parents, launches “one thing a week”, and implements family moral education practices. each class launches a home network education activity on the theme of reading, calligraphy and painting, family labor, etc., combining students’ moral education with family education. this promotes students to correctly understand the relationship between people, society and nature under the guidance of their parents, respects the objective world, acts scientifically and rationally, and makes students grow healthier. school-family co-education measures during the epidemic the home study of students is completely different from the study of students during school after the start of school, and requires the cooperation of homeroom teacher, classroom teachers and parents. therefore, during the epidemic, schools have formulated different measures for homeroom teachers, classroom teachers, and parents to ensure the smooth implementation of school-family co-education. homeroom teacher level work measures 1. establish and manage class learning and communication platforms. class learning and communication platforms can be established through platforms such as wechat group and qq group. 2. daily statistics of student observations and assignments. each day, after each homeroom teacher and the teacher understands the completion of the homework submission, fill in the “statistics form for online learning of students in zhenjiang experimental school” and submit it to the director in charge of teaching for the corresponding grade. this folder collects statistics on online learning of students in this grade and submits statistics to relevant personnel of the academic affairs office. working-teacher measures xia. school-family cooperative education during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 526 1. organize teaching seminars. for the city’s education bureau to organize the backbone teachers of the city, the recorded classroom teaching video content of each subject is synchronized, and the team leader organizes teachers in the group to conduct online teaching seminars and make relevant records at least once a week. 2. develop student exercises. teachers in accordance with the school’s daily curriculum schedule for each grade, watch the online course with students, and make notes at the same time. and according to the online teaching content, develop weekly subject practice in advance, arrange only the basic questions, do detailed answers, and send them to the qq groups in each class. 3. help students answer questions. if students still have questions after watching the video, they can send them point-to-point to the corresponding subject teachers, and the teachers will answer the questions on the day (the questions asked by the students before 18:00 pm on the day). 4. review student work. teachers in the class select 30% of the students in the class daily to submit assignments. after the student’s point-to-point to the corresponding subject teachers, the teachers make comments, feedback and correct comments or suggestions to explain the students’ problems. among them, the form of student assignments can be in the form of electronic manuscripts, printed manuscripts, or direct answers to questions in the assignment book. 30% of students submitting assignments should be selected alternately. while caring for key students, it is necessary to ensure that all students have the experience of submitting assignments in the short term. 5. statistics of teachers’ teaching. the preparation team completes the “statistical table of online teaching, teaching and research work” of the preparation team, and reports it to the teaching director before 5:00 pm on sunday. parental measures 1. instruct students to learn about epidemic situation. during the epidemic, parents should guide their children to pay attention to the official notification and authoritative broadcast of the pneumonia epidemic of covid-19 infection, and guide children to learn relevant epidemic prevention knowledge and do personal health protection through special education on “epidemic”. 2. urge your child to actively develop online learning. parents should cooperate with schools and teachers to urge their children to use zhenjiang smart education platform to conduct online learning. the main tasks are as follows:  refer to the daily curriculum schedules of all grades issued by the school to arrange study and life, and promote the development of good study habits and living habits of students.  guide and urge children to complete the learning videos, homework, teaching plans, homework explanation videos and homework answers for each subject in the learning platform on a daily basis. when in doubt, parents guide students to ask questions to the teacher through qq. xia. school-family cooperative education during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 527  parents with tutoring ability can provide tutoring to students’ learning, and guide students who have the ability to learn autonomously through the “famous teacher air classroom” in jiangsu province.  upload student assignments and cooperate with homeroom teacher to complete statistics of children’s online learning every day.  guide children to develop personal hobbies and implement family moral education practices while studying. concluding remarks “school’s out, but class’s on” is a challenge to both school education and family education. it not only requires schools to strengthen the guidance of students ‘online learning, and to do a good job in the service of students’ home study. it also needs the cooperation of the family and the school to help students reasonably arrange their work schedules and home study course content, and improve the content of home study. during the epidemic, the school of zhenjiang experimental school in jiangsu province used school-family co-education to supplement school education and work together to promote student learning and development. it is true that when schools promote schoolfamily co-education during the epidemic, there are still some problems that need to be solved urgently, such as difficulties for some parents to guide students, and the implementation of homework feedback cannot be implemented. these questions will encourage schools to further think about how to better establish a home-school linkage mechanism. references liu, j. on the combination of elementary school education and family education. reading writing, 16: 360 lu, b., liu, j. (2019) home-school interaction and cohesion to create a harmonious and high-quality education. basic edu referen, 18: 31-32 wang, s., dong, y. (2018) information technology promotes the implementation of school-family co-education-taking the primary school affiliated to feicheng city normal school as an example. modern edu, 4: 58-59. wen, y. (2019) school-family co-education, warm forward-an analysis of the significance and methods of home-school cooperation in high school. guangdong chenyue education development co., ltd. guangdong education society education modernization professional committee”. proceedings of teaching and scientific research research and thesis writing advanced seminar (6), guangzhou: 2-4. xia. school-family cooperative education during the covid-19 epidemic. vol.4, no. 2, 2020 528 received: 28 february 2020 revised: 05 march 2019 accepted: 11 march 2019 report-jianpingxia-bece_title_15mar2020 (1) report-jianpingxia-bece_maintext30mar2020 the effect of education groups on the quality of urban and rural compulsory education: an empirical analysis based on ceps data gang cheng , sihui du, yanan xu, luoping li faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100091, china. abstract: we retrieved data from china education panel survey (ceps) and adopted the hierarchical linear model as well as the quantile regression method to examine the effect of education groups on the quality of urban and rural compulsory education. student cognitive ability was cited as the evaluation index of education quality. according to the research findings, the overall effect of education groups on the quality of compulsory education is significantly positive, but there is urban-rural heterogeneity in this effect: the positive impact occurs only to urban member schools, while the education quality of rural member schools has not been improved by school grouping. in addition, there exists individual difference in this effect; school grouping significantly and negatively affects students from rural member schools and with medium and lower cognitive ability. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(2):1517-1522. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab004 how to cite: cheng, g., du, s., xu, y., & li, l. (2022). the effect of education groups on the quality of urban and rural compulsory education: an empirical analysis based on ceps data. best evidence in chinese education, 11(2):15171522. keywords: education group, compulsory education, education quality, urbanrural disparity cheng et al. (beijing). education groups and education quality of urban and rural china. bece, vol.11, no.2, 2022 1518 correspondence to: gang cheng, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100091, china. e-mail: cg@bnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:cg@bnu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ cheng et al. (beijing). education groups and education quality of urban and rural china. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1519 introduction the education group at the compulsory education level is a form of school association composed of a certain number of primary and/or junior secondary schools that are contractually tied to achieve scale effect. it is designed to expand access to high-quality educational resources through the alliance of advantaged and disadvantaged schools. an education group constituted by prestigious urban schools and ordinary rural schools is established to universalize the frontier educational concepts and school management skills of the former and to promote the balanced development of urban and rural compulsory education. based on the data from the china education panel survey (ceps) 2013-2015, this study uses the hierarchical linear model (hlm) and quantile regression method to evaluate the effect of education groups on the quality of urban and rural compulsory education quality as well as on the development of cognitive competencies of students with differential cognitive levels. the purpose of this paper is to identify the specific effects of school grouping on bridging the quality gap between urban and rural schools and to optimize the strategies for education group operation. data source this study sampled students who participated in the ceps baseline survey of 20132014 academic year and the follow-up survey of 2014-2015 academic year and drew the data of 6520 students from 88 schools. in the stage of baseline survey, they were in grade 7. five of the sampled schools were members of education groups and contributed 316 students for this investigation, which accounted for 4.85% of the total sample of students. further analysis showed that in the districts where the five schools are located, there are altogether 12 schools (715 students) included in the sample and that in this case, the portion of students from member schools of education groups was 44.20%. research findings statistical descriptions of member schools of education groups according to the sample analysis results, students from member schools of education groups, compared with their peers from non-member schools, displayed considerably higher cognitive ability and featured a lower proportion of rural “registered residence” (hukou) as well as a higher share of “the only child in the family”. member schools of education groups are more likely to be located in urban areas, with higher school rankings, stronger school finances, and higher teacher qualifications. nonetheless, there were no remarkable differences in basic facilities and student-teacher ratio between member and non-member schools. cheng et al. (beijing). education groups and education quality of urban and rural china. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1520 the impact of school grouping on student cognitive ability full sample estimation ols regression analysis results showed that education group membership of the school had a significant positive effect on the development of student cognitive ability, while school location in rural areas has a remarkable negative influence on the cultivation of student cognitive ability. the incorporation of coefficients of interaction terms into the analysis confirmed the urban-rural heterogeneity in the impact of school grouping. school rural location weakened the marginal effect of school grouping by 0 334 units, which reversed the positive impact of 0.208 units contributed by the variable of school grouping (0.208-0.334 = -0.126). consistent with the ols estimation results, in the hierarchical linear model, the coefficient of the variable of school grouping was significantly positive, while those of school location and interaction terms are significantly negative. moreover, a comparison of the coefficients indicated that the cognitive ability of rural students was not positively affected by the factor of school grouping, but rather declined (0.176-0.271 = -0.095). estimation of the sample from the districts where member schools of education groups are located the ols regression analysis results of the sample from the districts where member schools of education groups are located also pointed to prominent urban-rural heterogeneity in the effect of school grouping. overall, school grouping had a significant positive impact on student cognitive ability, but the coefficients of interaction terms demonstrated that the cognitive ability of students from rural member schools of education groups was remarkably lower than that of their urban counterparts by 0.914 units, which directly turned the overall positive influence of school grouping into a substantial negative impact (0.284-0.914 = -0.630). the hierarchical linear model also demonstrated high appropriateness. the result of chi-square test of zero model is significant. disparities between schools accounted for about 27.1% of the gap in cognitive ability between students; individual and family factors can partially explain the gap in student cognitive ability. the estimation results showed that the coefficients of the variable of school grouping and interaction terms are of significant levels, and there was positive-negative differentiation in their values. as a result, the influence of school grouping on rural students’ cognitive ability was substantially negative (0.250-0.740 = -0.490). the influence of school grouping on different student cohorts the regression coefficients of the variables of school grouping and interaction terms are significant at both the 25% and 50% quantiles. school grouping benefited urban students with below-average and medium cognitive ability (qr _25 and qr_ 50) more cheng et al. (beijing). education groups and education quality of urban and rural china. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1521 than any other student cohort, by an improvement of 0.476 and 0.537 units. for rural students with these levels of cognitive ability (qr_25 and qr_50), the effect of school grouping is reversed to -0.643 (0.476-1.119) and -0.440 (0.537-0.977) units, which means that the development of rural students with medium or below-average cognitive ability was severely impaired by the school’s membership in education group. discussion and conclusion the efficacy of education groups was confirmed by the research results in that the sharing of staff, curriculum content, and campus culture among member schools have helped increase student education output. the yearly teacher in-service training of member schools of education groups increased from 10.3 to 22 times on average, and its baseline level, follow-up level and growth rate were all higher than the averages of non-member schools in the same district; and the growth rate of teacher training of rural member schools has exceeded 300%, much higher than that of their urban counterparts. two types of costs should be taken into consideration in the exploration of the specific reasons for the heterogeneous effects of education groups on urban and rural compulsory education. (i) explicit costs: in the practice of school grouping, urban member schools benefited from the sophisticated inner-city and inter-city transportation systems and ideal digital environments, which enabled the effective sharing of highquality courses and the smooth rotation of excellent teachers and administrators. in contrast, due to the geographical separation and the “digital divide” between urban and rural areas, high-quality educational resources were less accessible to rural member schools. (ii) implicit costs: during the two years of the ceps, the sampled member schools of education groups were in the early stage of cooperation, experiencing a difficult transition from heterogeneity to homogeneity. the survey results of school satisfaction reflected the above costs in a direct way from the students’ perspective. students at rural member schools had a much higher level of academic weariness and stronger intention of school transfer than their urban counterparts. this study drew the following conclusions: first, the education group has a significant positive influence on the quality of compulsory education and can effectively promote student cognitive ability; second, the influence of the education group is heterogeneous in urban and rural areas with the positive effect existing only among urban member schools, and the quality of compulsory education in rural member schools may decline rather than improve; and third, there is individual heterogeneity in the impact of school grouping, and the impact on rural students with medium and lower cognitive ability is the most significantly negative. the education group is a new form of school organization, and the association of urban and rural schools will progressively improve in practice and in mutual adaptation. cheng et al. (beijing). education groups and education quality of urban and rural china. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1522 the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of educational economics review, 2022, 7(2):20. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 成刚, 杜思慧, 许亚男, & 李罗平. 集团化办学对城乡义务教育质量的影响研究—基于中国教 育追踪调查的实证分析. 教育经济评论, 2022, 7(2):20. received: 26 june 2022 revised: 10 july 2022 accepted: 14 july 2022 absbract1-gangcheng-bece_titlejuly_2022 absbract1-gangcheng-bece_maintextjuly2022 study on the ideal matching mode of sleep time and high academic performance of high school students in china and its early warning mechanism jian liu, liman zhao, xiaofeng du, guanxing xu beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. based on a sample survey of high schools in province s of china, this study used quantitative statistical analysis to explore the ideal matching mode of sleep time and high academic performance and established a multi-level early warning mechanism for schools that sacrifice student sleep for high academic performance. the results showed that “students achieve the best academic performance when they sleep for eight hours or more.” this is an ideal matching mode for schools to ensure the healthy development of students and build a good educational environment. teachers, schools, education administrators, and parents should hold correct educational values and view comprehensively the relationship between students’ sleep time and academic performance. for schools that sacrifice students' sleep time and blindly pursue high grades, a multi-level early warning mechanism should be established and their rectification should be supervised. best evid chin edu 2020; 6(2):845-861. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.ar074. how to cite: liu, j., zhao, l., du, x. & xu, g. (2020). study on the ideal matching mode of sleep time and high academic performance of high school students in china and its early warning mechanism. best evidence in chinese education, 6(2):845861. keywords: academic performance; sleep time; matching mode; early warning liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no.2, 2020 846 about the authors: jian liu, professor, collaborative innovation center of assessment for basic education quality, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: ncctlj@126.com or professorliu9506@126.com. xiaofeng du, collaborative innovation center of assessment for basic education quality, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: dxfice@163.com. guanxing xu, collaborative innovation center of assessment for basic education quality, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. email: xuguanxing_56@sina.com. correspondence to: liman zhao, collaborative innovation center of assessment for basic education quality, beijing normal university, room 9506, jingshi building, 19 xinjiekouwai street, haidian district, beijing 100875, china. email: 545997501@qq.com. conflict of interests: none. © 2020 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:dxfice@163.com mailto:xuguanxing_56@sina.com liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 847 question he sleep problems of high school students have received extensive attention from educational administration and scholars. china has also successively introduced a series of related policies to ensure students’ sleep time, such as the “compulsory education school management standards” and “comprehensive prevention and control of myopia in children and adolescents implementation plan.” these documents clearly mention the need to ensure that elementary, middle, and high school students sleep at least 10, 9, and 8 hours a day, respectively. a large number of studies have also confirmed that long-term lack of sleep is harmful to students’ learning ability, academic performance, and physical and mental health (curcio, 2006; wolfson, 2003; fallone, 2002). however, the implementation effects of these policies are not satisfactory. against the background of increasing pressure for higher education and academic competition, parents and teachers believe in the spirit of “extremely hard study” of the ancient chinese “tie one’s hair on the house beam and jab one’s side with a needle to keep oneself awake painstaking in one’s study” and “bore a hole on the wall to make use of the neighbor’s light to study” in order to let students pursue high scoring and obtain high rankings. many students are affected by these kinds of thoughts and remind themselves to invest more time in their studies, but they ignore their own sleep problems (tong, 2016). the monitoring data of the regional education quality physical examination project team of the collaborative innovation center of assessment for basic education quality showed that in many areas, the sleep time of high school students has not reached the basic level, and there are many schools and regions that blindly sacrifice sleep time to pursue high performance. multiple studies have pointed out the problem of insufficient sleep among high school students. yang et al. (2018) investigated the sleep time of high school students in shanghai and found that 94.8% of the students slept less than 8 hours; hou et al. (2015) also found the average sleep time of high school students in bao’an district, shenzhen was only 6.2 hours. studies have shown that the relatively good results brought about by lack of sleep are at the expense of the physical and mental health of the students and cause negative effects. adequate sleep time, a good development environment, and high-quality academic performance are necessary conditions for a successful education. based on this, this research will explore the ideal matching model of students’ high academic performance and sleep time based on physical and mental development and a good educational environment, and provide multi-level early warning for schools that sacrifice students’ sleep time in exchange for high performance, and hope it can provide enlightenment to the educational decision-making and practice. literature review with the promulgation of relevant policies, a large number of studies have also been carried out on the sleep time of high school students. we have found in existing ret liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 848 search that most of the related research focuses on the relationship between sleep time and academic achievement, physical and mental health, and analysis of its influencing factors. the relationship between sleep time and students’ academic performance sleep is a spontaneous and reversible resting state, manifested as the reduced responsiveness to external stimuli and temporary interruption of consciousness. traditionally, as an adaptive and protective activity, sleep is an important way for individuals to restore physical strength. liu et al. (2015) pointed out that sleep is not only important for restoring physical strength, but also for restoring mental strength. good sleep is not only an important guarantee for subsequent learning, but also helps to consolidate and maintain memory. dewald et al. (2010) conducted a meta-analysis of sleep time and academic performance for 15,199 students between the ages of 8 and 18 and showed that the correlation coefficient reached r = 0.069 and the correlation between boys were higher than that of girls. mirghani et al. (2015) also reached a similar conclusion in the study. jiang et al. (2011) found that school-age children with insufficient sleep time or poor sleep quality do not perform as well as children with a good sleep in language, mathematics, and academic performance. therefore, the sleep time and the academic performance of the students present a positive correlation. however, as the pace of life accelerates and the pressure of study and work increases, many people try to make up for the lack of study and work time by reducing sleep and hope to improve the efficiency of study and work. there are two explanations for the relationship between sleep time and academic performance: one is that when sleep is insufficient, the body’s sympathetic nerve function is hyperactive and catabolism increases, which affects the mental activities related to memory and attention. this ultimately impairs the maintenance and consolidation of memory and causes a decline in students’ academic performance. the other is that lack or interruption of sleep will reduce the nocturnal brain activity required for neurocognitive functions; among them, complex tasks require abstract thinking, creativity, integration, and planning; these tasks represent higher neurocognitive functions and mainly affected by sleep problems (yang et al., 2018). the relationship between sleep time and students’ physical and mental health liang et al. (2006) pointed out that lack of sleep in adolescents at night will weaken the body’s immune function, weaken the body’s defenses, and cause diseases; it will also hinder the production and release of growth hormone, leading to growth retardation. long-term lack of sleep can disrupt the biological clock of adolescents, leading to cerebral cortex dysfunction, neurasthenia, and various neuroses. knutson (2011) found that insufficient sleep time during adolescence was significantly positively correlated with overweight and obesity. therefore, sleep is not only an important physical requirement, liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 849 but also an important guarantee for students’ mental health. morrison et al. (1992) found that adolescents with chronic sleep deprivation have a significantly higher incidence of depression, anxiety, and behavioral problems than those with adequate sleep, and the more serious the lack of sleep, the higher the anxiety and depression. zhao et al. (2012) believed that from the perspective of emotional maintenance, long-term lack of sleep in students will show negative emotions such as emotional instability, irritability, anxiety, and other symptoms, which will affect normal life. analysis of influencing factors of students’ sleep time a number of studies have focused on the related causes of sleep deprivation among chinese students. he et al. (2007) investigated the sleep conditions of 618 high school students in beijing and found that personal emotions, study pressure, and test scores are the main factors affecting the sleep time and quality of high school students. zhao & xue (2018) found in a survey that middle school students’ participation in academic extracurricular tutoring can significantly reduce their sleep time. participating in intuition is one of the important indicators of students’ objective pressure. liu et al. (2011) found that study stress and test anxiety have a positive predictive effect on students’ subjective sleep quality, time to fall asleep, sleep time, sleep disturbance, and daytime dysfunction. lin et al. (2018) found that the greater the learning pressure, the worse the quality of sleep. with the intensification of competition, all classes of society have to increase learning content and requirements for children, so that children need to invest more time in learning, thereby breaking the normal routine of work and rest and affecting normal sleep. zheng et al. (2001) found that there is a linear regression relationship between students’ learning pressure and willpower, thinking, emotion, and physiological indicators, that is, the greater the learning pressure, the greater the impact of negative emotions on sleep quality. if students are under heavy learning pressure, they will naturally suffer from anxiety and insomnia over the years. in addition to learning pressure and other factors, liu et al. (2017) found that the longer students use mobile phones each day, the worse their sleep quality; students who use mobile phones for more than 60 minutes before going to bed each day have a sleep disorder rate significantly higher than less than 10 minute students, but using the basic functions of mobile phones (phone calls, text messages) has no effect on sleep quality. demirci et al. (2015) found that excessive use of smartphones has a direct effect on low sleep quality, which directly affects negative emotions such as depression and anxiety, thereby indirectly causing sleep problems; sleep quality is moderately positively correlated with students’ mental health and different components of sleep are all related to mental health, especially with somatization, compulsion, depression, and anxiety. therefore, students’ sleep time is affected by many factors. in order to pursue high academic performance, academic pressure, negative emotions, and the length of mobile phone use are all critical factors that affect students’ sleep time. in sum, the lack of sleep has a negative impact on students’ academic performance and physical and mental health. high school students spend most of their time in liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 850 the educational environment of the school. the hazards of insufficient sleep to students’ physical and mental health and academic achievement will directly or indirectly affect their hobbies, learning quality, social relationships, and frequency of participating in activities inside and outside the school, thereby affecting their subjective well-being. the heavy academic burden caused by the pursuit of higher academic performance is an important cause of insufficient sleep for students. in view of this, it is particularly important to explore and find a balance between ideal sleep time, higher academic performance, and a good physical and mental development environment. methods data sources this research relies on the regional education quality and health examination project team of the collaborative innovation center of assessment for basic education quality (hereinafter referred to as the project team) for data collection. the project team used a stratified random sampling method to survey 14,021 second-year students from 140 high schools in province s in an eastern province of china, including 6,569 boys and 7,452 girls. after weighing the sample, there are a total of 205,938 students, including 97,024 boys and 108,914 girls. boys accounted for 47% of the effective sample, and girls with 53% of the effective sample. the basic information of the survey subjects involved gender, region, parents’ occupation, parents’ education level, etc. the project team referred to domestic and foreign assessment projects and related documents and measured the sleep time and academic performance of students every day (except weekends and holidays). sleep time was divided into six periods of less than 5, 5-6, 6-7, 7-8, 8-9, and 9 hours or more; academic performance was the average score in chinese language, mathematics, and english language. in addition, the project team also investigated various variables such as students’ interest, academic burden, learning quality, social relationships, and subjective well-being of activity participation, and combined with relevant statistical models to synthesize the above variables into an index of 0-100. the higher the index a school had, the better the students developed in this school. for example, the higher the learning interest index, the higher the learning interest of the students of this school; the higher the interest satisfaction index, the better the curriculum of this school can meet the students’ interest development; the higher the homework index, the higher the ratio the school assigned the students homework time less than two hours (excluding weekends); the higher the sleep index, the higher the proportion of students in this school who sleep 8 hours or more per day. procedures we use broader effect size to compare different matching patterns of sleep time and high performance. the effect size represents the size of the standard deviation between the two sets of means. unlike the significance test, the effect size is not affected by the liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 851 sample size, and can more objectively reflect the size of the difference between groups. when the sample size is so large that the variable is easily significant, it is necessary to report the size of the effect. if the absolute value of the effect size is < 0.2, the actual difference is small, 0.2-0.8 is a moderate difference, and > 0.8 indicates the actual difference is large. results and analysis the high school in province s where “students have the best academic performance when they sleep for more than 9 hours”, and they had a higher interest, less pressure, better learning quality, more participation in activities, more harmonious social relations, and higher well-being according to regulations, the sleep time of high school students shall not be less than 8 hours. therefore, in this study, when the sleep time was 8-9 hours and its two intervals less and more than 8 hours, that is, 7-8 hours and > 9 hours, to explore the sleep time period when the student’s highest academic performance occurs, and then observed which group of the students were more interested and stressed less, a better quality of learning, high participation in activities, harmonious social relations and high sense of well-being. from this, we found an ideal matching mode between sleep time and performance. in this study, the “schools with the highest scores in sleep for more than 9 hours” were recorded as the category a; the “schools with the highest scores in 8-9 hours of sleep” were recorded as the category b; “the highest scores were in the 7-8 hours of sleep” were recorded as category c. in table 1, category a schools performed better than b and c on interest index, burden index, learning quality index, social relationship index, and activity participation index. from the actual difference reflected in the effect size, most of the effect size was ≥ 0.2. this showed that compared with the categories b and c schools, the students’ interest in learning, art, and sports have reached a higher level, and the school could also meet the students’ interests to a greater extent; sleep time was relatively high, relatively small homework time, a high proportion of students without extracurricular tutoring, and the students felt relatively less pressure; the relationship with teachers, parents and peers were relatively harmonious, participation in a club, charity, independent electives, and research studies were more motivated; learning motivation and selfconfidence were stronger, and the subjective well-being was also higher. specifically, the indexes with large differences are as follows: in terms of interest, the three categories of schools have the largest differences in the learning interest index and interest satisfaction index, and the learning interest index of students in “category a schools” is higher than that of “category b schools” by 8.0. the score is 24.2 points higher than that of “category c school”; the interest satisfaction index of “a school” is 7.1 points higher than that of “category b school” and 22.1 points higher than liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 852 “category c school”. in terms of burden, students in the three types of schools have the largest difference in the learning pressure index. the learning pressure felt by students in “category a schools” is 11.7 points lower than that of “category b schools” and 15.0 points lower than “category c schools”. in terms of social relationship, “category a school” is 20.2 points, 14.8 points and 14.0 points higher than “category c school” in teacher-student relationship index, peer relationship and parent-child relationship index, respectively, higher than “category b school” out of 6.3 points, 6.8 points, and 5.5 points. in terms of participating in activities, the three groups of school students have the biggest differences in participating in public welfare activities and research learning activities. the index of participation in public welfare activities of “category a schools” is higher than that of “category b schools” by 10.3 points and higher than “category c schools” by 21.4 points. on score: the index of “category a school” students participating in research learning activities is 11.4 points higher than that of “category b schools” and 23.0 points higher than “category c schools”. in terms of learning quality, the three groups of school students have the largest differences in learning motivation and learning self-confidence index. the “category a school” students have a higher learning confidence index by 17 points than the “category c school” and 8.0 points higher than the table 1. indices of students in three categories of schools. school category effect size c b a c vs a c vs b schools with the highest scores with 7-8 hours of sleep schools with the highest scores with 8-9 hours of sleep schools with the highest scores with >9 hours of sleep interest index to learning 41.7 57.9 65.9 1.10 0.39 to arts 60.6 64.8 66.1 0.64 0.14 to sports 69.5 72.9 75.0 0.63 0.22 interest satisfaction 50.5 65.5 72.6 1.05 0.37 burden index learning pressure 27.2 30.5 42.2 0.58 0.47 sleep 9.2 14.5 16.5 0.48 0.13 homework 58.6 59.0 63.1 0.22 0.19 learning quality index learning confidence 53.9 62.9 70.9 0.80 0.41 learning strategy 55.2 59.6 59.3 0.76 0.05 learning motivation 64.0 75.1 79.7 1.03 0.33 social relationship index with teachers 58.2 72.1 78.4 1.06 0.35 with peers 65.9 73.9 80.7 0.75 0.40 with parents 67.3 75.8 81.3 0.71 0.33 activity participation index charitable activities 49.5 60.6 70.9 0.89 0.47 research learning 48.7 60.3 71.7 0.99 0.52 independent elective 36.8 50.3 55.4 0.86 0.23 social activities 30.5 40.1 43.2 0.61 0.14 subjective well-being 72.4 77.9 83.2 0.87 0.44 liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 853 “category b school”. the learning motivation index of “category a school” students is 15.7 points higher than that of “category c schools” and 4.6 points higher than “category b schools”. ideal matching model of sleep time and high academic performance in different types of schools classify schools according to their average socioeconomic status (ses), and explore whether schools of different socioeconomic status groups conform to the overall law, that is, compared with categories b and c schools, students in category a schools have higher interest and less pressure, the quality of learning is better, the participation in activities is more, the social relationship is more harmonious, and it has higher wellbeing. this study ranked all the participating schools. the top 30% of the schools with average socioeconomic status were defined as the high socioeconomic status group, and the lower 30% were defined as the low socioeconomic status group. the specific results are as below: (1) in the low socioeconomic status group, the students in the low socioeconomic status group “when the sleep time is 8-9 hours, the students have the best performance”, the school students have higher interest, less pressure, better learning quality, more participation in activities, and a more harmonious social relationship, and better well-being. students from the three categories in the low socioeconomic status group have different learning interests, academic pressure, learning quality, activity participation, social relationship, and subjective well-being. the following table presents the difference between the indexes of the two groups of schools. it can be seen from table 2 that the students in the low socioeconomic status group “students with 8-9 hours of sleep have the best results” had a higher interest, less pressure, better learning quality, more participation in activities, and a more harmonious social relationship and students’ subjective well-being was relatively high, showing the following characteristics. first, in the low socioeconomic status group, the indexes of “category b schools” are higher than “category a schools”, but the overall difference was not big, basically staying at about 5 points, which was different from the overall law. this shows that in a school environment with a lower overall socioeconomic background, students need to spend a certain amount of time and effort to achieve good results, but the highest score also needs to be met on the basis of 8 hours of sleep, so that students will have a healthy educational environment, such as participating in more activities, performing better in various aspects such as interest, self-confidence, social relationship, and having more well-being. second, in the low socioeconomic status group, the indices of “category c schools” and “category b schools” were quite different. among them, “category c school” was 14.9 points and 14.8 points lower than “category b school” in learning interest index and interest satisfaction index, respectively; teacher-student relationship liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 854 table 2. indexes of students in three categories of schools in the low socioeconomic status group. low socioeconomic status group category c category b category a effect size b vs a b vs c interest index to learning 36.7 51.6 48.6 0.66 0.15 to arts 58.28 66.09 62.85 0.84 0.39 to sports 66.54 74.21 72.29 0.85 0.21 interest satisfaction 47.38 62.18 60.29 0.72 0.10 burden index learning pressure 14.3 24.4 18.6 0.61 0.37 sleep 6.6 17.7 10.4 0.65 0.45 homework 60.6 62.1 51.6 0.10 0.67 learning quality index learning confidence 57.8 56.9 55.4 0.05 0.07 learning strategy 54.82 57.88 55.62 0.66 0.54 learning motivation 60.8 69.9 69.6 0.57 0.02 social relationship index with teachers 52.8 66.0 63.2 0.69 0.15 with peers 66.3 68.7 64.6 0.15 0.21 with parents 70.3 70.7 68.2 0.03 0.13 activity participation index charitable activities 37.9 55.9 53.6 0.81 0.13 research learning 35.5 55.4 46.6 0.84 0.49 independent elective 28.9 45.8 38.2 0.82 0.40 social activities 17.0 35.3 28.5 0.86 0.34 subjective well-being 67.5 75.6 76.8 0.63 0.10 index was 13.2 points, 18.5 points, and 16.0 points lower; public welfare activity participation index, research learning index, the self-selective index, and the community participation index were 17.9, 19.9, 16.8 and 18.3 points lower, respectively. this shows that in a school environment with a low overall socioeconomic status, it is not possible to sacrifice students’ sleep in exchange for good performance. otherwise, children may face increased pressure, decreased interest, disharmony in social relationships, and participation in various activities, and subsequently, the enthusiasm was severely frustrated, and he was unable to feel happiness. (2) for schools in the high socioeconomic status group, the students in the schools with “the best performance when they sleep more than 8 hours” had a higher interest, lower pressure, better learning quality, higher participation in activities, and social relationship were more harmonious and well-being was higher. there are also differences in the performance of students in the three categories of schools in the high socioeconomic status group in terms of learning interest, academic pressure, learning quality, activity participation, social relationship, and subjective wellbeing. table 3 presents the difference between the indexes of the two groups of schools. liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 855 in table 3, in the high socioeconomic status group, some indices of category a schools were higher than category b and c schools, and some indices of category b schools were higher than category a schools. comprehensively, the categories a and b schools were “the schools with the best student performance when the sleep time is more than 8 hours.” the specific data presents the following characteristics: in the context of the overall high socioeconomic background of the school, the indices of “category b schools” and “category a schools” are different from each other, but the overall difference is not big, basically maintaining around 5 points. the indices of “category c schools” are lower than “category a schools” as a whole, and the differences are large. among them, “category c school” is more than 10 points lower than “category a school” in interest index; learning stress index and sleep index are 11.5 points and 17.1 points lower respectively; autonomous elective index and community participation index are 14.0 points and 18.4 points lower respectively; learning motivation index is 12.4 points lower. as a result, for students with high socioeconomic status, the lack of sleep brings serious consequences. they face increased pressure, decreased interest, disharmony in social relationships, and serious frustration in their enthusiasm for participating in various activities, and no well-being feeling. table 3. indexes of students in three categories of schools in the high socioeconomic status group. high socioeconomic status group category c category b category a effect size a vs c a vs b interest index to learning 54.4 72.6 74.0 1.15 0.09 to arts 54.99 66.52 66.15 1.30 0.04 to sports 64.88 74.36 75.01 1.18 0.06 interest satisfaction 69.05 78.08 79.00 0.70 0.07 burden index learning pressure 41.6 45.7 53.1 0.46 0.29 sleep 2.0 11.4 19.1 0.80 0.39 homework 56.5 64.7 59.5 0.12 0.21 learning quality index learning confidence 69.2 77.7 76.8 0.58 0.08 learning strategy 54.38 64.25 60.27 0.89 0.56 learning motivation 72.3 84.9 84.6 1.27 0.03 social relationship index with teachers 82.1 88.2 85.0 0.24 0.29 with peers 87.0 87.0 86.9 0.01 0.01 with parents 82.0 86.9 85.8 0.39 0.12 activity participation index charitable activities 95.0 76.0 77.0 0.94 0.06 research learning 69.3 74.6 78.5 0.51 0.20 independent elective 47.7 67.5 61.7 0.66 0.25 social activities 28.8 54.2 47.2 0.87 0.30 subjective well-being 86.0 86.4 87.7 0.21 0.17 liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 856 multi-level early warning of high-performance sleep interval in high schools in province s through the above analysis, no matter what the socioeconomic status of the school is, the achievement of high grades of students cannot be at the cost of reducing sleep time. students who sleep for at least eight hours are more likely to get the good academic performance and are more conducive to the formation of a healthy and benign educational environment. the following is a multi-level early warning for all sample schools in province s:  schools with the highest scores in the student group whose sleep time is < 5 hours are listed as red warnings;  schools with the highest score in the student group of 5-6 hours of sleep are listed as a yellow warning;  schools with the highest scores in the 6-7 hours of sleep time are listed as orange warnings;  schools with the highest scores in the student group with 7-8 hours of sleep are listed as blue warnings. more than 60% of schools in province s were at the warning level. among 140 schools, 24 schools were at the red warning level; 18 schools were at the yellow warning level; most schools were at the orange warning level, as many as 34. what’s more noteworthy is that province s as a whole was also at the orange warning level; 9 schools were at the green warning level. for these schools that exchange low sleep for high grades, we should pay attention to and supervise them in various ways to create a healthy educational environment for students. conclusion and discussion “students achieve the highest scores when they sleep for eight hours or more.” this is an ideal matching mode for the school to ensure the healthy development of chinese high school students and maintain a good educational environment according to the data, the schools in province s where “students sleep for eight hours or more have the best academic performance” have a good educational environment. students in these schools actively participated in public welfare activities, research learning activities, independent electives, and club activities. they were confident and motivated to devote themselves to learning; not only were they interested in learning, but they were also interested in art and sports. such schools could satisfy students’ hobbies in all aspects to a greater extent. ensure adequate sleep and complete homework of appropriate intensity every day; they had a more harmonious relationship with their parents, teachers, and peers, and they could feel more happiness. liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 857 for a long time, the spirit of “extremely hard study” reflected in ancient chinese stories such as “tie one’s hair on the house beam and jab one’s side with a needle to keep oneself awake painstaking in one’s study” and “bore a hole on the wall to make use of the neighbor’s light to study” have been highly praised as the outstanding qualities students should have. current teachers and parents often use such stories to encourage students and children to concentrate on learning. many children also use these stories to encourage themselves and remind themselves to study hard. however, the data obtained by the empirical investigation is exactly the opposite of this view. for students with relatively low family socioeconomic status, even if they have to spend more learning time, they must ensure 8-9 hours of sleep, so as to have a healthy educational environment and a healthy state of development. if the pursuit of high grades at the expense of sleep time will often increase the academic pressure of students, students will gradually lose their interest in learning, art, and sports, making students unwilling to participate in various activities, and worsening their relationship with teachers, parents, and peers. therefore, keeping students’ sleep time at 8 hours or more is an ideal matching model for schools to ensure the healthy development of students and create a good educational environment. the ideal model of the relationship between sleep time and academic performance should be: in certain sleep time, the student’s academic performance reaches its peak. the “elementary and middle school health education guidelines” issued by the ministry of education in 2008 stipulates that students should be guaranteed adequate sleep. among them, elementary, middle, and high school students should sleep 10, 9, and 8 hours a day, respectively. when the sleep time of high school students in province s is more than 8 hours, their academic performance reaches the highest point. the project team evaluated a high school in a southern coastal city of china and a middle school in the mainland of china in the same way and found that only when the sleep time was 7-8 hours or even 6-7 hours, the academic performance of students in this area can be reached the highest. it can be seen that the high school data in province s is closer to the ideal model than high schools (even middle schools) in other similar regions. in fact, since 1997, province s has continued to standardize school-running behavior and strengthened supervision of the phenomenon of increasing academic burden. our data showed that the long-term efforts of province s have achieved certain good results. teachers, schools, administrators, and parents should hold correct educational values and take a comprehensive view of the relationship between students’ sleep time and academic performance. it can be seen from this study that the high performance obtained by sacrificing students’ sleep requires a price, such as students’ low interest in learning, arts and sports, public welfare activities, research studies, autonomous electives, insufficient participation in club activities, high learning pressure, and the social relationship is tense and subjective, and well-being is low. liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 858 the fundamental goal of education and the healthy development of students should not be based solely on students’ academic performance as the only evaluation criterion. the “basic education curriculum reform outline (trial)” issued by the ministry of education in 2001 pointed out: “establishing an evaluation system that promotes the overall development of students. evaluation should not only focus on students’ academic performance but also discover and develop students’ various potentials.” the opinions of the ministry of education on promoting the reform of comprehensive evaluation of education quality in primary and secondary schools issued by the ministry of education in 2013 also particularly emphasized the concept of comprehensive indicators for education evaluation. the issuance of these important policy documents reflects the education administrators’ thinking on the goals of education reform at the macro level. educational goals and multiple evaluations should not only pay attention to the overall development of students’ morality, intelligence, sports, art, and labor, but also demonstrate students’ individual strengths and development potential. pursuing good grades at the expense of students’ sleep time and neglecting the physical and mental development of students and the creation of a good educational environment will inevitably lead china’s education astray. to ensure students’ sleep time in educational practice, efforts should be made in the following aspects: first, the educational administrative department and the school should act as parents’ consultants, and guide parents to choose appropriate family education methods according to their children’s actual conditions. one size fits all. parents should also understand that it is the duty of parents to let their children grow up healthily and happily. they should not blindly care about their children’s academic performance, but should be more concerned about their children’s subjective feelings and experiences in learning, concerned about the overall development of students, and balanced distribution of learning energy; it is necessary to face up to the academic burden of students and to think rationally and appropriately, so as not to fall into the misunderstanding of the excessive pursuit of high grades at the expense of students’ sleep time. second, the behaviors in schools that increase the learning burden of students and seriously affect students’ sleep time should be strictly investigated and urged for improvement; appropriate homework should be assigned to avoid problematic tactics, fatigue bombing, and phenomena that affect students’ sleep time. third, the education administrative department needs to effectively implement the principle of enrolling nearby to ensure a reasonable distance between the student’s residence and the school, so as to reduce the problem of insufficient sleep time caused by the student’s home address being too far away from the school, and the long time on the way to school. in the longterm run, enrollment for high school and college entrance examinations should break the “score-only” selection criterion and replace it with a comprehensive standard. it is necessary to pay attention not only to student performance, but also to student development, creativity, and the spirit of serving the society. guide the school to return to the track where knowledge education and quality education go hand in hand. liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 859 provide multi-level early warning and improve the accountability mechanism for schools that pay the price of lack of sleep and blindly pursue high academic performance even under the general situation of s province, which has continued to regulate schoolrunning behaviors for many years, more than 60% of the students in the 140 schools surveyed in this study still achieved the highest results when they slept for less than 8 hours. such a high proportion requires extensive attention. among them, 24 schools were at the red warning level; 18 schools were at the yellow warning level; as many as 34 schools were at the orange warning level; 9 schools were at the blue warning level. this early warning mechanism is extensible. all regions can refer to this early warning standard and conduct multi-faceted supervision of schools that sacrifice sleep time in exchange for high grades. educational administrative departments should truly be aware of the harm to students in pursuit of high grades at the expense of sleep time. they should increase risk awareness, strengthen monitoring and early warning, and carry out necessary guidance and accountability. early warning and supervision of students’ sleep time is systematic work. it cannot be accomplished overnight with just one measure; it requires the joint efforts of many parties. for example, the administrative department of education can set up an early warning and monitoring system for an academic burden to encourage parents to respond to students’ burden problems such as lack of sleep and heavy homework; in turn, relevant departments can use this as a reference to investigate relevant schools and supervise their rectification. they can also hire a third-party assessment agency to investigate the sleep time of students, and based on the early warning mechanism established in this study, publish the warning results every month, and criticize schools that blindly pursue high grades at the expense of student sleep time. in addition, different schools are encouraged to develop mutual learning and healthy competition. schools at an early warning level learn from schools that can guarantee adequate sleep, high academic standards, healthy physical and mental development, and a good educational environment for students. the collision of different educational management modes and methods will produce different educational results, and mutual learning and communication can jointly promote the comprehensive and healthy development of students. liu et al. mode of sleep time and academic performance in chinese high school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 860 references curcio, g., ferrara, m., & de gennaro, l. 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[chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.10052232.2018.06.008 zheng, l., wan, l., & li, z. (2001). linear regression analysis of the impact of learning pressure on students’ mental and physical health. chinese school health, 22(3):224-225. [chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.10009817.2001.03.028 received: 06 august 2020 revised: 20 september 2020 accepted: 09 october 2020 the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university (educational science edition), 2020(3):71-79. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 刘坚, 赵利曼, 杜宵丰, 徐冠兴. (2020). 高中生睡眠时间与高学业成绩的理想匹配模式探究及预 警. 华东师范大学学报(教育科学版), 2020(3):71-79. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-015-1712-9 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-015-1712-9 https://doi.org/10.1097/00004583-199201000-00014 https://doi.org/10.1097/00004583-199201000-00014 https://doi.org/10.16194/j.cnki.31-1059/g4.2016.09.008 https://doi.org/10.16194/j.cnki.31-1059/g4.2016.09.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1087-0792(03)90003-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1087-0792(03)90003-7 https://doi.org/10.19428/j.cnki.sjpm.2018.18609 https://doi.org/10.19428/j.cnki.sjpm.2018.18609 http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-erto201209016.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-erto201209016.htm https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1005-2232.2018.06.008 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1005-2232.2018.06.008 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1000-9817.2001.03.028 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1000-9817.2001.03.028 article-jianliu-bece_title_16nov2020 article-jianliu-bece_maintext16nov2020 bece. newsletter bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1281 the determinants and impacts of private tutoring in and out of school in hong kong by li, j.l., & pan, d.d. correspondence to: li, j.l, shanghai normal university, china. e-mail: duhappycharlie@163.com study published in the education & economy uses the datasets of pisa 2015 of hong kong as an analysis sample. this study attempts to identify the factors that explain the demand for on-campus and off-campus private tutoring by using two-level bernoulli model, and to analyze the effect of private tutoring by using hierarchical linear model (hlm) and propensity score matching (psm), hoping to provide some references to the implementation of “after school service” program in mainland china. the results are as follows:  after school program in hong kong intended to serve poor students are mainly for poor performance students instead of poor students. according to the two-level bernoulli model, students with poor academic performance are more likely to attend after school program. at the same time, combined with the results of hlm model, under the condition of controlling family escs background, family escs has no significant impact on students’ scores in science, mathematics and reading. therefore, schools provide after school program based on students’ academic performance rather than family conditions, which deviate from the original intention of serving poor families and turns into, serve poor performance students.  the effect of on-campus and off-campus private tutoring t on students’ academic performance differs in different subjects. according to the results of psm, on-campus tutoring has a significantly negative effect on students’ achievement in science, math, and reading. off-campus tutoring has a negative impact on students’ math achievement, but has no impact on reading and science achievement. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. a mailto:duhappycharlie@163.com bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1282  the after school tutoring provided by different teachers has different effects on students’ academic performance. combined with the results of hlm model, on campus tutoring are mainly provided by students’ regular teachers or teachers working for a business or organization specialized in extracurricular instruction. and no matter who provide the tutoring, on-campus tutoring would damage students’ achievements. off-campus tutoring provided by regular teachers in school has significantly negative impacts on students’ math and reading achievements. the upgrading and adjustment of after school program in mainland china cannot do without the guidance of theory, while the after school service study in hong kong provides positive and beneficial experience for it. based on the research findings, the author pointed out that the implementation of “after school service” program in mainland china should pay more attention to the choice of students, selection of tutors and service methods. specifically, after school service should follow the selection criteria for the poor students or students with learning difficulties, allowing students to choose freely whether to participate; meanwhile, the contents, forms and methods of academic after school service should be standardized. in addition, the after school service mode of “school-auxiliary assistance” from schools and professional tutoring institutions should be appropriately adopted to provide services for students in mainland china. source: education & economy, 2020; 2020(2):49-59. bece. newsletter vol.12, no.1, 2022 1601 an “assurance of security” or “agent of tracking”? an empirical study of the impact of vocational education on social mobility by wang, y. j. & hu, h. q. correspondence to: yijun wang, institute of vocational education, tongji university, china. e-mail: wyjxgh@tongji.edu.cn ublished in the journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), this study drew on data from the china family panel survey (cfps) by the institute of social science survey at peking university as the research sample to examine the impact of education on social mobility as well as the influences of the registered residence, administrative region and other factors on social mobility of populations with different educational levels. the descriptive analysis and linear regression methods were adopted in the research. the results of the study are as follows:  a longitudinal comparison of the social status between populations of various educational backgrounds revealed that generally, those that have received higher education had higher socioeconomic status; compared with the junior secondary education group, the vocational education cohort enjoyed higher incomes and social status. to be more specific, people with vocational education background usually have relatively more stable incomes and could avoid the risk of falling into the bottom end of the labor market, which is a security particularly to socio-economically disadvantaged individuals. with the increase of age, their income levels tend to improve, further promoting the advancement of their social status. therefore, vocational education can provide an “assurance of security for individuals involved and their families.  according to the descriptive analysis of the intergenerational social mobility of the vocational education group, children’s the education levels exceeded those of parents to a large extent, vocational education can enable children to obtain more incomes than their parents, giving families (especially rural families) strong economic support, and there are more possibilities of occupational advancement among the younger generation. however, the social status of the younger generation tends to fluctuate around the p mailto:wyjxgh@tongji.edu.cn vol.12, no.1, 2022 1602 level of that of their parents, and the upward margin of social mobility is constrained.  the regression analysis results indicated that vocational education could more significantly promote social mobility for rural families and families in relatively backward western regions than for urban families and those in developed eastern regions. it can be concluded from research findings that it is difficult for vocational education group to obtain a substantial raise in social status due to their limited family economic, social, and cultural capital, the “utilitarian” nature of vocational education itself, and the labor market structure, yet they can still achieve a socio-economic status above the social average, which has the tendency to improve over time. however, from an individual or family perspective, vocational education can provide an “assurance of security” and to a certain extent promote positive social mobility. in general, the security function of vocational education is more significant, though its function of tracking is still strong, and the gap in socio-economic status between the vocational education and higher education cohorts will gradually expand over time. in light of that, the study suggests that vocational education should strive to offer students high-quality educational resources, increase employment opportunities, and improve social mobility, thus enhancing its function of assuring security. especially, the government should increase subsidies for vocational education in the western region and guide rural families to take on vocational education through corresponding support policies. at the same time, we should encourage junior secondary graduates to receive vocational education and give full play to the positive role of vocational education in the context of industrial transformation and upgrading. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences),2022;2022(07):69-84. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1203 emotional regulation report on the study of social and emotional skills of chinese adolescents (ii) zhi liu, ruirui zhu, haili cui, & jingzhong huang east china normal university, shanghai 200241, china ecently, an article published in the journal of east china normal university (education sciences) was based on the data of 10-year-old and 15-year-old students in suzhou city, china participating in the oecd social and emotional ability assessment. the study used descriptive statistics, difference testing, regression analysis, and other statistical methods to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the emotional regulation performance of suzhou students. emotion regulation is an important part of one’s social and emotional ability. in the oecd’s research on social and emotional ability, based on the theory of the “big five personalities”, the connotation of emotional regulation is defined as whether a person can manage emotional well, effectively adjust negative emotions and cope with pressure, as well as maintain a positive and optimistic attitude towards one’s personal life and social career development. in view of the emotional adjustment methods of adolescents and the characteristics that they cannot accurately observe and express, the emotional adjustment dimensions of the oecd social and emotional ability assessment measure stress resistance, optimism, and emotion control. one carries out the three-demonstration analysis based on the performance of the item’s ability. the emotional state will have an important impact on one’s study, work, and personal life. a large number of empirical studies indicate that emotional regulation is closely related to health and well-being, but especially overall physical and mental health. the oecd pointed out in its re © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. r bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1204 search report that emotion regulation is of great significance to the life development of children and adolescents and is closely related to many life outcome variables (such as educational expectations, test anxiety, life satisfaction, happiness, health, etc.). with the increasing uncertainty of current social development, students must face many sudden changes in learning, living environment, and interpersonal relationships. in this case, regulating emotions is particularly important for students. when cannot adapt and adjust, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and other emotions may result. therefore, it is extremely important and urgent to teach young students to regulate and manage emotions well. the sampling of the oecd youth social and emotional ability research is systematically conducted from all eligible schools and students in the participating cities, specifically to all primary and secondary schools in the 6 districts and 4 county-level cities under the jurisdiction of suzhou city. the study uses a stratified two-stage cluster sampling method. the 10-yearold group and the 15-year-old group constituted 3,800 and 3,750 subjects, respectively, with the total sample size being 7,550. the research results are divided into three parts, including overall condition, analysis on predictive variables of emotion regulation, and variables of emotion regulation and life outcome. the analysis shows differences in the students’ abilities to resist stress, their optimism, and emotional control according to age, gender, urban and rural areas, and school categories. there is a correlation among the 15 abilities of the “big five personalities” model, which one can analyze from multiple levels through regression analysis. one may also explore the predictive variables of students’ emotion regulation and the influence of emotion regulation on the five major life outcome variables. the details are as follows: the overall situation of emotional regulation the overall performance of suzhou students in emotional regulation reveals the scores of various sub-abilities of emotional regulation, the correlation between emotional regulation and other sub-abilities, and the differences in age, gender, urban and rural areas, and school types of emotional regulation. the study found that among 10-year-old students, anti-stress, optimism, and emotional control were significantly related to other abilities (p < 0.01). optimism and emotional control were at a medium-to-high level, with an impact coefficient of 0.60. anti-stress and optimism were at a medium-to-high level. the level-related influence coefficient was 0.57, and emotional control and anti-stress were also related to the middle and high levels, with an influence coefficient of 0.57. anti-stress, optimism, and emotional control were significantly related to other abilities (p < 0.01) among students in the 15-year-old group. optimism and emotional control were related to a medium-to-high level, with an impact coefficient of 0.62. anti-stress and optimism were related to a medium-to-high level. the influence coefficient was 0.60. emotional control and anti-stress were also related to the middle to high level, and the influence coefficient was 0.57. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1205 there were also significant differences in the score performance of various sub-abilities of emotion regulation in age, gender, urban and rural areas; the differences between general high school and vocational high school were insignificant. there is a substantial difference between the age-based tripartite evaluations of students, parents, and teachers. the evaluations of the 10year-old group by students and teachers are 0.08-66 points higher than those of the 15-year-old group, while the parents’ evaluations of the 10-year-old group are lower than 15 11-23 points in the age group. with the increase of age, the difference in the ability of male and female students in the dimension of emotion regulation will change. in the lower age group, there is little difference between boys and girls, but in the higher age group, boys have better emotional regulation ability than girls. students in the central city indicate better emotional regulation than that of the rural students. the urbanrural differences in the three abilities of anti-stress, optimism, and emotion control in the 10-year-old group are statistically significantly different from 0 (p < 0.01), indicating the central city students’ emotional regulation is significantly higher than in rural areas. the 15-year-old students have relatively small differences in the mean of these 3 abilities, and there is no statistically significant difference. analysis of predictors of emotion regulation it is necessary to use multiple regression to analyze the factors that affect emotional regulation development, including background variables, student variables, teacher variables, school variables, and family variables. regarding the background variables, in the 10-year-old group of students, the two variables of family possessions and the number of family books have stable and significant positive effects on the three emotional regulation abilities. the p values are all less than 0.01, and the coefficients respectively are 0.24. 0.09. in the 10-year-old group of students, the three variables of parents’ highest education, family possessions, and family book collection have stable and significant positive effects on the three abilities of emotional regulation. the p values are all less than 0.01, and the coefficients are 0.01, 0.17, 0.01, respectively. regarding student variables, in general, whether it is a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old student, the six variables of security, friendship, good habits of friends, friendliness of classmates, outdoor activity time and growth-oriented thinking are all related to emotional regulation. the item ability has a significant and stable positive impact (p < 0.01), and a wide range of social relationships negatively impacts the 10-year-old group of students (p < 0.01) and positively impacts the 15-year-old group of students (p < 0.01). regarding teacher variables, for the 10-year-old group of students, the two variables of teacher-student relationship and teaching age have stable and significant positive effects on the three abilities of emotional regulation dimensions (p < 0.01), with coefficients around 0.18 and 0.05. for the 15year-old students, the three abilities of the teacher-student relationship in the bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1206 emotional regulation dimension have stable and significant positive effects (p < 0.01), with a coefficient of about 0.16. whether it is a 10-year-old or a 15year-old student, the teacher-student relationship can have a stable and significant positive impact on the three abilities of stress, optimism and emotional control. in addition, for the 10-year-old group of students, the teacher’s high expectations have a negative impact on students’ emotional regulation (p < 0.01), but for the 15-year-old group, similar effects are not obvious (p = 0.01). regarding school variables, for the 10-year-old group of students, the three variables of school belonging, school cooperation atmosphere, and extra-school activities have stable and significant positive effects on the three abilities of emotion regulation (p < 0.01), with 0.32, 0.15, and 0.09 coefficients, respectively. for 15-year-old students, similar to 10-year-old students, the three variables of school belonging, school cooperation atmosphere, and extra-school activities have stable and significant positive effects on the three abilities of 15-year-old students in the emotional regulation dimension (p < 0.01), with coefficients of 0.40, 0.05, and 0.09, respectively. regarding family variables for the 10-year-old group of students, the three variables of understanding fathers, understanding mothers, and parents’ high expectations have stable and significant positive effects on the three emotional regulation abilities (p < 0.01) with coefficients of 0.14, 0.11, and 0.06, respectively. parent-child problems and punitive fathers have a significant negative impact on the three abilities (p < 0.01), and the coefficients are 0.17 and 0.00, respectively. this shows that the discordant parent-child relationship and strict fathers hinder students’ emotional regulation abilities. for the 15-year-old group of students, the three variables of understanding fathers, punitive fathers, and parents’ high expectations have stable and significant positive effects on the three abilities of emotional regulation dimensions (p < 0.01), with coefficients of 0.11, 0.05, and 0.07, respectively. the difference in the 10-year-old group is that the strictness of the father’s discipline positively correlated to a child’s ability to regulate emotions. the degree of influence of understanding parents is generally higher than that of punitive parents, and for 15-year-old students, the influence of fathers is greater than that of mothers. moreover, punitive mothers have a negative influence on children’s emotional regulation. in addition, consistent with the 10-year-old group, the parent-child problem also has a significant negative impact on the three abilities (p < 0.01), with a coefficient of about 0.23. emotion regulation and life outcomes from the perspective of academic performance and educational expectations, for the 10-year-old group of students, the optimism of emotional regulation and emotional control has a stable and positive impact on students’ performance in chinese, mathematics, and art p < 0.01). in contrast, the influence of optimism is greater (coefficients are 0.06, 0.06, 0.05, respectively). compared with students in the 15-year-old group, optimism and emotional con bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1207 trol have different effects on the performance of each subject and their educational expectations. from the perspective of global awareness, whether it is a 10-year-old, or a 15-year-old student, anti-stress, optimism, and emotional control have a positive and significant impact on their global awareness (p < 0.01). this indicates that improving anti-stress, optimism, and emotional control could increase the global awareness of students of different age groups. from the perspective of health, whether it is a 10-year-old or a 15year-old student, the emotional regulation ability has a significant positive impact on one’s health status (p < 0.01), indicating that one’s optimism, ability to resist stress and emotional control can enhance one’s health. from the perspective of quality of life, whether it is a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old student, the ability to resist stress, optimism and emotional control has a significant positive impact on happiness and satisfaction (p < 0.01), and a significant negative for test anxiety influence (p < 0.01), that is, the better the emotional regulation ability, the less test anxiety. from the perspective of social relations, the assessment of social and emotional abilities mainly includes variables such as being close to family members (parents) and close to others (companion relations). from the analysis results, in both groups, emotional regulation ability has a significant positive impact on close family members and others to whom one is close (p < 0.01), indicating that the ability to resist stress, optimism, and emotional control can be improved. these abilities can make students closer to family and others. therefore, as an important dimension of social and emotional ability, emotion regulation is affected by different subjects and many variable factors. under the current rapidly developing and changing social background, it becomes increasingly important for students to have strong emotional regulation abilities. accordingly, this study presents some research recommendations: in terms of concepts, we must attach great importance to cultivating students’ emotional regulation-related abilities; in implementation, we must master and use strategies and models for emotional regulation; all relevant subjects must clarify their own roles, explore effective paths, and form a joint force for educating people. we should also promote the improvement of students’ emotional regulation levels. source: journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2021, 39(09): 47-46. correspondence to: jingzhong huang east china normal university shanghai 200241, jiangsu china email: zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.rp032 mailto:zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1074 the impact of boarding on the children’s health in rural china by jiang, n., & xu, j. correspondence to: xu, j., college of economics and management, zhejiang a&f university, china. email: xu_jingqin@163.com his article is based on the data from the china health and nutrition survey in the year 2009, 2011, and 2015, which covers a total of 12 provinces in the east-central-west regions of china, using the propensity score matching method (psm), and adopted the rosenbaum boundary estimation and instrumental variable methods for robustness testing to confirm the credibility of the research conclusions. the research results are as follows:  indicators and method introduction: using the anthropometric parameters (height, weight, etc.) to measure children’s health status, and use haz score (height for age z-score) to evaluate children’s long-term nutritional health status, baz score (bmi for age z-score) to reflect children’s recent or short-term nutritional health status. from the descriptive statistics of the data, it is known that there are certain characteristics differences between boarding students and non-boarding students. the propensity score matching method (psm) needs to be used to control the differences in characteristics besides children’s health status, and it is necessary to further adopt the robustness test of rosenbaum boundary estimation and instrumental variable method to confirm the reliability of the research conclusions.  analysis of the results: boarding at school has a certain negative impact on children’s health, and rural children from central west regions, especially the western areas were strongly affected, while the situation of that in the eastern region is not significant; the negative impact of school boarding on the health of rural boarding students mainly occurs at the elementary school level.  countermeasures and suggestions: first, it is necessary to contribute to the reinforcement of financial support for rural boarding schools in the central west regions, especially in the western regions. meanwhile, the special fund for the nutrition improvement plan for boarding schools requires strict management. second, great importance should be attached to children’s health t vol.8, no.1, 2021 1075 problems caused by low-age boarding. it is strongly recommended to provide nutrition and health courses and strengthening home-school interaction to help low-age boarding children develop healthy eating habits; third, refine the rural boarding schools’ management, carry out some nutrition knowledge training, concentrate on meal collocation, ensure the diversified food and balanced nutrition structure, and improve the food taste, so as to provide a good learning and living condition for rural boarding children. source: education & economy, 2020; 36(4):21-29. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1213 open-mindedness report on the study of social and emotional skills of chinese adolescents (iv) zhifang shao, zhi liu, shuyu yang, & jingzhong huang east china normal university, shanghai 200241, china s one of the five dimensions of social and emotional ability, openmindedness is derived from the openness factor of the “big five personality”, which describes one’s willingness to try and accept novel experiences. people with a high level of open-mindedness are more creative and artistic, while those with low level of openness are more obedient to tradition and pragmatic, but lack of innovation. according to the oecd research framework, open-mindedness includes tolerance, curiosity and creativity. this study is based on data collected from 10-year-old and 15year-old students in suzhou city participating in the oecd social and emotional ability assessment. it uses descriptive statistics, difference testing and regression analysis to present the performance of suzhou students’ openmindedness. this allows the study to provide reference for the accurate assessment of teenagers’ social and emotional abilities, in addition to further developing the quality of education in china. the study presents data results from the following three parts: the first part presents the overall score of open-mindedness, the correlation between open-mindedness and other subabilities, and the age difference of open-mindedness (comparison between 10 and 15 years old group), gender difference, urban-rural difference, and the difference between general high and vocational high; the second part presents the factors influencing open-mindedness through regression analysis, including background variables, individual factors, family upbringing, teacher factors, and school factors; the third part presents the effects of tolerance, curiosity and creativity on academic achievement (chinese, math, art), edu © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. a bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1214 cational expectation, global consciousness, closeness to family, closeness to others, health, life happiness, life satisfaction, test anxiety and other life outcome variables of 10 and 15 year old students through regression analysis. the results are as follows: the overall status of open capacity from the scores of openness, suzhou students’ self-evaluate openmindedness at a higher level, indicating that their confidence in themselves is higher than the international average. at the same time, the self-rating of students in the 10-year-old group is lower than that in the 15-year-old group. the same is true for parents’ and teachers’ ratings, which are themselves similar. in the distribution graphs of each sub-ability score of the two age groups, there is a small peak in the high end of the distribution graph of the 10-year-old group. the reason for this phenomenon may be that some elementary school students are susceptible to social expectations, leading them to be more likely to give what they think society may deem the “best” option. from the perspective of the correlation between open-mindedness and other sub-abilities and compared with the international sample, the suzhou sample has a higher correlation between tolerance, curiosity, and creativity in its openness. moreover, the correlation coefficients are all higher than 0.5. there are also higher correlation coefficients between open-mindedness’ sub-abilities and the sub-abilities of other abilities. among them, openmindedness has a higher correlation with task ability and collaboration ability. the correlation coefficient between curiosity and perseverance in the 10year-old group is 0.69, and the correlation coefficient with cooperation score is 0.67. in contrast, the correlation is low between openness and emotional regulation and communication skills, while the correlation coefficient of the 15-year-old group is slightly lower than that of the 10-year-old group. from the perspective of the difference in openness, the scores of openness of 15-year-old boys and girls are significantly lower than those of 10year-olds. this is especially the case for the curiosity and creativity scores, with an effect size of about 0.8. here, compared with boys, girls experience a decline. this result is particularly serious and deserves focused attention; gender differences in the openness of the 10-year-old group are small, with the only significant differences in tolerance scores (girls are higher than boys). the effect is weak, and there is a gender difference in the 15-year-old group. as a result, girls are more tolerant than boys, but they score significantly lower than boys in curiosity and creativity in these groups. in both urban and rural areas, the openness of students in schools in central urban areas is significantly higher than schools in rural areas, but the effect size is not large; in general, they are higher in vocational schools except for girls’ creativity scores, while other indicators are significantly higher than those of vocational high school students. influencing factors of openness bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1215 use multiple regression to analyze the factors that affect openness, including the effects of background variables, student variables, teacher variables, school variables, and family variables on tolerance, curiosity, and creativity. regarding background variables, among the 10-year-old students, parents’ highest education level, family possessions and family book collection significantly positively affect tolerance, curiosity and creativity. the positive influence coefficients of the parents’ highest educational background were 0.01, 0.01, and 0.04, respectively. the positive influence coefficients of family possessions were 0.45, 0.49, 0.47, respectively, and the positive influence coefficients of family book collection were 0.07, 0.06, and 0.09, respectively. among students in the 15-year-old group, age, parents’ highest education, family possessions, and family collections significantly positively affect tolerance, curiosity, and creativity. the positive coefficients of age are 0.61, 0.66, and 0.51, respectively, with parents being the highest. the positive influence coefficients of educational background were 0.02, 0.02, and 0.03, respectively. the positive influence coefficients of family possessions were 0.31, 0.31, 0.38, respectively, while the positive influence coefficients of family book collection were 0.05, 0.05, and 0.06, respectively. regarding student variables, among the 10-year-old students, security, friendships, and good habits significantly positively affect tolerance, curiosity, and creativity. friends’ high expectations and online time significantly negatively affect tolerance, curiosity, and creativity. among the students in the 15-year-old group, one’s sense of security, friendships, good habit friends, extensive social relationships, outdoor activity time, and growth-oriented thinking all significantly positively affect students’ tolerance, curiosity and creativity. friends’ high expectations and online time significantly negatively affect students’ tolerance, curiosity and creativity. regarding teacher variables, the teacher-student relationship significantly positively affects the tolerance, curiosity and creativity of students in the 10-year-old group and the 15-year-old group (p < 0.01; 10-year-old group: β is 0.12, 0.14, 0.11, respectively; 15-year-old group; β = 0.14, 0.15, and 0.13). the training frequency has a significant positive effect on the three abilities of the 10-year-old group (p < 0.01, β = 0.01, 0.01, and 0.01, respectively). among the three abilities of the 15-year-old group, the influence is significantly negative (p < 0.01, β = -0.01, -0.00, -0.01, respectively). regarding school variables, except that the standard regression coefficient of school bullying on curiosity scores is insignificant, other factors including school belonging, school cooperation atmosphere, school competition atmosphere, and extra-school activities all significantly positively affect the tolerance of the 10-year-old and 15-year-old students degree, curiosity and creativity. regarding family variables, whether it is a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old student, understanding mothers, understanding fathers, and parents’ high expectations all significantly positively affect students’ tolerance, curiosity, and creativity. parent-child issues significantly negatively affect three abilities (p bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1216 < 0.01; 10-year-old group: β = -0.04, -0.07, -0.04, respectively; 15-year-old group; β = -0.05, -0.07, -0.04 respectively). openness and life outcomes among the 10-year-old students, tolerance, curiosity and creativity have significant positive effects on educational expectations, global awareness, health, happiness, satisfaction, and closeness to family and others. among the 15year-old students, tolerance, curiosity and creativity have significant positive effects on global awareness, health, happiness, satisfaction, and closeness to others. in addition, whether it is a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old group, the regression coefficients of curiosity scores on various variables of life outcomes have reached an extremely significant level, indicating the high importance of curiosity in students’ lives. it is therefore necessary to strengthen encouragement and guidance for high school girls, rural school students, and vocational school students to prevent “stereotype threats” caused by various gaps. during the enrollment stage of freshmen, we should protect students’ curiosity and creativity, set reasonable course difficulty and academic burden, and prioritize inspiring freshmen’s curiosity and cultivating students’ active learning spirit. in addition, protecting and developing the curiosity of students is the key to the development of social and emotional abilities. source: journal of east china normal university (education science edition), 2021, 39(09):77-92. correspondence to: zhifang shao east china normal university shanghai 200241 china email: zfshao@psy.ecnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.rp034 mailto:zfshao@psy.ecnu.edu.cn bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1071 can augmented reality improve learning? by nie, y., & wan, w. correspondence to: nie, y., shaanxi normal university, china. email: nieyong@snnu.edu.cn n the basis of 40 effective experimental and quasi-experimental studies from home and abroad, the article recently published in modern educational technology explored the issue of whether augmented reality technology can improve learning effectiveness through the usage of review manager. the main research results are as follows: this study provides strong evidence for the education and teaching effects of ar technology and confirms that ar technology does have a moderate (d = 0.57) effect on student’s learning effects. the ar technology has a moderate influence on student’s cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability.  ar technology has a moderate influence on the learning effectiveness of different learning stages, with the most significant effects on the preschool stage, followed by a primary school, and the least effects on the college stage.  combined with different teaching methods, ar technology can always greatly improve the practical learning effects, but moderating effects vary in different interventions.  the effect size of ar application in different scenarios ranging from high to low in turns is: off-campus venues (d = 0.73), classroom (d = 0.63), and campus laboratory (d = 0.48). moreover, there exist differences in the moderating effects on learning effectiveness under different scenarios. based on the findings above, this study also provides some practical recommendations, such as improving the role of technology on learning effectiveness, flexibly choosing the situation according to the teaching contents, and carefully selecting the original teaching methods in the application of ar technology. source: modern educational technology, 2021; 31(2):40-47. o bece. newsletter vol.10, no.2, 2022 1422 is “hope for success” effective? by cheng, g., du, s. h., & yu, q. correspondence to: gang cheng, beijing normal university. e-mail: cg@bnu.edu.cn high expectations, strict requirements” has been the typical educational principle for many parents. however, does “ambition” really work? a study published in journal of east china normal university uses the statistical data of china education panel studies (ceps) from 2014 to 2015 to explore the influence of parent-child education expectation deviation on adolescent academic performance and its mechanism by applying the least square regression, propensity score matching and bootstrap mediation effect test. the results are as follows.  comprehensive ols and psm estimation results of the whole sample show that parent-child education expectation deviation significantly and negatively affects adolescent academic performance.  the up-biased parent-child education expectation deviation represented by a strong desire for success is not reasonable and has a significant negative impact on academic performance. there is no significant relation between the downward bias of parent-child education expectation deviation and academic performance, but it does not mean that it is reasonable that the perceived parental education expectation should be lower than the children’s selfexpectation.  psychological pressure, academic burden and negative emotions play a partial mediating role in the relationship between upward biased parent-child education expectation deviation and academic achievement. the negative impact of over-expectation on individuals may be related to low learning efficiency and insufficient academic input caused by over-study and psychological pressure, which may lead to more severe psychological problems in the long run.  the results of gender comparison show that compared with girls, boys’ academic performance is more prone to the negative impact of up-biased parent-child education expectation deviation. the mediating mechanism provides a reasonable explanation for this result. the stress level, academic burden, and negative emotions “ mailto:cg@bnu.edu.cn vol.10, no.2, 2022 1423 of boys with high expectation preference are higher than those of girls with high expectation preference. based on the research results, this study suggests that in teenager family education, parents should understand the fundamental value of education and make objective evaluation of children’s academic ability; parent-child interaction and communication should be maintained; parents should help their children to regulate their psychological pressure, academic burden and negative emotions; parents should pay more attention to boys’ educational expectations to help them overcome academic difficulties, build confidence and grow up healthily. source: journal of east china normal university (education science edition), 2022;(01):74-87. bece. newsletter vol.12, no.2, 2022 1655 the relationship between peer attachment and mobile phone addiction of junior secondary school students: an analysis based on a moderated mediation model by yang, c., lian, s. l., chen, c. y., sun, x. j., & zhou, z. k. correspondence to: zongkui zhou, central china normal university, china. email: zhouzk@mail.ccnu.edu.cn eer attachment refers to the intimacy between adolescents and their peers, in which they give each other warmth and support. good peer attachment can reduce emotional and behavioral problems. peer attachment is also considered as an important factor affecting adolescents' mobile phone addiction. in order to clarify the relationship between peer attachment and mobile phone addiction and its mechanism, this study constructed a moderated mediation model to examine the mediation of negative emotions and the moderating effect of the ability to be alone. in this study, 782 junior middle school students were surveyed in groups by class-based cluster sampling. the measuring instruments included the inventory of peer attachment, the depression anxiety stress scale, mobile phone addiction index, and the ability to be alone scale. the research results show that: (i) after controlling for gender, age, grade, being only child or not, and mobile phone use years, peer attachment has a significant negative predictive effect on mobile phone addiction. (ii) negative emotions exert complete mediation on the relationship between peer attachment and cell phone addiction. (iii) the direct effect of peer attachment on cell phone addiction and the mediating effect of negative emotions are both moderated by the ability to be alone. the moderated mediation model constructed from the perspective of compensation theory is used to clarify how peer attachment affects mobile phone addiction of junior secondary school students (the mediating effect of negative emotions) and to respond to the question when peer attachment has a more significant impact on mobile phone addiction (the moderating effect of the ability to be alone). the results of the study have theoretical and practical significance for deepening the research on the causes of mobile phone addiction and guiding junior secondary school students to develop good peer attachment to ensure sound psychosocial functioning. p mailto:zhouzk@mail.ccnu.edu.cn vol.12, no.2, 2022 1656 source: psychological development and education, 2022; 38(4):538-545. the influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students: the mediating role of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy lei wang, yirui song wuhan sports university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china abstract. to explore the relationship and mechanism of school loosetight culture to middle school bullying, a total of 808 students were selected from three middle schools in dehong prefecture, yunnan province of china, to conduct a questionnaire survey. the study used the school loose-tight culture scale, the collective moral disengagement scale, the collective efficacy scale, and the bullying scale for middle school students. the results showed that (i) school loose-tight culture significantly predicted the occurrence of school bullying; (ii) school loose-tight culture was significantly negatively correlated with collective moral disengagement and school bullying but positively correlated with collective efficacy. further, collective moral disengagement was significantly positively correlated with school bullying, but collective efficacy was significantly negatively correlated with school bullying; (iii) school loose-tight culture inhibited school bullying through the dual mediating effects of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy at the same time. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 9(2):1263-1272. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.ar060. how to cite: wang, l., & song, y. (2021). the influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students: the mediating role of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy. best evidence in chinese education, 9(2):1263-1272. keywords: school loose-tight culture, collective moral disengagement, collective efficacy, campus bullying wang & song. influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students. bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1264 about the author: yirui song, department of psychology, wuhan sports university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. e-mail: 804504354@qq.com correspondence to: lei wang, associate professor, department of psychology, wuhan sports university, wuhan 430079, hubei province, china. e-mail: 378299706@qq.com funding: this work was supported by the national social science fund project “mental generation mechanism and intervention research on campus violence in middle school students” (project #: 16bsh104). conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:804504354@qq.com mailto:378299706@qq.com wang & song. influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1265 question chool bullying is considered a widespread form of school violence, which has a long-term negative impact on young people’s healthy personalities and development (hu, 2017). studies have shown that students with externalized behavior problems react negatively to the external environment (cai, 2006). first, according to the ternary interaction theory, an individual’s behavior is strongly governed by motivation and beliefs and adversely affects the subject’s thinking and emotions. secondly, behavior is not only governed by individual needs but also restricted by the environment. schools and classes are the environments that middle school students are exposed to most frequently, directly impacting their behavior. studies have shown that bullying behaviors of middle school students are related to factors such as moral disengagement, self-efficacy, and class environment (wang et al., 2018). still, there is no research on the influencing factors of campus bullying from the collective level. according to the ecological system theory, the development of middle school students is in a complex environmental system, and each layer of the system interacts with other systems and individuals, which affects the development of students. school culture is the core force that promotes the development of the school and the internal mechanism that affects students’ behavior. therefore, it is feasible and significant to discuss the impact of school culture on campus bullying from the collective level. tight-loose culture is a new dimension of cross-cultural psychology research, which refers to the social norm culture of punishment and intensity of deviant behaviors (lu et al., 2017). the “loose” in tight-loose culture refers to weak norms and a high tolerance for deviant behaviors (inadequate punishment), and “tight” refers to solid norms and a low tolerance for deviant behaviors (intense punishment) (gelfand, li & gordon, 2017). social norms under different cultural backgrounds reflect the difference between looseness and tightness, which helps to enhance our understanding and prediction of differences in human psychology and behavior. under different school cultural backgrounds, students perceive different school loose-tight cultures, and their selfcontrol, self-regulation, and self-monitoring abilities for bullying behavior are also quite different. studies have shown that students are prone to frequent skipping classes in schools with relatively loose rules and regulations. students cannot be better integrated into the class environment, leading to increased bullying behavior (zeng et al., 2019). as a result, school loose-tight culture directly impacts campus bullying, and this impact will play a role indirectly through the class atmosphere. studies have shown that moral disengagement has a significant positive predictive effect on adolescent verbal bullying, relationship bullying, and physical bullying (yang & wang, 2012). bandura (2002) put forward the concept of collective moral disengagement, which refers to the common belief of the group that defends negative behaviors morally, and it reflects the degree of recognition or opposition of the class to certain irregular behaviors. as a collective consensus, collective moral disengagement is more likely to transfer responsibility, which in turn increases the possibility of campus bullying. the lower the middle school students’ perception of the school atmoss wang & song. influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1266 phere, the higher their level of moral disengagement. collective efficacy is proposed by bandura based on self-efficacy and defines it as to whether people feel that they can solve problems through joint efforts in a group, organization, or country, and increase the strength of belief in life. studies have shown a negative correlation between individual self-efficacy and bullying behavior, and individuals with low self-efficacy are more likely to have bullying behavior (valois et al., 2017). studies have pointed out that student problem behaviors are significantly related to class collective efficacy, and students with lower collective efficacy levels are bullied more frequently (sapouna, 2010). social norms run through the entire human culture and are a collective consensus of human beings on acceptable behavior. collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy, as a collective consensus of class environment and school belonging, may affect students’ bullying behavior. school culture has a particular influence on campus bullying. in addition, collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy, as an individual’s perception of class atmosphere, also impact campus bullying behavior. according to ecosystem theory, school loose-tight culture will affect the class atmosphere, and the class atmosphere will further affect campus bullying. therefore, the relationship between school loosetight culture, collective moral disengagement, collective efficacy, and the occurrence of campus bullying is worthy of attention. this study aims to test the relationship between these variables to provide a reference for the prevention and intervention of school bullying. methodology survey object using the convenient sampling method, a total of 850 middle school students were selected from three middle schools in dehong prefecture, yunnan province of china. after excluding 42 invalid data, 808 valid data were finally obtained, with an effective rate of 95.1%. among them, there are 353 boys (43.7%) and 455 girls (56.3%); there are 276 (34.2%) students in the 7th grade, 238 (29.5%) in the 8th grade, and 294 (36.3%) in the 9th grade. research tools  school loose-tight culture scale this study used the school loose-tight culture scale compiled by gelfand et al. (2011), with a total of 6 items. a likert 6-point scoring is used, from 1 for “completely disagree” to 6 for “completely agree. the higher the score, the “tighter” the school loose-tight culture perceived by the students. the cronbach’s α coefficient of the scale in this study was 0.86.  school bullying moral disengagement scale wang & song. influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1267 this study used the moral disengagement scale of campus bullying compiled by thornberg et al. the chinese version was revised by wang, yan & qiu (2019). there are 30 items in the scale divided into eight dimensions: moral defense, distorted results, dehumanization, responsibility transfer, scattered responsibility, euphemistic labeling, favorable comparison, and blame attribution. use a 5-point scale of 1-5. the higher is the score, and the higher is the level of campus bullying moral disengagement. the cronbach’s α coefficient of the scale in this study was 0.91.  collective efficacy scale this study used the collective efficacy scale compiled by goddard (2002), with 12 tems in total. it is divided into two factors: task analysis and group structure. using a 5-point scale of 1-5, and the higher is the score; the higher is the students’ collective efficacy. the cronbach’s α coefficient of the scale in this study was 0.87.  bullying scale for middle school students using yang’s (2014) bullying scale for middle school students, there are 14 items in total, divided into two subscales: bullying and being bullied. the scale uses a 5-point scale of 1-5. the bullying scale has seven items, and the higher the score, the higher the frequency of bullying; the bullied scale has seven items and the higher the score, the higher the degree of being bullied. the cronbach’s α coefficient of the bullying subscale and the being bullied subscale in this study were 0.89 and 0.85, respectively. data processing and collection use spss25.0 for reliability test, single factor common method deviation test, descriptive statistics, and correlation analysis. in addition, mplus7.4 established the structural equation model, and the mediation effect test of the percentile bootstrap method with deviation correction was carried out. results and analysis common method deviation test harman’s single factor test method was used to perform unrotated efa on all the original items of the main variables in this study. the test results found that the explanatory rate of the first common factor was 14.28%, which did not exceed the critical value of 40%. therefore, this result indicated that no serious common method deviation existed in this study. descriptive statistics descriptive statistics and pearson correlation analysis were performed on school loosetight culture, collective moral disengagement, collective efficacy, and school bullying (table 1). the results showed that school bullying was significantly negatively corre wang & song. influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1268 table 1. correlation analysis of school bullying and school loose-tight culture, collective moral disengagement, and collective efficacy. variable m±sd school loose-tight culture collective moral disengagement collective efficacy bullying school loose-tight culture 4.52±0.93 1 collective moral disengagement 2.09±0.65 -0.17** 1 collective efficacy 3.58±0.58 0.31** -0.28** 1 bullying 1.71±0.81 -0.21** 0.28** -0.33** 1 being bullied 1.34±0.65 -0.15** 0.31** -0.28** 0.53** note: **p<0.01, ***p<0.001. table 2. analysis of the mediating effect of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy. effect size boot se z p 95% ci upper limit lower limit overall effect -0.25 0.04 -5.53 < 0.001 -0.34 -0.16 indirect effect -0.22 0.03 -5.90 < 0.001 -0.30 -0.16 school loose-tight culture → collective moral disengagement → school bullying -0.07 0.02 -3.55 < 0.001 -0.11 -0.03 school loose-tight culture → collective efficacy → school bullying -0.15 0.03 -4.84 < 0.001 -0.23 -0.10 direct effect -0.03 0.02 -0.52 0.61 -0.13 0.08 lated with school loose-tight culture, significantly positively correlated with collective moral disengagement, and significantly negatively correlated with collective efficacy. school loose-tight culture has a significant negative correlation with collective moral disengagement and a significant positive correlation with collective efficacy. furthermore, bullying is positively associated with being bullied. this showed that school bullying is obviously affected by school loose-tight culture perception, collective moral disengagement, and collective efficacy. wang & song. influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1269 figure 1. the mediation model of school loose-tight culture affecting school bullying. the mediating role of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy in the relationship between school loose-tight culture and school bullying structural equation modeling was used to analyze the multiple mediating effects of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy between school loose-tight culture and campus bullying (figure 1). each fitting index of the model reached a critical value (χ 2 /df = 3.64, cfi = 0.95, tli = 0.94, rmsea = 0.06). according to the bootstrap method recommended by wen and ye (2014) to further test the significance of the mediation effect. the results show that the mediating effects of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy are both significant, and the parallel mediating effects of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy in school loosening culture and campus bullying are significant. the total effect of school loose-tight culture on school bullying was -0.25. after the model introduces collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy, the direct effect changed to -0.03; the indirect effect of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy in the impact of school bullying on school loose-tight culture was 0.22, and the effect amount (that is, the mediation effect accounts for the total effect percentage) was 88%. school loose-tight culture had an indirect effect on campus bullying through collective moral disengagement, with a size of -0.07, accounting for 28% of the total effect. school loose-tight culture could also indirectly affect bullying behavior wang & song. influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1270 through collective efficacy, with a size of -0.15, accounting for 60% of the overall effect (table 2). discussion this study aimed to explore the impact of school loose-tight culture on campus bullying, and the mediating mechanism of collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy. correlation analysis showed that school loose-tight culture is significantly negatively correlated with school bullying; further structural equations showed that school loosetight culture negatively predicts school bullying. the finding is consistent with previous research results (wang et al., 2017) and further proved the negative predictive effect of school loose-tight culture on campus bullying. collective moral disengagement is significantly positively correlated with campus bullying; collective efficacy is significantly negatively correlated with campus bullying. this result validates our hypothesis and is also in line with the moral disengagement theory. when individuals have externalized behavior problems, they will first reduce psychological guilt and self-blame through the mechanism of moral disengagement (gutzwiller-helfenfinger, 2015). according to social cognition theory, when individuals pursue goals, self-efficacy affects behavior changes through physical arousal and is cultivated by individuals in the social environment. in the same way, collective efficacy is a way of cognition cultivated by individuals in a group environment and affects their bullying behavior. our results showed that collective moral disengagement plays a completely mediating role between school loose-tight culture and campus bullying. on the one hand, moral disengagement is a crucial internal mechanism for psychological abuse and neglect to affect adolescent bullying behavior. on the other hand, school culture is the norms, rules, atmosphere, and way of thinking jointly created by teachers, students, and school administrators in the long-term educational and teaching activities through the interaction between the school members. school culture provides students with ethical requirements, lists clear rules and regulations, and determines what behaviors students can do and what is out of school management treaties. these can effectively reduce the occurrence of collective moral disengagement. on the other hand, when the level of moral disengagement is higher, the collective will transfer more responsibility, thereby perceiving less attribution of blame and lowering the victim’s painful perception, which ultimately leads to campus bullying, consistent with previous studies (sun et al., 2017). therefore, we must not only pay attention to the cultivation of the school cultural environment, but also prevent the negative effect of collective moral disengagement in the class environment. collective efficacy plays a completely intermediary role between school loosetight culture and campus bullying. in collective cognition development, group identity, collective efficacy, and group emotions will change with social situations and group conditions. when students perceive the “tight” school culture atmosphere, the level of collective efficacy will increase, and group members are more willing to participate in joint actions. students have improved their interpersonal relationships through cooperation and communication, and the intervention on campus bullying will also increase, wang & song. influence of school loose-tight culture on bullying of middle school students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1271 which has a certain inhibitory effect on bullying. therefore, improving the level of collective effectiveness can effectively reduce the probability of school bullying incidents. the research results showed that there is a significant negative correlation between collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy. collective moral disengagement and collective efficacy, as a collective consciousness, as the class environment and atmosphere, are closely linked to the school culture, forming an ecological environment system that connects the school and the class and profoundly impacts the bullying behavior of students. the study results confirmed that the school loose-tight culture reduces school bullying by reducing collective moral disengagement and enhancing collective efficacy. thus, introducing the loose-tight cultural dimension in cross-cultural psychology has practical significance for advancing the localization of campus bullying. therefore, in the future, we can pay attention to campus bullying and the level of students’ mental health from the overall ecosystem level of individual-collective, home-school connection, and so on. references bandura, a. 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(2012). the influence of moral refusal on adolescents’ aggressive behavior: a moderated mediating effect. psychological bulletin, 44(8):1075-1085. available at: http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlxb/cn/y2012/v 44/i8/1075 yang, w.m. (2014). research on the influencing factors of middle school students’ bullying behavior: based on multi-layer analysis of hlm model. zhejiang: master’s thesis of zhejiang normal university. zeng, x.r., wang, y., ding, j.h., & zhou, h. (2019). classroom bullying norms and bullying behavior: the mediating effect of group fear and peer pressure. psychology news, 51(8):935-944. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3724/sp.j.1041.2019.00 935 received: 29 september 2021 revised: 07 october 2021 accepted: 25 october 2021 the chinese version of this article has been published in educational research and experiment, 2021,1:93-96. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 王磊, 宋一锐. (2021). 学校松-紧文化对中学生欺凌的影响: 集体道德推脱与集体效能感的中 介作用. 教育研究与实验, 1:93-96. https://doi.org/10.13110/merrpalmquar1982.61.1.0192 https://doi.org/10.13110/merrpalmquar1982.61.1.0192 http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlkxjz/cn/10.3724/sp.j.1042.2017.00887 http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlkxjz/cn/10.3724/sp.j.1042.2017.00887 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0886260509354509 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0886260509354509 https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.12493 http://www.jcse.com.cn/cn/y2017/v0/i3/54 http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlxb/cn/y2012/v44/i8/1075 http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlxb/cn/y2012/v44/i8/1075 http://dx.doi.org/10.3724/sp.j.1041.2019.00935 http://dx.doi.org/10.3724/sp.j.1041.2019.00935 article-leiwang-bece_title_dec2021 article-leiwang--bece_maintextdec2021 bece. newsletter vol.10, no.2, 2022 1415 the relationship between the home cognitive environment and the development of infants and toddlers aged 0-3 years by zhang, y., & hong, x. m. correspondence to: xiumin hong, beijing normal university. email: xiuminhong@163.com he first few years of a child’s life witness the most rapid development in his or her entire life. promoting the physical and mental health development of infants and toddlers at the age of 0-3 years is receiving widespread attention in china and abroad. published in psychological development and education recently, this study analyzes the mechanisms of the effects of family cognitive environment, child care experiences, and effortful control on the development of infants and toddlers at the age of 0-3 years, selecting parents of infants and toddlers aged between 0 and 3 as respondents. effortful control refers to individual-initiated self-regulation of emotional responses and behaviors, and it reflects individual differences in self-control，attention adjustment, and behavioral inhibition and activation. findings of the study：  infant and toddler effortful control has a mediating effect between the family cognitive environment and infant and toddler development, that is, the family cognitive environment influences infant and toddler development by acting on their effortful control. high-quality family cognitive environments provide rich opportunities for infants and toddlers to exercise effortful control, allowing them to regulate and manage their emotions and behaviors in different tasks, thus contributing to their overall development.  the first half of the mediating pathway “family cognitive environment-effort control-infant and toddler development” is moderated by whether or not the infant or toddler is enrolled in child care, the effect of family cognitive environment on infant and toddler effortful control is greater when they are enrolled in child care and weaker when they do not have any experience in child care. based on the above findings, the authors suggest that parents and educators should create a cognitively stimulating environment for infants and toddlers at home and in nurseries under the premise of ensuring safety and t mailto:xiuminhong@163.com vol.10, no.2, 2022 1416 health, which facilitates high-quality parent-child interactions and provides appropriate play materials, and that effortful control should be exercised in daily life to promote infant and toddler development. source: psychological development and education, 2020; 2020(2):178-185. bece. newsletter vol.8, no.2, 2021 1148 how does family labor promote the ability development of junior high school students? by fang, c., & cao, l. correspondence to: fang, c., graduate school of education, peking university, beijing, china, 100871. email: 1906391201@pku.edu.cn trengthening labor education is an indispensable part of the comprehensive development of students. however, the family, as an important field of student labor education, is failed to realize the effect. recently, a study published in journal of educational science of hunan normal university, on the basis of the baseline data of the china education panel survey, analyzing the junior high school student’s family labor situation in china by constructing a multi-layer linear model, and then explored the relationship between family labor and the development of junior high school student’s ability. the results show that:  there is a phenomenon of “absence” in family labor education in our country. 12.1% of junior high school students do not participate in family labor, and there are significant differences in the family labor time among different characteristics junior high school students.  there are significant differences in family labor among students from different family backgrounds and urban and rural areas. students from disadvantaged family backgrounds and rural students have a greater proportion of family labor with a longer time than other students.  family labor within one hour can help improve the academic performance and cognitive ability of junior high school students, but more than one hour will lead to decreases in grades and cognitive ability.  family labor has a significant positive impact on students’ noncognitive ability, such as openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and a sense of responsibility. it can also reduce neurotic negative emotions. therefore, the researchers suggest:  parents should attach importance to labor education and integrate labor education into family education. by setting up a good example for children by labor practice, parents can subtly nourish s mailto:1906391201@pku.edu.cn vol.8, no.2, 2021 1149 the labor character of students, and create a good atmosphere to optimize the labor habits of students.  follow the pattern of students’ physical and mental development to carry out appropriate family labor. for students with different characteristics, parents should allocate an appropriate amount of family work that conforms to the law of their physical and mental development, rather than allocate some repetitive and heavy physical labor. the key to family labor is to improve the quality of labor education.  all parties should actively build an internal and external interweaving multiple coordination family labor education system with family as the main body, school as the guide, and community as the support. source: journal of educational science of hunan normal university, 2021; 20(02):56-63+89. bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1061 the situation of “school’s out, but class’s on” under the epidemic by wang j., wei y., & zong m. correspondence to: wang j., school of educational information technology, central china normal university, china. email: wjxin@mail.ccnu.edu.cn onfronted with the covid-19 outbreak, online education has become the main way of teaching at all kinds of schools since the ministry of education of p. r. china proposed the “school’s out, but class’s on” policy. an empirical article published in china educational technology took 59,156 primary and secondary school teachers in hubei province (the worsthit area of the epidemic), as research objects, analyzing their online teaching behaviors, teaching modes, and acceptability through questionnaire survey and interview. the research findings are as follows: in terms of teaching behavior and teaching mode: the smartphone has become the most commonly used teaching terminal for teachers. however, from the perspective of its functions, the function supporting the teaching process is slightly single, and the screen is too small, which will affect the effect of teachers’ online teaching. in terms of the use of teaching resources, teachers’ own resources made the most, accounting for 51.79%; in addition, public education resources play an important role in this online teaching. considering the online teaching contents, teachers can carry out flexible teaching according to local conditions. on the basis of the spring schedule, 78.84% of the teachers began to teach basic cultural courses and carried out epidemic prevention education, life and safety education, and other themed education. they also guided students to operate home-based labor, physical exercise, and other activities, which combining education with talent cultivation. as to the teaching mode and activities: live online classroom and centralized tutoring and q&a are the teaching modes generally adopted by teachers; in addition, more than half of the teachers assigned and corrected homework (80.46%), answered questions online, and provided tutoring (76.32%) and sent digital learning resources (65.11%), which ensured the learning of students’ cultural foundation courses. what’s more, 62.66 percent c vol.8, no.1, 2021 1062 of teachers communicate with students’ parents to encourage them to supervise the students’ learning. in terms of teachers’ acceptability: teachers have a strong willingness to use online teaching. the perceived usefulness and willingness of rural teachers were significantly higher than those of urban teachers, and the acceptability of junior middle school teachers was the lowest. there are some problems in online teaching: the network environment and hardware equipment still need to be improved; teachers lack the ability to design online teaching; teachers’ information literacy is uneven, and they cannot accurately analyze the learning situation. therefore, the author considered that the hardware facilities and software resources should be improved to provide a good environment for online teaching; the teaching concept should be changed from “teaching for teaching” to “teaching by learning”; the way of teacher training and teaching research should be innovated to improve teachers’ ability of online teaching design; data-driven, individualized instruction should be realized based on learning analysis technology. source: china educational technology, 2020; 2020 (5):15-21. bece. newsletter vol.11, no.2, 2022 1537 the influence of grandparenting at the preschool stage on human capital accumulation of junior secondary students: an empirical analysis based on the ceps data by hu, n. y., & ning, m. x. correspondence to: manxiu ning, fujian agriculture and forestry university, china. e-mail: njauyeying@yahoo.com.cn he quality of family rearing in the preschool stage plays an important role in the accumulation of individuals’ human capital. this study (published in studies in preschool education) selected data from the china education panel survey (ceps) in the 2013-2014 academic year to examine the effects of preschool grandparenting on the cognitive and non-cognitive ability development of junior secondary students using a propensity score matching method. the findings of the study are as follows:  preschool grandparenting considerably promotes cognitive ability of junior secondary students, but significantly inhibited their noncognitive ability growth.  in terms of urban-rural heterogeneity, preschool parenting has no significant facilitative effect on cognitive ability of rural junior secondary students, but considerably facilitates cognitive ability development of their urban peers. from the standpoint of family economic status, preschool grandparenting has no significant effect on cognitive and non-cognitive ability of junior secondary students from impoverished families; it has a considerable positive effect on cognitive ability of junior secondary students from non-impoverished families, but a significant inhibitory effect on their non-cognitive ability. based on the above findings, the study offers the following policy implications. first, from the family’s perspective, grandparenting in the preschool years may impede individual human capital accumulation in some respects, but the overall positive role of grandparents in the long-term development of their grandparents should not be negated. parents should recognize their own essential role in their children's development, increase their awareness of companionship, pay attention to communication with their children, and fot mailto:njauyeying@yahoo.com.cn vol.11, no.2, 2022 1538 cus on developing their non-cognitive abilities in life practice. meantime, grandparents should be encouraged to improve their ability in rearing, update their concepts of education in time, and place a premium on non-cognitive ability development of grandchildren. second, the government should invest more in the construction of public care institutions so that official nursery service can play a good complementary role to family care. it should also encourage the development of nonprofit childcare institutions and tap the potential of the nonprofit sector in providing childcare service. finally, school education should be given full play in improving human capital accumulation of students from rural areas and poor families, so as to offset the negative effects of preschool grandparenting on junior secondary students. at the same time, the development of non-cognitive skills should be incorporated into the teaching and learning process to boost the comprehensive and lasting competitiveness of junior secondary students in the future labor market. source: studies in preschool education, 2022; 2022(5):44-56. bece. newsletter vol.12, no.1, 2022 1607 harsh parenting and adolescent suicidal tendencies: based on a moderated mediation model by lyu, s. p., wang, y., wang, x. h., guo, x. s., & yao, x. y. correspondence to: school of public policy and administration, xi’an jiaotong university, china. e-mail: xhwang@mail.xjtu.edu.cn arious evidence reveals that teenagers today have become a population with high suicide risk. it is of great theoretical and practical significance to investigate the factors influencing teenagers’ suicide mentality and the mechanism underlying them. published in psychological development and education, this study examines the relationship between harsh parenting and adolescent suicidal tendencies, based on a questionnaire survey of 4071 secondary students from four middle schools in xi'an city. the research results are as follows:  harsh parenting and individuals’ justification of suicide behavior have significant predictive effects on teenager suicide tendencies. first, long-term harsh parenting involving severe punishment will make the home, which should offer spiritual comfort and support to children, full of conflicts, thus increasing their suicide risk. second, individuals who accept and support suicidal behavior are more likely to have suicidal mentality and behavior.  adolescents’ justification of suicide behavior partially mediates the relationship between harsh parenting and adolescent suicidal tendencies. if children are often severely punished by their parents and seldom feel love and care from them, they will develop a sense of worthlessness and self-hatred, thus taking suicide as a reasonable way to avoid mental agony.  among various forms of social support, teacher support has the most significant moderating effect on the relationship between harsh parenting and teenager suicidal tendencies mediated by the justification of suicidal behavior. social support refers to care and aid that teenagers get from their peers, teachers, and other social groups, which generate emotional comfort and psychological support. the results show that teacher support can reduce the influence of teenagers’ justification of suicide behavior on youngsters’ suicide tendencies, improve their self-efficacy and wellbeing, and thus eliminate suicidal intention. v mailto:xhwang@mail.xjtu.edu.cn vol.12, no.1, 2022 1608 based on the above findings, it is concluded that those traditional harsh parenting ideas like the one that corporal punishment is beneficial to child growth should be abandoned. the so-called stringent discipline, especially authoritarian way of discipline, is likely to cause serious destructive consequences. source: psychological development and education, 2022; 2022(6):869-878. bece. newsletter vol.11, no.2, 2022 1539 maternal occupation status, child educational attainment and gender differences: an empirical study based on the data from the chinese general social survey by li, k. h. & sun, t. correspondence to: tao sun, shandong university, china. e-mail: taosun@sdu.edu.cn owadays, chinese women have made considerable progress in their career development. how mothers’ career advancement affects offspring education and gender differences in child education is an important issue in the research on gender equality in education. based on cgss2015 data, this study used regression analysis with instrumental variables to investigate the effects of maternal occupation status on child educational attainment and gender differences. the robustness test was subsequently carried out by re-screening the samples and changing the measurement methods of child educational levels. the heterogeneity effect of maternal occupation status on the gender difference in educational attainment was examined according to distinct family social classes and varying educational levels of parents. the results of the study:  maternal occupation status significantly promotes child education, and the improved maternal occupation status enhances mothers’ power in family decision-making, more likely to increase family input in child education.  maternal occupation status can significantly and negatively moderate the gender gap in offspring educational attainment; that is, the higher the mother's occupational status, the more equal the educational opportunity of male and female offspring in the family.  heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of maternal occupation status on gender gap in child educational attainment only exists in the family group with relatively higher parental education levels and higher family status, and that the impact is not significant among families from lower social classes and with lower levels of parental education. to conclude, the advancement of the maternal occupation status in the family has a significant effect on the improvement of the overall educational n mailto:taosun@sdu.edu.cn vol.11, no.2, 2022 1540 level of children and can effectively reduce gender differences in child educational achievements. therefore, the mother’s career advancement is of great significance to family educational reproduction and woman educational opportunity. the improvement of woman labor market status is conducive to the accumulation of offspring educational capital and the reduction of gender inequality in child education. public policy makers should take this variable into account and formulate pertinent policy measures to support woman career advancement to promote equity in education. source: journal of shandong university (philosophy and social sciences), 2022; 2022(3):102-114. bece, vol.11, no.1, 2022 1425 parent time input in teenager education matters more than shadow education xiaoqiao cheng nanjing normal university, nanjing, jiangsu, china “education is what survives when what has been learned is forgotten.” –bf skinner n recent years, shadow education—paid private supplementary tutoring providing additional educational assistance for students who are preparing for a variety of examinations—has become one of the fastest growing industries in a number of countries around the world, causing concern among governments and education policymakers, who believe that shadow education exacerbates the financial burden on poor families and exacerbates education inequality (yu & zhang, 2022). the growing significance of educational accomplishments for students’ future careers, combined with the immense pressure schools face to maintain their ranking, may lead the majority of parents to seek out private tutoring as the most effective means of enhancing their children’s academic competitiveness. however, the opportunities for children from various socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in examfocused shadow education are frequently mediated by their home economic strengths; as a result, children from low-income households face barriers to accessing shadow education. for instance, byun (2019) found in his analysis that seoul families often spend more than twice as much on shadow education as their rural counterparts. there is a widespread belief among global researchers that the substantial investment by families of superior economic © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. i http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ bece, vol.11, no.1, 2022 1426 status in shadow education has resulted in higher educational attainment and consequently exacerbated the imbalanced gap between students from different social strata that is “taken for granted”. although the government and relevant education policymakers have attempted to implement some reforms to address these issues, such as providing financial assistance to poor families, they have failed to adequately respond to the extraordinary expansion of educational aspirations resulting from the existing position of the consolidated upper and middle classes. entrich (2015) suggested that highly ranked public high schools in metropolitan areas would attract a greater proportion of students from affluent families who view extracurricular tutoring as a necessity during their high school years. this may encourage them to enroll in the most prestigious universities, thereby ensuring their social standing remains above average. this provides a plausible explanation for the rise in popularity of shadow education. therefore, numerous types of evidence indicate that students’ participation in shadow schooling is significantly influenced by their social origins and family incomes. in this issue, family time and money inputs in education and teenager development: interpretation of social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education by li and he (2022) examined the connection between family financial and time investments in education and adolescent development. this study integrates home time and money inputs in education and reveals: there are class differences in family time and money investments in education; family time investment in education is the most influential factor on adolescent academic performance; social capital (parental participation) and cultural capital account for score gaps among students far more than shadow education. this article suggests that the influence of shadow education on the academic achievement of adolescents is not as great as previously believed. in addition to spending more money on off-campus supplemental tutoring for their children, parents from middle-class or higher socioeconomic backgrounds also devote more time to accompanying their children. in addition, extracurricular tutoring on weekdays (monday through friday) has a considerable detrimental influence on adolescents’ academic performance, whereas weekend tutoring has a significant favorable effect. the most important result of this study is that parents’ direct time investment in their children, like parent-child contact and parental companionship, has the biggest effect on adolescent academic success. references byun, s. y. (2014). shadow education and academic success in republic of korea. in korean education in changing economic and demographic contexts (pp. 39-58). springer, singapore. bece, vol.11, no.1, 2022 1427 entrich, s. r. (2015). the decision for shadow education in japan: students’ choice or parents’ pressure? social science japan journal, 18(2):193-216. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyv012 li, j., & he, r. (2022). family time and money inputs in education and teenager development: interpretation of social capital, cultural capital, and shadow education. best evidence in chinese education, 11(2): 1455-1460. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.ab002 yu, j., & zhang, r. (2022). a review of shadow education. science insights education frontiers, 11(2):1579-1593. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.22.re058 correspondence to: xiaoqiao cheng, ph.d. nanjing normal university nanjing 211200 jiangsu china e-mail: xqcheng2008@vip.163.com conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.co011 https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyv012 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.ab002 https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.22.re058 mailto:xqcheng2008@vip.163.com the effect of school organizational support on job satisfaction of primary and secondary school teachers: the mediating role of teachers’ engagement in educational research weihao wang, 1 shike zhou 2 1. school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210097, china. 2. jiangsu academy of educational science, nanjing 210013, china abstract: the topic of teacher work satisfaction has long been a focus of educational study. this study examined the impact of school organizational support on teacher job satisfaction as mediated by teachers’ engagement in educational research, utilizing the findings of a survey on the academic quality of basic education students in jiangsu province in 2020 and analyzing the data of 21,154 primary and 16,585 secondary school teachers. in this work, the structural equation model is utilized. significant favorable relationships are shown between school organization support, teachers’ participation in educational research, and teachers’ work happiness. the engagement of teachers in educational research somewhat mediates the relationship between school organization support and teacher job happiness. school organization support positively predicts teacher job satisfaction. the impact of school organization support on teachers’ participation in educational research and job satisfaction is greater at the primary level than at the junior secondary level. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(2):1499-1515. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.or064 how to cite: wang, w., & zhou, s. (2022). the effect of school organizational support on job satisfaction of primary and secondary school teachers: the mediating role of teachers’ engagement in educational research. best evidence in chinese education, 11(2):1499-1515. wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no.2, 2022 1500 keywords: teacher educational research, teacher job satisfaction, school organizational support, mediating effect about the author: shike zhou, jiangsu academy of educational science, nanjing 210013, china. e-mail: jyszsk@163.com correspondence to: weihao wang, 122 ninghai road, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210097, china. e-mail: 785091301@qq.com funding: this study is funded by the priority academic program development of jiangsu higher education institutions (papd). conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:jyszsk@163.com mailto:785091301@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1501 introduction n china, the educational research system is an inherent aspect of the basic education community, intended to support the professional development of teachers, the enhancement of the quality of basic education, and the complete development of students (shen & yang, 2019; liang et al., 2016). cheng (2014) contends that the exceptional performance of chinese students on the program for international student assessment (pisa) is attributable in part to the systematic and frequent educational research conducted by instructors, which is difficult to achieve in other nations. however, the phenomenon of “resistance to research” among instructors occurs as a result of problems produced by the excessive pursuit of rapid research findings, such as intense workload, unclear objectives, inadequate financing, and a rigid management system (shao, 2012; luo, 2008; yang, 2018). consequently, teacher education research has become a two-edged sword. how may educational research help the job happiness of educators? few studies have done in-depth analyses of the relationship between school organizational support and teacher job satisfaction from the standpoint of teacher education research. consequently, we use the results of a survey on student academic quality in jiangsu province’s basic education to investigate the relationship between school organizational support, teachers’ participation in scientific research, and teacher job satisfaction. the study adopts the structural equation model in order to provide a theoretical framework and empirical basis for the application of organizational support theory to the discussion of teacher educational research and job satisfaction, as well as to provide insights for the promotion of teacher educational research and the enhancement of teacher professional satisfaction. a literature review the influence of school organizational support on teachers’ job satisfaction the organizational support theory combines organizational anthropomorphism, expectation theory, and the social exchange idea. the theories of organizational support and employee perception of organizational support and appropriate measuring scales were developed by eisenberger et al. in 1986. in their meta-analysis, rhoades and eisenberger (2002) contend that there is a strong positive relationship between organizational support and worker job satisfaction, enthusiasm, and output. chinese scholar xu gives his concepts of organizational support and perceived organizational support in a chinese context based on their prior research (xu et al., 2005). organizational support is a fundamental aspect of school administration. in their research study, rhoades and eisenberger (2002) conclude that perceived organizational support of employees can increase employee job satisfaction and promote other beneficial job-related behaviors. when teachers perceive adequate organizational support and concern for their well-being, their job security and general contentment will increase. improved teacher job satisfaction promotes a heightened sense of accountability for instructional outcomes (ji & zhao, 2021; hakkak et al., 2014; bogler & nir, i wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1502 2010). el-hilali and al-rashidi (2015) discover that organizational support (including professional development, reasonable workload, and equitable distribution of educational resources) is one of the most influential factors on job satisfaction among female primary school teachers in their study of female primary school teachers. meng (2019) finds a substantial positive association between job satisfaction and organizational support for dalian’s junior secondary physical education teachers. similarly, ji (2020) indicates that the perception of organizational support can predict significantly the job satisfaction of primary and secondary school teachers in tibet. thus, we propose two hypotheses: h1a: at the primary level, school organizational support exerts a positive influence on teacher job satisfaction. h1b: at the junior secondary level, school organizational support has a positive effect on teacher job satisfaction. the impact of school organizational support on teachers’ engagement in scientific research teacher educational research, as defined by you (2018), is a collection of theoretical and practical educational exploration activities, including regular teaching research, participation in major research projects, and educational paper writing, undertaken by teachers to investigate the causes and solutions to problems in schooling as well as the universal patterns of education and teaching. china’s distinctive educational research system plays a crucial role in implementing the state’s curriculum reform and fostering the professionalism of teachers. in the 1950s, in order to ensure the quality of education, local departments of education established educational research offices and recruited a group of outstanding teachers from schools to serve as teaching research staff in order to instruct in-service teachers in syllabus study, teaching material compilation, and lesson planning. in light of the relatively low educational levels of teachers at the time, the development of educational research offices at all levels was a crucial step toward standardizing the quality of classroom instruction (gu, 2014). the school-based educational research offices have contributed to the general improvement of the quality of school education by resolving problems in teaching, summarizing and sharing valuable practical teaching experience, and supervising the quality of school teaching (yin et al., 2020). the several opinions of the state education commission on improving the performance of teaching research offices were announced in 1990 in an effort to standardize the criteria for educational research and the functions of related organizations. since china’s reform and opening up, this is the first official document issued by the ministry of education to improve educational research, signaling the beginning of institutionalization and standardization of the educational research system (state education commission, 2012; he, 2020). to fulfill the ever-increasingly complex demands of contemporary society on teachers, schools must cultivate their own motives for sustained professional growth (yarmakeev, 2019). shore and wayne (1993) found an association between organizational support and the positive work behavior of employees. additionally, several studies have indicated that perceived organizational support can dramatically increase employees’ proactive work involvement (cleveland & shore, 1992; rhoades & wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1503 eisenberger, 2002). when school organizational support offers teachers with effective aid in their educational research efforts, involvement will increase dramatically (xu et al., 2013; zhou et al., 2019). this study therefore proposes the following hypotheses: h2a: at the primary level, school organizational support has a positive effect on teachers’ participation in educational research. h2b: at the junior secondary level, school organizational support positively affects teachers’ engagement in educational research. the effect of teachers’ engagement in educational research on job satisfaction while some scholars suggest that teachers’ participation in educational research may increase their workload or possibly lead to career burnout (luo, 2008; yang, 2018), others contend that encouraging teachers’ professional growth might improve their job satisfaction (guskey & yoon, 2009). scientific research activities that contribute to addressing practical teaching challenges, understanding curricular content, and boosting self-efficacy can considerably improve teacher work satisfaction (xue, 2006; shao, 2012; avalos, 2010). creative research allows teachers to see novelties in their job rather than boring repetitions, which effectively alleviates negative emotions such as inactivity, exhaustion, and indifference (sukhomlinsky, 2009). as a result, we raise the two hypotheses below. h3a: at the primary level, teachers’ participation in educational research has a positive impact on teacher job satisfaction. h3b: at the junior secondary level, teachers’ engagement in educational research is positively correlated with teacher job satisfaction. a summary of the literature review previous studies have demonstrated that teachers are motivated not only by money and spiritual benefits but also by job satisfaction. despite this, relatively few studies have examined the links between school organizational support, teachers’ participation in educational research, and teacher job satisfaction. however, the above analysis of the relationship between school organizational support, teachers’ engagement in scientific research, and teacher job satisfaction suggests that there may be a correlation between the three variables: school organizational support has a direct effect on teacher job satisfaction and can also influence teacher job satisfaction via the mediating effect of teachers’ engagement in educational research. data and methodology sources of data the 2020 survey findings on the academic quality of jiangsu province’s basic education students serve as our data source. initiated in 2006, the survey chooses primary and high school students and instructors from around the province for testing and inquiry, resulting in a large sample size and authoritative results (chen, 2020). before the inveswang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1504 tigation and testing, the survey in 2020 selected a series of study themes and dimensions, and sampling was conducted in two stages. the student sample consisted of fifth and ninth graders; the teacher sample consisted of the class teachers and english, chinese, and mathematics teachers of the sampled students; and the school leadership sample consisted of the sampled students’ principals (including the principals and vice principals). as a result, the student, teacher, and leadership databases for primary and secondary schools were created. the survey was conducted in two phases. in the first phase, the trial test and questionnaire modification were conducted, and in the second, the province-wide uniform survey was conducted. prior to the survey, the team engaged a group of education management and education assessment specialists to conduct semantic analysis and expert validity evaluation of the questionnaires. based on the outcomes of the experts’ evaluations, the questionnaires were improved. the survey team then conducted a pilot test of student, teacher, and principal questionnaire content in x city, jiangsu province. according to the results of the reliability and validity study of the trial questionnaires, irrelevant questions were eliminated from the final version of the province-wide uniform survey questionnaires for the second stage. after the second stage of the provincial unified survey, the questionnaires’ dependability and validity were evaluated again. after eliminating the problematic items, the research-relevant subjects and dimensions were identified. the current study selects data from the teacher questionnaire survey findings. data for 21,154 primary school teachers and 16,585 junior secondary school teachers were obtained after sorting and screening. in tables 1 and 2, descriptive statistics and variable descriptions are illustrated. research tools this empirical investigation focuses primarily on five dimensions: school organizational support; teachers’ cognitive engagement in educational research; teachers’ emotional engagement in educational research; teachers’ behavioral engagement in educational research; and teachers’ job satisfaction. school organizational support questionnaire the six survey items on this questionnaire are graded on a six-point likert scale, with 1 denoting “strongly disagree” and 6 denoting “strongly agree.” the more points are received, the greater school support instructors believe they receive for participating in educational research initiatives. teacher’s educational research participation questionnaire it has 12 survey items in three dimensions and uses a likert scale with a maximum of five points (1 for “non-conforming” and 5 for “conforming”). teachers are more likely to participate in educational research if they score high. teacher’s job satisfaction questionnaire wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1505 table 1. descriptive statistics. variable names primary schools (n=21,154) junior secondary schools (n=16,585) mean sd min max mean sd min max teacher charact. gender-male 0.180 0.388 0 1 0.300 0.457 0 1 length of service 15.870 10.972 0 44 19.290 9.654 0 44 position 2.540 0.816 1 5 2.980 0.800 1 5 educational level 2.980 0.332 1 4 3.070 0.316 1 4 marital status-married 0.820 0.386 0 1 0.910 0.291 0 1 concurrent administrative post-yes 0.650 0.477 0 1 0.500 0.500 0 1 subject-chinese 0.432 0.495 0 1 0.333 0.471 0 1 subject-mathematics 0.318 0.466 0 1 0.330 0.470 0 1 school charact. ownership-public 0.950 0.216 0 1 0.850 0.355 0 1 school in the city 0.610 0.488 0 1 0.628 0.483 0 1 school in the town 0.345 0.475 0 1 0.330 0.470 0 1 school in south jiangsu prov. 0.448 0.497 0 1 0.432 0.495 0 1 school in north jiangsu prov. 0.388 0.487 0 1 0.363 0.481 0 1 sd: standard deviations; min: minimum value; max: maximum value; charact: characteristics; prov.: province. it consists of four survey items scored on a five-point likert scale (from 1 to 5, with 1 denoting “strongly disagree” and 5 denoting “strongly agree”). the higher the score, the more satisfied teachers are with their jobs. reliability and validity tests the findings of model reliability and validity assessments at the primary and junior secondary levels are reported in tables 3 and 4, respectively. school organizational support school organizational support in this study refers to the school’s support for teacher participation in educational research initiatives. this component is represented by six survey items in the 2020 teacher questionnaire. according to the factor analysis, the kmo test scores at the primary and junior secondary levels are 0.932 and 0.924, respectively, which meet the requirements. the cronbach’s α coefficient of school organization support at the primary and junior secondary levels are 0.956 and 0.945, respectively, showing that the questionnaire is reliable and valid. in confirmatory factor analysis, the range of smc of school organization support at the two stages is 0.654-0.884 and 0.598-0.846, respectively, with cr 0.960 and 0.947, ave 0.802 and 0.750, cfi 0.976 and 0.972, tli 0.960 and 0.953, and rmsea 0.014 and 0.063, showing strong goodness of fit of this dimension. wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1506 table 2. variable categories and descriptions variable variable name descriptions teacher charact. gender-male 1=male，0=female; a dummy variable; females as the control group. position 1=the third level，2=the second level，3=the first level， 4=senior，5=ultra-senior educational level 1=senior secondary(technical secondary and secondary normal schools)，2=junior college，3=bachelor degree，4=master degree length of service a continuous variable; the value representing years of service. marital status-married 1=married，0=unmarried; a dummy variable; the unmarried as the control group. concurrent administrative post-yes 1=yes，0=no; a dummy variable; those without concurrent posts as the control group. subject-chinese 1=chinese language teacher，0= non-chinese language teacher; a dummy variable; english teachers as the control group. subject-mathematics 1=maths teacher，0=non-maths teacher; a dummy variable; english teachers as the control group. charact. of corresponding schools ownership-public 1=public school，0=private school; a dummy variable; private schools as the control group. school in the city 1=school in the city，0=school outside the city; a dummy variable; schools in villages as the control group. school in the town 1=school in the town，0=school outside the town; a dummy variable; schools in villages as the control group. school in south jiangsu prov. 1= school in south jiangsu prov.，0=school outside south jiangsu prov.; a dummy variable; schools in central jiangsu prov. as the control group. school in north jiangsu prov. 1= school in north jiangsu prov.，0= school outside north jiangsu prov.; a dummy variable; schools in central jiangsu prov. as the control group. charact: characteristics; prov.: province. teachers’ cognitive engagement in educational research four survey items, based on data from the teacher survey, assess teachers’ cognitive participation in educational research. the cronbach’s α coefficients for teachers’ cognitive participation in educational research at the primary and junior secondary levels are 0.886 and 0.884, respectively, showing the questionnaire’s reliability and validity. in confirmatory factor analysis, the range of smc for teachers’ cognitive engagement in educational research at the two stages is 0.483-0.753 and 0.479-0.753, the cr is 0.892 and 0.891, the ave is 0.675 and 0.673, the cfi is 0.982 and 0.987, and the rmsea is 0.074 and 0.065, indicating that this dimension has a good fit. teachers’ emotional engagement in educational research wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1507 table 3. the test of model reliability and validity at the primary level. dimensions cronbach’ α smc cr ave cfi rsmea 1st order school organizational support 0.956 0.654-0.884 0.960 0.802 0.976 0.014 teachers’ cognitive engagement in educational research 0.886 0.483-0.753 0.892 0.675 0.982 0.074 teachers’ emotional engagement in educational research 0.895 0.587-0.796 0.899 0.690 0.979 0.056 teachers’ behavioral engagement in educational research 0.894 0.573-0.810 0.900 0.694 0.987 0.056 teacher job satisfaction 0.781 0.323-0.781 0.796 0.501 0.986 0.054 2nd order teachers’ engagement in educational research 0.741-1.040 0.947 0.857 0.927 0.064 testing standards > 0.7 > 0.3 > 0.7 > 0.5 > 0.9 < 0.08 table 4. the test of model reliability and validity at the junior secondary level. dimensions cronbach’ α smc cr ave cfi rsmea 1st order school organizational support 0.956 0.598-0.846 0.947 0.75 0.972 0.063 teachers’ cognitive engagement in educational research 0.886 0.479-0.753 0.891 0.673 0.987 0.065 teachers’ emotional engagement in educational research 0.895 0.591-0.767 0.899 0.69 0.976 0.068 teachers’ behavioral engagement in educational research 0.894 0.578-0.812 0.894 0.679 0.99 0.054 teacher job satisfaction 0.781 0.305-0.790 0.786 0.487 0.986 0.059 2nd order teachers’ engagement in educational research 0.697-1.038 0.941 0.843 0.926 0.064 testing standards > 0.7 > 0.3 > 0.7 > 0.5 > 0.9 < 0.08 the data on teachers’ emotional engagement in educational research came from a fouritem survey administered via a teacher questionnaire. the cronbach’s α coefficients for primary and junior secondary teachers’ emotional engagement in educational research are 0.895% and 0.891%, respectively, suggesting the questionnaire’s reliability and validity. in confirmatory factor analysis, the range of smc for teachers’ emotional participation in educational research at the two stages is 0.587-0.796 and 0.591-0.767, the cr is 0.899 and 0.899, the ave is 0.690 and 0.690, the cfi is 0.979 and 0.976, and the rmsea is 0.056 and 0.068, indicating that this dimension is well-fitting. teachers’ behavioral engagement in educational research wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1508 for the dimension of teachers’ behavioral participation in educational research, which is examined under four items, data are taken from the teacher questionnaire. at the primary and junior secondary levels, the cronbach’s α coefficients of teachers’ behavioral participation in educational research are 0.894 and 0.912, respectively, indicating strong reliability and validity of the questionnaire. the range of smc for teachers’ behavioral involvement in educational research at the two stages in confirmatory factor analysis is 0.573–0.810 and 0.578–0.812, respectively, with cr 0.900 and 0.894, ave 0.694 and 0.679, cfi 0.987 and 0.990, and rmsea 0.056 and 0.054, indicating good goodness of fit for this dimension. teachers’ engagement in educational research teachers’ participation in educational research is a second-order latent variable in this study that is obtained from their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral involvement. the range of smc for teachers’ participation in educational research at the primary and junior secondary levels is 0.741-1.040 and 0.697-1.038, respectively, with cr of 0.947 and 0.941, ave of 0.857 and 0.843, cfi of 0.927 and 0.926, and rmsea of 0.064 and 0.064. it demonstrates how well the model of teachers’ involvement in educational research fits the data and how it can be used as the main mediating factor in this investigation. teacher job satisfaction in this study, the main dependent variable is teacher job satisfaction. data for this dimension is taken from the teacher’s questionnaire, which is broken down into four items. at the primary and junior secondary levels, the teachers’ job satisfaction cronbach’s α coefficients are 0.781 and 0.771, respectively, indicating good validity and reliability of the questionnaire. the range of the smc in the confirmatory factor analysis is 0.323-0.781 and 0.305-0.790, cr is 0.796 and 0.786, ave is 0.501 and 0.487, cfi is 0.986 and 0.986, and rmsea is 0.054 and 0.059, respectively. all components are adequate, indicating a good goodness of fit for the model of teacher work satisfaction, with the exception of the ave value at the junior secondary level, which is marginally below the standard. the common method biases of all self-assessment items are tested in this study using confirmatory factor analysis after reviewing the study by liu et al. (2019). with cfi = 0.572, gfi = 0.418, rmsea = 0.197 at the primary level and cfi = 0.556, gfi = 0.443, rmsea = 0.191 at the junior secondary level, the results show that the model has a low goodness of fit. therefore, this study does not exhibit any significant common method biases. research results and analyses the interaction between school organizational support, teachers’ engagement in educational research and teacher job satisfaction wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1509 table 5. overall reliability and validity indicators of the structural model. education levels primary level junior secondary level indicators cfi rmsea gfi tli cfi rmsea gfi tli values 0.952 0.067 0.913 0.946 0.947 0.067 0.911 0.940 standards > 0.9 < 0.08 > 0.9 > 0.9 > 0.9 < 0.08 > 0.9 > 0.9 table 6. the path analysis. paths primary level junior secondary level est. s.e. c.r. p std. est. s.e. c.r. p std. teer←sos 0.189 0.003 63.007 *** 0.475 0.156 0.003 47.841 *** 0.410 tjs←sos 0.407 0.006 64.471 *** 0.542 0.356 0.006 55.302 *** 0.523 tjs←teer 0.311 0.014 22.075 *** 0.165 0.243 0.015 16.024 *** 0.135 notes: 1) teer=teachers’ engagement in educational research; sos= school organizational support; tjs=teacher job satisfaction 2) *p < 0.05. **p < 0.01. ***p < 0.001. figure 1. the path analysis at the primary level. wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1510 figure 2. the path analysis at junior secondary level. in this work, the variance maximum likelihood technique is used to estimate the structural equation model’s parameters in order to determine the structural model’s overall reliability and validity indicators (table 5). as shown in table 5, the cfi of the structural model at the primary and junior secondary levels is 0.952 and 0.947, the rmsea is 0.067 and 0.067, the gfi is 0.913 and 0.911, and the tli is 0.946 and 0.940, indicating that the model is well-fitting. as shown in figure 1 and table 6, at the primary level, school organizational support increases teacher job satisfaction significantly and positively (std. = 0.542, p < 0.001), validating hypothesis h1a. school organizational support has a considerable beneficial effect on teachers’ participation in educational research (std. = 0.475, p < 0.001), confirming hypothesis h2a. the participation of teachers in educational research has a significant beneficial effect on teacher job satisfaction (std. = 0.165, p < 0.001), validating hypothesis h3a. school organizational support had a considerable beneficial effect on teacher job satisfaction at the junior secondary level (std. = 0.523, p < 0.001), corroborating h1b. h2b is supported since school organizational support promotes teachers’ engagement in scientific research significantly and positively (std. = 0.410, p < 0.001). teachers’ participation in educational research had a significant beneficial effect on teacher job satisfaction (std. = 0.135, p < 0.001), corroborating h3b (figure 2). the preceding conclusions are similar to those of prior investigations (shore & wayne, 1993; el-hilali & al-rashidi, 2015; tang, 2018; ji, 2020; ji & zhao, 2021). researchers discovered that teachers identify their importance to the school through spiritual and professional support as well as material support, such as professional wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1511 recognition and respect from the school, easy access to information, reasonable salaries and promotion, and other benefits that help teachers do their jobs better (rhoades & eisenberger, 2002; yang et al., 2022). because of the principle of reciprocity, perceived school organizational support motivates teachers’ loyalty to the school’s development and readiness to assist the school in attaining its goals, resulting in increased job satisfaction. meanwhile, school organizational support strengthens teachers’ emotional attachment to the school. the care, recognition, and respect inherent in school organizational support meet teachers’ social and emotional needs and encourage them to integrate organizational membership and role status into their social identity, thus enhancing organizational success and improving job happiness. as a result, the school’s genuine expression of recognition and respect for teachers’ professionalism, as well as support for their teaching and research, might motivate them to participate in educational research and boost their job satisfaction. the test of mediating effect between school organizational support, teachers’ engagement in educational research and teacher job satisfaction in this study, the 95% confidence intervals are constructed, bias correction (biascorrected percentile 95% ci), and percentile regression (percentile 95% ci) are used. the bootstrap method is used for the test of mediating effects and paths, and a random selection of 5,000 bootstrap samples is conducted. table 7 displays the point estimates, z-scores, and confidence intervals for each effect. the test’s results indicate: (i) at the primary stage, teachers’ participation in educational research has a positive impact on their job satisfaction, with a mediating effect value of 0.058; the percentile and the bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals do not contain 0, with p < 0.01, which denotes a significant level of effect. it suggests that, at this point, the relationship between school organizational support and teacher job satisfaction is mediated by teachers’ involvement in educational research. (ii) at the junior secondary level, teachers’ participation in educational research has a positive impact on teacher job satisfaction with a mediating effect value of 0.038; the percentile and the bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals do not contain 0, with p < 0.01, indicating a significant level of effect. this indicates that, at this point, the relationship between school organizational support and teacher job satisfaction is mediated by teachers’ involvement in educational research. (iii) the impact size at the primary stage is 0.466, with p < 0.01 indicating a substantial level of effect. neither the percentile nor the biascorrected 95% confidence intervals contain 0. it implies that partial mediation is the way to resolution at the primary school level. (iv) the overall effect size reaches 0.388 at the junior secondary level; the percentile and the bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals do not contain 0, and p < 0.01 denotes a substantial degree of effect. it implies that partial mediation is the appropriate path for mediation at this time. the association between school organizational support and teacher job satisfaction in primary and secondary schools is significantly influenced by teachers’ participation in educational research. we advance in this study by confirming that there is a mediating effect of teacher educational research on the relationship between school organi wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1512 table 7. the test of paths and mediating effects. paths and effects estimated values coefficient products bootstrap method (5,000 times) 95% ci bias correction percentiles sd z-values lower upper p lower upper p the primary school level overall effects 0.466 0.008 58.250 0.451 0.482 *** 0.451 0.481 *** direct effects 0.408 0.008 51.000 0.392 0.424 *** 0.392 0.424 *** indirect effects 0.058 0.003 19.333 0.053 0.064 *** 0.053 0.064 *** the junior secondary level overall effects 0.388 0.008 48.500 0.374 0.403 *** 0.373 0.403 *** direct effects 0.35 0.008 43.750 0.335 0.366 *** 0.335 0.366 *** indirect effects 0.038 0.002 19.000 0.033 0.043 *** 0.033 0.043 *** note: *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001. zational support and teacher job satisfaction at both the primary and secondary levels, despite some prior studies having found that school organizational support can influence teacher job satisfaction through organizational commitment, career commitment, and work burden alleviation (tang, 2018). this suggests that schools can increase teacher job satisfaction by giving teachers the organizational support they need to conduct educational research (including emotional, practical, and informational support); by relieving their stress at work; by enhancing their positive emotional experiences; and by igniting their interest in doing so. the study also found that in the primary and junior secondary levels, there are differences in the correlations between school organizational support, teacher involvement in educational research, and work satisfaction. some earlier research investigated the topic either at the primary or junior secondary level, or they did not segment the samples from the various stages, making it difficult to draw comparisons between the two levels (gu et al., 2020). contrarily, the current study examines samples from both primary and junior secondary schools in order to enable comparative analysis, which indicates that organizational support in both primary and junior secondary schools has a positive impact on teacher educational research and job satisfaction, though the effect at the primary stage is more significant than that at the following stage. additionally, this study finds that primary school teachers are more satisfied with their jobs than their counterparts at junior high schools, which is supported by studies by shen and coworkers (2016) and ding et al. (2018). job burnout is inversely connected with teacher job satisfaction, and junior secondary school teachers’ job burnout is strongly correlated with their workload (zhang et al., 2014; cai & zhu, 2013). teachers in junior secondary schools face more pressure from students’ academic success than their counterparts in primary schools, which may account for their substantially poorer job satisfaction. conclusions and limitations wang & zhou. (nanjing). school organizational support and teachers' job satisfaction. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1513 conclusions we develop a theoretical model to describe the effect of school organizational support on teacher job satisfaction as mediated by teachers’ engagement in educational research, using data from a survey of the academic quality of jiangsu province’s basic education students conducted in 2020. our empirical investigation yields the following findings: (i) there is a strong and positive correlation between school organizational support and teachers’ participation in educational research and work satisfaction at both the primary and junior secondary levels. (ii) school organizational support not only directly and positively predicts teacher job satisfaction but also indirectly influences teacher job satisfaction through the mediating effect of teachers’ engagement in educational research. school organizational support influences teachers’ engagement in educational research and teacher job satisfaction differently at the two stages, with a more pronounced effect at the primary level than at the junior secondary level. limitations future studies could benefit from further development. (i) this study examines the interaction between school organizational support, teachers’ engagement in educational research, and teacher job satisfaction using only cross-sectional data. since there are flaws in the analysis of causal effects using cross-sectional data, it is recommended that future research utilizes longitudinal data to further investigate the causal effect of school organizational support on teacher job satisfaction via the mediating role of teacher educational research. (ii) throughout the course of teacher education research, there may be additional moderating variables influencing teacher work satisfaction (guskey, 2002).due to the survey’s limited scope, this report cannot examine other mediating elements in the analysis, which will be the subject of subsequent research. references avalos, b. 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(2019). the impact of organizational support on the returnee teachers’ satisfaction of scientific research progress -a case study of 21 colleges and universities in shanghai. higher education exploration, 2019(12):101-107. received: 01 june 2022 revised: 14 june2022 accepted: 11 july 2022 https://doi.org/10.13342/j.cnki.%20cjhp.%202016.04.009 https://doi.org/10.13342/j.cnki.%20cjhp.%202016.04.009 https://doi.org/10.13718/j.cnki.%20jsjy.%202019.04.007 https://doi.org/10.13718/j.cnki.%20jsjy.%202019.04.007 https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.78.5.774 https://www.ncct.edu.cn/2012/policydocumentres_0619/959.html https://www.ncct.edu.cn/2012/policydocumentres_0619/959.html https://doi.org/10.16194/j.cnki.31-1059/g4.2018.12.008 https://doi.org/10.16194/j.cnki.31-1059/g4.2018.12.008 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.809272 https://doi.org/10.31901/24566322.2019/27.1-3.1099 https://doi.org/10.31901/24566322.2019/27.1-3.1099 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-020-09626-0 https://doi.org/10.16128/j.%20cnki.1005-3611.2014.05.085 https://doi.org/10.16128/j.%20cnki.1005-3611.2014.05.085 bece_weihaowang_title_july2022 bece_weihaowang_maintext_july2022 empirical research on the relationship between family economic, social and cultural status and students’ exposure to school bullying: mediating effects of parental support and teacher support liang huang 1,2 , decheng zhao 3 1. the chinese university of hong kong, hong kong, china 2. southeast university, nanjing, china 3. beijing normal university, beijing, china abstract. using survey data collected by the organization for the economic cooperation and development (oecd) in its 2015 program for international student assessment (pisa2015), this study explores the relationship between family economic, social and cultural status (escs) and students’ exposure to school bullying for students in beijingshanghai-jiangsu-guangdong (china). additionally, the study examines the mediating effects of parental support and teacher support on the relationship between family escs and students’ exposure to school bullying. lower family escs led to significantly increased exposure to school bullying. parental support and teacher support mediated the relationship between family escs and students’ exposure to school bullying, with slightly different magnitudes. the results suggest that china should continue to improve its system for school bullying prevention and treatment, and should especially focus on reducing bullying victimization among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. further, parents in disadvantaged families should provide support and care to their children to enhance their abilities to tackle bullying victimization, and teachers should treat students fairly and guide students in socializing with their peers appropriately. best evid chin edu 2019; 1(1):15-27. doi: 10.15354/bece.19.ar1006 keywords: pisa2015; family escs; school bullying; parental support; teacher support; mediating effect vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 16 relatively high prevalence of school bullying in china, with events of bullying and school violence being reported, has been observed recently (wang, 2016). bullying is widely recognized as a specific form of aggressive behavior that is repetitive, intentional, and based on a power imbalance (smith et al., 1999). school bullying experienced by adolescent students, who are in a period of transition, has negative effects on their physical and mental health, on their academic capability and social adaptability, and can be irreversibly detrimental to the students’ longterm wellbeing (woods et al., 2004). research reveals that bullying victimization severely hampers students’ educational attainment and personality development. students frequently exposed to school bullying have lower educational performance and are more likely to suffer from various psychological symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicidal tendencies, compared to their counterparts (delprato et al., 2017; kaltiala-heino et al., 2000). in fact, the high prevalence of school bullying and its severe impacts has become a major policy concern in china. in 2016, a national antibullying policy, guidance on the prevention and treatment of bullying and school violence, that required schools’ active participation in counteracting school bullying and protecting students’ rights, was promulgated by the ministry of education and eight other central ministries. consequently, it is imperative for researchers and practitioners to identify the factors associated with school bullying and to help design effective policies that support and protect at-risk students (olweus, 1994). of the risk factors for bullying victimization, family socioeconomic background is recognized as an important but still under-researched predictor. prior research by scholars in other countries has shown connections between students’ exposure to school bullying and their family socioeconomic backgrounds. in many cases, students with disadvantaged family backgrounds tend to suffer peer victimization at a higher rate than students from advantaged families. for example, due et al. (2009), using data from the international ‘health behavior in school-aged children’ study involving 35 countries, examined the socioeconomic inequality in students’ exposure to school bullying and found that students from families of low affluence were more likely to be bullied. consistent with this, analitis et al. (2009) explored the factors associated with bullying victimization in children and adolescents aged 8 to 18 and found that students whose parents had a lower educational level reported more peer victimization. empirical findings suggest that the inequality in students’ exposure to bullying that exists in various cultural contexts may prevent some students from equally healthy development. as a result, this has become a concern for policy-makers, researchers, and practitioners worldwide. nonetheless, empirical research on the mechanisms underlying the inequality of about the authors: liang huang is a lecturer at department of public administration, southeast university, china; and decheng zhao is a professor at faculty of education, beijing normal university, china. correspondence to: liang huang, department of public administration, southeast university, china. e-mail: eliot_huang@163.com. conflict of interests: none. a vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 17 students’ exposure to bullying is limited, specifically the ways in which variances in family economic, social and cultural status (escs) affect the likelihood of a student being bullied. an emerging line of empirical evidence suggests social support is important in protecting students from being bullied. students from families with lower escs may be more likely to be bullied because they receive less social support compared with other students (jansen et al., 2011). as parents and teachers are the most important sources of social support for students facing possible bullying, we hypothesize that inequality in family escs among students may result in an inequality of parental support and teacher support and that this may further lead to inequalities in students’ exposure to school bullying. specifically, two questions guided this research: 1. what are the effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying? 2. do parental support and teacher support mediate the effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying? data from students in china’s four provinces of beijing, shanghai, jiangsu, and guangdong were used in this study. the findings of this study can inform the design of effective anti-school bullying policies to put into practice. methods sample the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) collects data on students’ abilities from countries worldwide through its program for international student assessment (pisa). in the 2015 assessment round (hereafter, pisa2015), pisa for the first time included questions to evaluate bullying in schools of participating countries and economies (oecd, 2016). the school bullying variable, together with other variables in the pisa2015 database reflecting students’ individual characteristics, family backgrounds and school characteristics, provided the data needed for this study. listwise deletion was employed to exclude those cases with missing data; 8,671 15year-old students from the pisa2015 beijing-shanghai-jiangsu-guangdong (china) database were identified as the sample of this study. variables students’ exposure to school bullying pisa2015 measured students’ exposure to school bullying from the perspective of the victims (oecd, 2017). students were asked to report their experiences during the past one year with six forms of school bullying actions: 1) “others spread rumors about me”; 2) “being left out of things by others intentionally”; 3) “being made fun of by others”; 4) “being threatened by others”; 5) “others took away or destroyed my things”; and 6) “being hit or pushed by others” (oecd, 2017). the frequency of students experiencing any one of the six forms of school bullying was classified into four categories: 1) “never or almost never”; 2) “a few times a year”; 3) “a few times a month”; and 4) “once a vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 18 week or more” (oecd, 2017). based on maynard et al. (2016), students with responses of “a few times a month” or “once a week or more” were defined as being exposed to that specific form of school bullying action. students exposed to least one form of school bullying were defined as being exposed to school bullying and assigned a value of 1 for the bullying variable; other students were assigned a value of 0. in this study, 21.74% of students reported being exposed to school bullying during the past one year. family escs pisa computed an index of family escs using family background information, such as parents’ highest education level, parents’ highest occupation status, and home possessions (oecd, 2017). the family escs was transformed with 0 representing the average family escs of oecd students and 1 representing the standard deviation (sd) of the oecd students’ family escs. in the subset of data used for this study, student family escs had a mean of -0.84 and a sd of 1.12. parental support pisa2015 asked students to report the extent to which their parents support them in their daily living, school learning and other activities (e.g., “my parents are interested in my school activities,” and “my parents support me when i am facing difficulties at school,” and “my parents encourage me to be confident”) (oecd, 2017). from the responses, pisa computed an index of parental support, which was transformed with 0 representing the average parental support of oecd students and 1 representing the sd of the oecd students’ parental support. in this study, the sample students’ parental support had a mean of -0.16 and a sd of 0.88. teacher support pisa2015 asked students to report the frequency of the help, care and support they got from their science teachers in classroom learning (e.g., “the teachers give extra help when students need it,” and “the teachers help students with their learning,” and “the teachers give students an opportunity to express their opinions”) (oecd, 2017) and used this to compute an index of teacher support. once again, the index of teacher support was transformed with 0 representing the average teacher support of oecd students and 1 representing the sd of the oecd students’ teacher support. for the sample subset used here, the students’ teacher support index had a mean of 0.28 and a sd of 0.92. control variables included control variables related to individual students were gender (52% males, 48% females) and study program (56% lower secondary school students, 35% upper secondary school students, and 8% vocational school students). also included were control variables related to school characteristics: school location (37% urban schools, 63% vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 19 rural schools), school type (90% public schools, 10% private schools), school size (in hundreds of students, mean = 19.70, sd = 19.18), class size (number of students, mean = 41.66 , sd = 9.37), student-teacher ratio (mean = 12.62, sd = 8.55), proportion of all teachers fully certified (mean = 0.97, sd = 0.07), school educational material shortage (mean = 0.07, sd = 1.22), and school educational staff shortage (mean = 0.77, sd = 1.28). data analysis data analysis involved three phases. in phase one, descriptive statistics were used to preliminarily examine whether exposure to school bullying differed among students with different family escs. in phase two, a binary logit model was constructed to analyze the predictive effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying. the binary logit model took the following form, yi = α0 + + γ1escsi + ui1 (1) where yi refers to students’ exposure to school bullying, α0 is a constant, xij is a vector of control variables, escsi is the student’s family escs, and ui1 is the error term. in phase three of the data analysis, a path analysis model was constructed to examine the mediating roles of parent support and teacher support on the relationship between family escs and students’ exposure to school bullying. the path analysis model has the advantage that it can be used to simultaneously estimate casual relationships among multiple variables (wang, 2014). the path analysis model had the following form, mti = α1 + + γ2escsi + ui2 (2) yi = α2 + + γ3escsi + γ4mti + ui3 (3) where yi refers to students’ being exposed to school bullying, α1 and α2 are constants, xij is a vector of control variables, mti are the mediating variables between family escs and students’ exposure to school bullying, including the parental support variable (m1) and the teacher support variable (m2), and ui2 and ui3 are error terms. as parental support and teacher support are correlated, the path coefficient between the two mediating variables in the model was set to be freely estimated. since pisa2015 employed two-stage sampling methods to select sample students 1 , for phases two and three of the data analysis, the standard errors of parameter estimates were estimated using both the final student weighting and fay’s balanced repeated replication (brr) method with a 0.5 coefficient (oecd, 2009). moreover, in phase three data analysis, a bias-corrected bootstrap method was employed for analysis of mediating variables. the bootstrap method as a resampling estimation method produces more accurate interval estimates (hayes, 2009). in this study, resampling was set to 2,000 vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 20 times. the software spss 23.0 was used to conduct descriptive statistics (phase one) and mplus 7.0 was used to conduct data analysis (phases two and three). results descriptive statistics to initially explore whether students’ exposure to school bullying was affected by family escs background, we grouped students into three categories based on their family’s ecsc: (1) advantaged family backgrounds – student’s family escs was in the top quarter of the index of the sample students’ family escs; (2) average family backgrounds – student’s family escs was between the 25th to 75th percentile of the index of the sample students’ family escs; and (3) disadvantaged family backgrounds – student’s family escs was in the bottom quarter of the index of the sample students’ family escs. we then used descriptive statistics for each group to look for differences among groups in students’ exposure to school bullying behavior. table 1 shows the results of the descriptive statistics. in general, students’ exposure to any form of school bullying was less for students from advantaged family backgrounds (18.96%) than for students from average family escs backgrounds (21.55%), which, in turn, was less than that for students from disadvantaged backgrounds (24.91%). students’ exposure to school bullying differed significantly among the three types of family backgrounds (χ 2 = 22.75, p < 0.001). the percentage of students exposed to each specific form of school bullying similarly decreased when going from disadvantaged family backgrounds to average family backgrounds to advantaged family backgrounds. the percentage of students who reported “being left out of things by others intentionally,” or “being made fun of by others,” or “others took away or destroyed my things,” or “being threatened by others” differed significantly among the three types of family backgrounds (chi-squared pvalue ≤ 0.01 in all tests). this further verified that differences exist in students’ exposure to school bullying under different family backgrounds. binary logit model: effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying given the differences observed above in students’ exposure to school bullying based on different family backgrounds, we next analyzed the predictive effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying by employing a binary logit model (equation (1) above) to the data. table 2 displays these results. without controlling for other variables, family escs had a significant negative effect on students’ exposure to school bullying (γ = -0.055, p < 0.001). the predictive effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying remained significant after controlling for variables related to individual students (γ = -0.052, p< 0.01) or variables related to school characteristics (γ = -0.040, p < 0.05). the results of the binary logit model are consistent with the re vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 21 table 1. students’ exposure to school bullying under different family backgrounds (%). exposure to school bullying actions all students disadvantaged family backgrounds average family backgrounds advantaged family backgrounds x 2 exposure to any form of school bullying 21.74 24.91 21.55 18.96 22.75*** others spread rumors about me 6.30 6.50 6.34 6.00 0.51 being left out of things by others intentionally 7.57 9.87 7.24 5.90 25.68*** being made fun of by others 11.50 13.93 11.35 9.36 22.40*** being threatened by others 3.29 4.11 3.37 2.31 11.21** others took away or destroy my things 12.57 14.30 12.57 10.84 11.80** being hit or pushed by others 4.29 4.57 4.41 3.78 1.90 *p<0.05，**p<0.01，***p<0.001 sults of the descriptive statistics and both show that students with higher family escs are less likely to be bullied. path analysis: mechanisms underlying effect of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying to further explore the mechanisms underlying effect of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying, we conducted path analysis using path analysis equations (2) and (3) (see methods). the weighted root mean-square residual (wrmr), an indicator of the path model fit, was 0.002, indicating a good model fit. 2 table 3 shows the results of the path analysis model. results reveal that the direct predictive effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying was -0.019 (p > 0.05). family escs affected students’ exposure to school bullying indirectly through its influence on parental support and teacher support of students. the predictive effects of family escs on parental support was 0.138 and the predictive effects of parental support on students’ exposure to school bullying was -0.086; both these path coefficients reached at least a 0.01 level of significance. the predictive effects of family escs on teacher support was 0.070 and the predictive effects of teacher support on students’ exposure to school bullying was -0.142; both path coefficients had p < 0.001. vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 22 analysis of mediating variables was conducted using the bias-corrected bootstrap method. table 4 shows the results. the 95% bootstrap confidence interval (ci) of both the indirect effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying through parental support and the indirect effects of family escs on students’ exposure to school bullying through teacher support did not include zero, indicating significant mediating effects. the magnitude of the mediating effects of parental support and teacher support on the relationship between family escs and students’ exposure to school bullying were slightly different. thus, the mechanism underlying family escs effects on students’ exposure to school bullying has been elucidated: students with a higher family escs get more parental support and teacher support, and students with more parental support and teacher support have a lower risk of being bullied. conversely, students with lower family escs get less parental support and teacher support, and students with less parental support and teacher support have a higher risk of being bullied. table 2. the predictive effects of family escs on students’ being exposed to school bullying. students’ exposure to school bullying coefficient se coefficient se coefficient se family escs -0.055*** 0.016 -0.052** 0.019 -0.040* 0.020 male (reference group: female) 0.423*** 0.046 0.422*** 0.046 lower secondary school students (reference group: vocational school students) -0.030 0.079 -0.114 0.122 upper secondary school students (reference group: vocational school students) -0.105 0.087 -0.166 0.108 urban school (reference group: rural school) -0.025 0.067 public school (reference group: private school) -0.108 0.113 school size -0.002 0.002 class size 0.007 0.005 student-teacher ratio 0.003 0.003 proportion of all teachers fully certified 0.027 0.317 school educational material shortage 0.008 0.029 school educational staff shortage 0.012 0.036 threshold 0.833*** 0.033 1.018*** 0.076 1.148** 0.375 *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001 vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 23 discussion and implications discussion in this study, we found that students’ exposure to school bullying differed depending on family escs background. students from advantaged family backgrounds had decreased exposure to bullying (18.96%) compared to those from disadvantaged family backgrounds (24.91%). we also verified that the inequality of family escs is a key factor affecting the likelihood of students being bullied in the four china provinces of beijing, shanghai, jiangsu, and guangdong. bullying victimization can hinder students’ physical and mental development, their educational attainment, and undermine their social table 3. results of the path analysis model. 3 parental support (m1) teacher support (m2) students’ exposure to school bullying coefficient se coefficient se coefficient se family escs 0.138*** 0.013 0.070*** 0.015 -0.019 0.020 parental support -0.086** 0.028 teacher support -0.142*** 0.022 male (reference group: female) -0.078*** 0.023 -0.090*** 0.026 0.402*** 0.047 lower secondary school students (reference group: vocational school students) 0.026 0.094 0.113 0.071 -0.095 0.118 upper secondary school students (reference group: vocational school students) 0.109 0.094 -0.024 0.064 -0.161 0.103 urban school (reference group: rural school) -0.045 0.034 0.011 0.040 -0.028 0.067 public school (reference group: private school) -0.100 0.067 -0.086 0.081 -0.129 0.109 school size 0.000 0.001 -0.001 0.001 -0.002 0.002 class size 0.002 0.002 -0.007* 0.003 0.006 0.005 student-teacher ratio -0.004* 0.002 -0.008 0.005 0.001 0.003 proportion of all teachers fully certified 0.850*** 0.221 0.698 0.385 0.194 0.284 school educational material shortage -0.017 0.016 -0.054* 0.027 -0.001 0.029 school educational staff shortage -0.027 0.015 -0.011 0.024 0.008 0.035 intercept -0.816*** 0.208 0.101 0.397 threshold 1.207*** 0.386 *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001 vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 24 table 4. mediation analysis using bias-corrected bootstrap method. influence path estimate 95% bootstrap ci coefficient se lower upper family escs → parental support → students’ exposure to school bullying -0.012** 0.004 -0.015 -0.008 family escs → teacher support → students’ exposure to school bullying -0.010*** 0.003 -0.012 -0.008 total indirect effects -0.022*** 0.005 -0.027 -0.017 *p<0.05, **p<0.01, **p<0.001 and economic welfare in adulthood (brown et al., 2008). as a result, students from disadvantaged families in the four provinces of china may not enjoy equal opportunities to flourish due to an increased exposure to school bullying. we identify the mechanism by which family escs influences students’ exposure to school bullying: family escs indirectly impacted students’ exposure to school bullying through its effect on parental and teacher support available to students. specifically, family escs inequality leads to inequality in levels of parental support and teacher support, which further created inequality of students’ being bullied. in terms of the mediating role of parental support, parents from families with higher escs tend to have higher educational levels. this may mean they make more conscious efforts to get involved in their children’s education and development and are more willing to communicate with their children to help solve the learning and living problems their children confront (lereya et al., 2013). caring and supportive ties between parents and children are conducive to the development of students’ academic adaptability and social skills and thus can protect students from being bullied (rivara et al., 2016). in contrast, parents from families with lower escs have limited resources, capabilities, and time and thus may be less able to provide their children with timely and effective help when their children face difficulties, making these students more likely to be bullied. in terms of the mediating role of parental support, parents from families with higher escs can mobilize more social and cultural resources to become better involved in their child’s school educational activities and can actively build cooperative relations with teachers, which will help their children get more support from teachers (mcneal et al., 1999). support from teachers helps students gain peer acceptance and enhance their social competency, which can reduce students’ exposure to school bullying (troop-gordon et al., 2011). in contrast, parents from families with lower escs lack the relevant resources and capabilities to create a favorable external developmental environment for their children, making these students more likely to be bullied. implications vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 25 in light of the discussion above, the following recommendations are offered. first, china should continue to improve its system of school bullying prevention and treatment to reduce bullying victimization among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. school bullying prevention and treatment has become a major concern for the country’s policy-makers. to promote the implementation of effective school bullying prevention and treatment initiatives, china should continue to improve its system of school bullying prevention and treatment to comprehensively tackle all forms of school bullying and to guarantee that all students have equal and sufficient opportunities for healthy physical and mental development. for students in schools within beijing, shanghai, jiangsu, and guangdong provinces, family escs inequality resulted in students from disadvantaged families experiencing disproportionately more bullying. therefore, while formulating the school bullying prevention and treatment policy, the country should give more policy support to students from disadvantaged escs families. likewise, educational authorities should invest more resources and professional support in rural schools, disadvantaged schools, and migrant schools that have higher proportions of students from disadvantaged family backgrounds and should help these schools build up their bullying prevention and treatment system to reduce the risk of school bullying in disadvantaged students. second, parents in disadvantaged families should give more support and care to their children to enhance their abilities to resist bullying victimization. the role of parents in helping students counteract school bullying is critically important (liao et al., 2017). however, parents from families with lower escs often cannot offer such help, care, and support to their children, leaving their children exposed to bullying victimization. in this study, we propose that even though parents of disadvantaged families may lack the corresponding resources and capabilities to provide their children with a better developmental environment, they can still be actively involved in their children’s education, pay more attention to their children’s mental and behavioral development, and improve the parent-child relationship through increased close communication and interaction to help their offspring cope with difficulties in learning, living and peer interaction and to protect them from the harmful effects of being bullied. we suggest that parents make a conscious effort to learn how to prevent and treat school bullying and to help their children recognize school bullying and make appropriate responses. in addition, parents who find that their children have been exposed to school bullying should seek the support of communities and schools to help these students overcome bullying victimization. third, teachers should treat students fairly and guide students to socialize with their peers appropriately. teachers are a valuable resource that students can rely on for help with school bullying. the help and care teachers give to students is conducive to broadening student-teacher communication channels and building positive studentteacher relations. this enables students to actively seek their teachers’ support when in need and helps student get the acceptance and recognition of peers. in this study, we found that the teacher support that students receive varied for students from different vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 26 family backgrounds, such that students with higher family escs have a lower risk of being bullied and students with lower family escs have a higher risk of being bullied. to reduce exposure to school bullying for all students, we suggest that teachers treat students fairly, analyze the behavioral and mental progress of their students, and provide timely help and support to students facing learning, living and socializing difficulties. additionally, teachers can help students cultivate good conduct, such as being friendly and helpful, and respecting others, and can guide students to socialize with their peers appropriately so that students from disadvantaged family backgrounds better integrate themselves into their peer group. notes 1. in the first stage of sampling, pisa employed probability proportional to size (pps) to select sample schools. in the second stage of sampling, pisa randomly selected students from sample schools. 2. for a path analysis model with continuous and categorical variables, model fit is acceptable if the weighted root mean-square residual (wrmr) is less than 0.9. for more detail, please refer to schreiber, j. b., nora, a., stage, f. k., barlow, e. a., & king, j. (2006). reporting structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis results: a review. the journal of educational research, 99(6), 323-338. 3. results of the path analysis model estimate the correlation coefficient between parental support and teacher support as 0.150 (p < 0.001). this result was not included in table 3. references analitis, f., velderman, m. k., ravenssieberer, u., detmar, s., erhart, m., & herdman, m., et al. (2009) being bullied: associated factors in children and adolescents 8 to 18 years old in 11 european countries. pediatrics; 123(2):569-577. brown, s., & taylor, k. (2008) bullying, education and earnings: evidence from the national child development study. econ edu rev; 27(4):387-401. delprato, m., akyeampong, k., & dunne, m. (2017) the impact of bullying on students’ learning in latin america: a matching approach for 15 countries. int j edu dev; 52:37-57. due, p., merlo, j., harelfisch, y., damsgaard, m. t., soc, m.s. , & holstein b.e., et al. (2009) socioeconomic inequality in exposure to bullying during adolescence: a comparative, cross-sectional, multilevel study in 35 countries. am j pub health; 99(5):907-914. hayes, & andrew, f.. (2009) beyond baron and kenny: statistical mediation analysis in the new millennium. commun monograph; 76(4):408-420. jansen, d.e., veenstra r., ormel, j., verhulst, f.c., & reijneveld, s.a.. (2011) early risk factors for being a bully, victim, or bully/victim in late elementary and early secondary education. the longitudinal trails study. bmc pub health; 11(1):440. kaltiala-heino, r., rimpel, m., rantanen, p., & rimpel, a. (2000) bullying at school—an indicator of adolescents at risk for mental disorders. j adolesc; 23(6):661-674. lereya, s.t., samara, m., & wolke, d. (2013) parenting behavior and the risk of becoming a victim and a bully/victim: a meta-analysis study. child abus negl; 37(12):1091-1108. liao, j.x., jin, y.l. (2017) the prevention of the american school bullying: history, experience and enlightenment. edu sci; 33(5):8996. maynard, b.r., vaughn, m.g., salaswright, c.p., & vaughn, s.r. (2016) bullying victimization among school-aged immigrant youth in vol. 1, no. 1, 2019 27 the united states. j adol health offic pub soc adol med; 58(3):337-344. mcneal jr, r.b., & ralph, b. (1999) parental involvement as social capital: differential effectiveness on science achievement, truancy, and dropping out. soc forc; 78(1):117-144. oecd (2016) pisa 2015 assessment and analytical framework: science, reading, mathematics and financial literacy, pisa, oecd publishing, paris. oecd (2017) pisa 2015 results (volume iii): students’ well-being, pisa, oecd publishing, paris. oecd (2009) pisa data analysis manual: spss, second edition. pisa, oecd publishing: 7274. olweus, d. (1994) bullying at school: basic facts and effects of a school based intervention program. j child psychol psych, 35(7):1171-1190. rivara, f., & le menestrel, s. (2016) preventing bullying through science, policy, and practice. washington, dc: the national academies press. smith, p. & morita, y., junger-tas, j., olweus, d., catalano r.f., & slee, p. (1999) the nature of school bullying: a cross national perspective. london, united kingdom: routledge. troop-gordon, w., & kopp, j. (2011) teacher– child relationship quality and children’s peer victimization and aggressive behavior in late childhood. soc dev; 20(3):536-561. wang, m.c. (2014) latent variable modeling using mplus. chongqing, p.r.china: chongqing university press, 77. wang, w.d. (2016) how much school bullying that should not have occurred? guangming daily. retrieved september 10, 2017 from http://news.gmw.cn/201612/15/content_23265749.htm. woods, s., & wolke, d. (2004). direct and relational bullying among primary school children and academic achievement. j sch psychol; 42(2):135-155. received: 27 october 2018 revised: 11 november 2018 accepted: 25 november 2018 the chinese version of this article has been published in education science 2018; 34(1):7-13. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 黄亮, 赵德成. 家庭社会经济文化地位与学生遭受校园欺凌关系的实证研究-家长支持和教师 支持的中介作用. 教育科学 2018; 34(1):7-13. article-liang huang_title_20jan2019 article-liang huang_main text_20jan2019 bece. newsletter bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1273 can programming really promote individual development of children? a meta-analysis on 28 experimental and quasi-experimental studies by sun, l.h. & hu, l.l. correspondence to: sun, l.h., tianjin university. e-mail: sunlh777@163.com s a basic skill of children facing the future, adapting to the future, and transforming the future, programming has continuously received attention from all walks of life. scholars have carried out a great deal of experimental and quasi-experimental research, but the results of the research differ. to respond to the topic “whether children’s programming promotes children’s individual development”, a study from journal of east china normal university (education science edition) adopted a meta-analysis method to conduct empirical research on the influence of programming on individual development by reviewing 28 independent studies and 74 effect sizes that can be used for analysis. the research results were evaluated to summarize the degree of influence of programming on the individual development of children. in addition, the study further analyzed the differences in the influence of programming on the individual development of children by different stages, programming styles, sample sizes, and experimental cycles, to obtain scientific and reasonable conclusions and provide a feasible reference for the subsequent progress in children’s programming education research and practice. the important findings of the study are as follows:  in this study, the combined effect size of the overall impact of programming on children’s individual development is smd = 0.61 > 0.5, which shows that programming has a positive effect on children’s individual development.  this study further measured the specific effects of programming on children’s individual development from three dimensions: cognition, behavior and emotion. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. a mailto:sunlh777@163.com bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1274 first, at the cognitive level, the combined effect size of programming on individual children is (smd = 0.86, p < 0.001), reaching a statistically significant level, indicating that programming can significantly and actively promote the cognitive development of students. specifically, programming influences mathematical thinking (smd = 2.68, p < 0.001), academic achievement (smd = 0.61, p < 0.001), knowledge transfer (smd = 0.82, p < 0.001) and computational thinking (smd = 0.50, p < 0.001). the impacts reach a significant level. second, at the behavioral level, the combined effect size of programming on children’s individual development is (smd = 0.34, p < 0.001), indicating that programming has a significant intermediate effect on children’s behavior development, specifically, in pair ranking ability (smd = 0.65, p < 0.001), classification planning (smd = 0.31, p < 0.05), problem solving (smd = 0.25, p < 0.05) and collaborative innovation (smd = 0.40, p < 0.01) the impacts are of significant levels. finally, at the emotional level, the combined effect size of programming on children’s individual development is (smd = 0.31, p < 0.001), indicating that programming has a significant intermediate effect on children’s emotional development. specifically, programming has significant impacts on learning interest (smd = 0.51, p < 0.01) and children’s self-efficacy (smd = 0.22, p < 0.05), and the impacts on children’s learning motivation (smd = 0.19, p > 0.05) and learning participation (smd = 0.20, p > 0.05) are not significant. overall, programming has significant positive effects on children’s cognitive, behavioral, and emotional development, and it has the most prominent effect on cognitive development.  from the perspective of different learning stages, there is no significant difference between the group effects (chi 2 = 2.67, p > 0.05) of children’s programming in preschools, elementary schools and middle schools. the effects of programming on the individual development of students at different school stages are ranked in order of the combined effect size: middle school (smd = 0.77, p < 0.001), preschool (smd = 0.56, p < 0.001) and elementary school (smd = 0.52, p < 0.001) ).  from the perspective of different experimental cycles, there are significant differences in the impact of programming experiment cycles of different lengths (chi 2 = 24.68, p < 0.001) on the individual development of children. specifically, the short-term experiment had the highest combined effect size (smd = 0.43, p < 0.001), followed by the long-term experiment (smd = 0.26, p < 0.001), and the midterm experiment had the lowest combined effect size (smd = 0.24, p < 0.001).  from the perspective of different sample sizes, the intergroup effect size shows chi 2 = 23.53, p < 0.001, reaching a significant level, indicating that there are significant differences in the influence of programming on the individual development of large, medium, and bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1275 small-scale of student sample. specifically, the small-scale combined effect size (smd = 0.41, p < 0.001) is higher than that of the medium-scale (smd = 0.37, p < 0.001) and higher than the largescale combined effect size (smd = 0.17, p < 0.001). this shows that small-scale programming activities have a more significant impact on children’s individual development than medium-scale and largescale programming activities. moreover, there is a negative correlation between the sample size and the effect. as the sample size increases, the effect gradually decreases. this finding can provide a reference for the design and development of subsequent programming activities.  from the perspective of different programming forms, the intergroup effect size shows chi 2 = 32.72, p < 0.001, reaching a significant level, indicating that there are significant differences in the role of different programming forms in promoting the individual development of children. specifically, unplugged programming has the highest combined effect size (smd = 1.47, p < 0.001), followed by logo programming (smd = 0.78, p < 0.05), other programming forms (smd = 0.41, p < 0.001), and scratch (smd = 0.23, p < 0.001) with the lowest combined effect size, which indicates that unplugged programming is significantly better than other programming forms in promoting the individual development of children. however, there is a possibility that this is caused by the differences among users in different groups. in summary, the analysis results affirm the importance of programming to children’s growth and its positive role in promoting individual development. however, research results also shows that programming education will present different effects when facing different learners and learning situations. therefore, programming teaching practice should not be carried out blindly. instead, it should be designed and planned scientifically and reasonably according to the different elements of the teaching system. source: journal of east china normal university, educational sciences, 2021; 39(11):45-58. rebuild classroom teaching values lan ye east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china abstract. educational activities cannot avoid the issue of value. the research on “new basic education” also discusses contemporary chinese social development and educational values reform. this article proposes to rebuild classroom teaching values. this value’s core concept is: the current value of classroom teaching in china’s primary education needs to be transformed from a single transmission of ready-made knowledge presented in textbooks to a generation that can actively and healthy development in contemporary society. its primary contents are: expand the rich educational value of subjects; reorganize the teaching content according to the realization of the educational value; comprehensively design flexible teaching content. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 8(2):1131-1141. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.cr02. how to cite: ye, l. (2021). rebuild classroom teaching values. best evidence in chinese education, 8(2):1131-1141. keywords: classroom teaching, teaching values, new basic education, active and healthy development correspondence to: lan ye, professor, ex-director, institute of basic education reform and development, east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china. email: editorial-office@bonoi.org conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1132 question and task ducational activities cannot avoid the question of value. this is a presumption of our judgment on the relationship between value and fact in education research. from a historical point of view, whenever society undergoes a significant transformation, people’s criticism of education often begins with value criticism. starting from a re-understanding of the value and purpose of education and using this as the basis and starting point, it then makes a more specific evaluation of the actual educational activities and proposes new principles, programs, and even methods. today, we are in such an era. the research on “new basic education” 1 also discusses contemporary chinese social development and educational values reform. 2 however, when reform research enters school practice, through a lesson, what we (referring to all members participating in the “new basic education research”) see is that in the field of subject teaching, most teachers’ choices of educational value are still stay on “transmitting knowledge.” although some teachers have paid attention to the development of students’ skills, even abilities, and intelligence, most of them are merely embellishments. as for the goals outside the scope of understanding, it is less involved. interestingly, this kind of value is not manifested in teachers’ remarks in writing articles or theoretical studies but in teaching goals and classroom behaviors in the preparation notes. usually, in terms of teaching objectives, the most clearly defined and understood, most of which are the “key points” and “difficult points” of the teaching of this lesson, the “skills” and “techniques” that need to be mastered. other aspects may be mentioned simply or abstractly, or clicked with similar empty words almost every time. in more cases, it is not written at all. in the classroom, severe and responsible teachers often spend their energy on clarifying knowledge and implementing exercises so that students can have a firm grasp of knowledge and make no mistakes in exams. in short, the teaching values discussed abstractly by teachers are not consistent with the values they pursue in teaching practice, and they are far from each other. to point out this phenomenon is not to accuse teachers of inconsistency in words and deeds, but to show that we deeply feel the change in the concept of teaching reform in the reform research. this includes the transformation of teaching values, which must not be separated from teachers’ teaching practice and must pay attention to the process of how they realize internalization in their teaching practice. only the teacher’s inner concept has the fundamental role of guiding the teacher’s teaching goal formulation and orientation practice behavior. therefore, we need to work with teachers to reflect on teaching practice critically, find out the teaching values hidden and existing behind teaching behavior and speech, and then understand such values’ problems. it is further necessary to discuss the basis and rationality of the new classroom teaching values with teachers, rebuild the classroom teaching values in the teachers’ minds, and realize them consciously and persistently in teaching practice. the new basic education classroom teaching reform regards the connection, co-creation, and interpretation between teachers’ new values and new teaching behaviors as the requirements throughout e ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1133 the reform and is also one of the essential indicators for evaluating whether the reform is happening. the core idea of the new teaching values the reconstruction of the new teaching values must start from the level of general common understanding, that is, to re-understand the value of teaching in educating people and the question of what kind of people it serves. the core concept of the common values of teaching formed by the “new basic education” is: the values of classroom teaching in china’s primary education need to be transformed from a single transmission of ready-made knowledge presented in textbooks to a generation that can achieve an active and healthy development in contemporary society. we believe that subject book knowledge is a resource and means of “education” in classroom teaching, serving the fundamental purpose of “education.” “teaching” and “education” are not two things; they are different aspects of one thing. in teaching, teachers realize “education” through “teaching.” in order to teach well, teachers need to understand what kind of people to educate. teachers who only pay attention to the value of existing knowledge transfer are actually “educating” people who passively accept, adapt, obey, and execute others’ thoughts and will as their primary way of living. the active spirit and desire to explore young students’ lives are often suppressed or even obliterated in such classroom teaching. if this situation does not change, education will become an opposing force hindering social and personal development. the “new basic education” advocates that today’s elementary and middle school education in china should take the formation of students’ awareness and the ability for active and healthy development as the core value, and this value must be reflected in all educational activities. among them, “active” is a further focus and is a popular formulation of “education should be based on student development.” here, it is necessary to explain the basis for this focus. “student development” is a frequently discussed issue in education. in the past ten years or so, educational theorists have first discussed whether education should be based on social development or individual development. later, when it comes to the latter, we will further discuss the “what development” of students should be based on. each has its own opinions, such as “harmonious development,” “subjective development,” “free development,” and “multi-faceted development,” and so on. these views give people inspiration from different angles. however, it seems that there is only an ideal state that humans are expected to achieve to explain “development.” in our view, “development” as an open and generative dynamic process is neither external nor internal. human development can only be realized in the interaction of various human relations and activities. therefore, we should not only set the requirements for development from the perspective of isolated individuals but should use “relationships” and “activities” as the framework to think about the “what development” of students should be the basis for education. furthermore, as an individual, the most fundamental relationships and activities fall into two categories. one category points to the outside world (extroverted). it refers to the individual’s relationship with the surrounding world and practical activities. the other is internal (introverted), that is, the relationship between the ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1134 individual and the self, reflection, and reconstruction activities. there are only two primary ways that individuals can take in these two types of relationships and activities: active or passive. naturally, people cannot take the initiative actively all the time, everything, and everywhere. however, from the perspective of self-development, individual initiative is a significant key factor. this initiative includes the relationship and activities of the above two dimensions. they are indispensable to the development of the individual and are closely related and interact with each other. individual initiative is always a choice and action made after understanding the outside world, self, relationship, the value of the behavior that will occur, and generating a desire. regardless of whether the final subject actively chooses to “forward,” actively choose to “backward,” or chooses to “unchanged,” it is all based on the individual’s knowledge and will. the initiative of individual practice is significant for everyone in an era of rapid changes in the current environment and an increase in uncertainties in the living environment. the life course of everyone living in contemporary chinese society has more opportunities and possibilities than before the reform and opening up, but there are also more risks and crises. therefore, people’s awareness and ability of self-selection under complex backgrounds are more important and necessary for the meaning and value of life. the possibility of active human development can be explained using the biological subject and self-organization theory proposed by the famous contemporary french thinker edgar morin. morin believes that living things can self-organize and regenerate themselves. this ability is realized by processing a series of information, by oneself and for one’s calculation. “the minimum actions of living beings are based on the premise of ‘self-calculation.’ through this calculation, the individual processes all objects and materials according to itself in a self-centered manner. the subject is such a computing existence.” 3 this is to talk about the subject’s “self-organization” in the sense of living organisms. what morin wants to explain in this way is: the subject “is not just a philosophical concept, a problem in the spiritual domain, but also an ontological concept with material substance, and it is also a scientifically provable conclusion 4 ; the subject is not just a human characteristic the unique characteristics are the characteristics shared by living things.” when talking about “humans,” morin affirmed that humans are not separated from the biological realm, so they still retain the essential characteristics of living things, but humans are different from living things. he emphasized the emergence of extraordinary new forms in human beings, who are the subject of consciousness. he said: “as for us, human beings, we have consciousness, language, and culture. we are computing/knowing individuals: subjects, who can make decisions, make choices, make policies, enjoy freedom, and create inventions. 5 morin’s above statement has at least two cognitive values: first, it redefines the concept of “subject” from a scientific perspective and extends it to the entire biological field, providing a new perspective for subject research. it is a perspective that stays in the field of speculation and rethinks the subject matter involved in philosophy connected with science. second, while communicating the relationship between man and the biological world, it also highlights the human subject’s uniqueness. this unique concentration shows that people have consciousness and calculation: cognitive ability, which ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1135 makes people show a series of behavioral characteristics far beyond the biological world. the inherent power is that people can consciously and autonomously choose, plan and create. from the perspective of education, it is more important that this kind of knowledge-calculation activity points to the environment and objects of human material existence and points to the environment and objects of human spiritual existence. it points to the external world of the individual and points to the internal world of the individual. when it points to the understanding and calculation of the inner world and directly focuses on the individual’s development, the individual actively thinks and criticizes his development. when choosing goals, planning processes, and preparing for implementation, people have the individual development awareness and ability to take the initiative to control their own life and destiny. this is the essential possibility a person has. it is the most critical “self-generation and self-regeneration” ability different from any living creatures, and it is also the inner guarantee for a person as an individual to realize the value of life and obtain a happy life. therefore, cultivating individuals’ ability to develop actively has been designated by the “new basic education” as the essential primary education task to develop people’s life potential. it can be seen from this that we use the term “active” to define “development” because it not only embodies the state of activity but also contains the selfconsciousness of the subject, points to relational things, and expresses the pursuit of expectations. this is our answer from the overall framework of relations and activities, based on the integration of the essential power of human beings and the needs of contemporary chinese social development, and that education should be based on “what development of students.” also, we added the word “health” after the word “active.” this is a restrictive definition, mainly to avoid misunderstandings, to avoid accusations such as “to take the initiative to do bad things, only care about personal interests, and undermine the interests of the collective and others, is it also the active development expected by education?” here, “health” expresses a positive direction that requires individual behavior to help develop the individual’s body and mind and human society. maybe this is an unnecessary “restriction.” if we regard the word “development” as inherently containing the meaning of change positively and upward, this restrictive word becomes even more superfluous. reconstruction of subject teaching values the second level of the reconstruction of classroom teaching values is the reconstruction of subject teaching values. this is a transformation that teachers must realize whether they can implement the new teaching values at the general level after they agree with the new teaching values. because it is related to how each teacher recognizes the specific value of the subject he teaches. only when the understanding is clear it is possible to implement the understanding of teaching values into the planning of specific teaching behaviors from the design activities before the teaching process and provide a “blueprint” in line with the value orientation for the development of teaching practice. ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1136 otherwise, the new teaching values at the general level will still be just verbal empty talk. the new basic education realizes the conversion and infiltration of common teaching values recognized by teachers into subject teaching values through the research of subject teaching reform plan, case design, practice and evaluation, and research on subject teaching design. 6 here, we would like to explain the main content of the reconstruction of subject teaching values with the reform requirements of teachers’ teaching design and show how the general theories we put forward are transformed and permeated into the evolution process of teachers’ actual work. extend the rich educational value of subjects for a long time, the educational value of subjects has been limited to mastering knowledge. in practice, due to the value orientation caused by the intense pressure of “exam-oriented education,” subject teaching tends to memorize or strengthen the content that may be tested in practice to achieve the explicit goal of solid memory, proficient response, and successful test. from the perspective of traditional subject syllabus and textbook presentation, the main highlight is the basic knowledge that has been formed in the subject field. it appears in front of students in the face of objective truth and requires students to understand, master and use. the main consequence of this presentation of the subject is that it has caused the subject’s educational value impoverishment. first, it cuts off two connections: one is the rich and complex connection between abstract book knowledge and people’s life; the other is the rich and complex connection between abstract book knowledge and people’s discovery, problem-solving, and knowledge process. the knowledge encountered by students and teachers in teaching is a solidified truth, lacking knowledge of “popularity” and a bunch of “dead” symbolic conclusions. they serve as the “original materials” that make up the subject’s primary content and bring about the original poverty of education resources. also, what is worth thinking about is that the selection of the traditional subject teaching content of elementary and middle school is based on the related scientific subject. from this point of view of the ultimate goal of subject teaching in elementary and middle school, it is also to let students master the subject’s basics (including knowledge, skills, and methods) and prepare for further learning or future professional learning. although the arrangement of teaching content and the compilation of textbooks also emphasize the need to pay attention to the students’ cognitive level, characteristics, and acceptability, which cannot be entirely compiled according to the logic of the subject, but its purpose is to make it easier and better for students to learn the subject know-how. in short, the subject itself is the center of attention of subject teaching. this creates a vital lack: the lack of attention to the needs of elementary and middle schools of different ages. on the one hand, most learning subjects’ content lacks an internal connection with students’ growth today. the content of classroom teaching has become a specialized field isolated from the daily life of students. it seems to belong to another world. on the other hand, the confusion, curiosity, questions, expectations, interests, and many potential abilities that students often appear in the process of ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1137 growing up are not reflected in the subject setting. after all, the subject is directly set for students to enter higher school. students’ development in learning is inevitable and indirect results of learning. the issue of “education” as the school’s fundamental value, as the main body of development and growth: students’ needs, from the student’s need subject to the compilation of the syllabus and textbooks, have not entered the minds of the creators and compilers. as a primary, critical, prerequisite question, it is considered the basis, primary reference, and entire teaching subject’s content. in curriculum reforms, people often call for the following: the society has developed, and new subjects need to be added; the science has developed, and the existing subject knowledge is outdated, and the teaching content needs to be updated. how many curriculum reforms are often completed in “additions and subtractions, additions and replacements?” however, the relationship between students’ growth and development needs and the curriculum reform has not yet been studied as the core issue of curriculum reform. in our opinion, the content of curriculum and subject teaching lacks vitality, which is a deeper reason for the impoverished value of subject teaching and education. based on reason analysis, the “new basic education” gradually formed an action strategy to expand the value of subject education: the starting point of reform is to develop the value of existing subjects rather than creating new courses. this is a possible action strategy for the school as the basic unit and the actual school teaching reform. it is also a feasible strategy for teachers to create and realize their changes and development in research reform. however, it is necessary to further study the “color of life” in the overall reform of elementary and middle school curriculum from a long-term perspective. for now, in school practice, this task can be studied from the self-developed curriculum of some schools with relatively weak macro-control and social intervention. with the improvement of china’s elementary and middle school curriculum and implementation policy openness, the school’s power and ability to select and compile courses independently are enhanced. the school-based curriculum has genuinely become a universal need and action for elementary and middle schools. furthermore, a life-rich curriculum focusing on the development and growth of young people will undoubtedly be created. to expand the educational value of the existing subjects, the new basic education requires teachers to carefully analyze the subject’s unique development value for students when designing teaching, instead of first grasping the critical points of knowledge and teaching in this lesson. we do not believe that subject knowledge is of no value to students’ development and can be ignored. on the contrary, it is the primary content that must be finally mastered by students in teaching. however, the value of teaching to students should not stay here, let alone think that students exist for learning this knowledge, and teachers exist for teaching this knowledge. teaching to serve the students’ active development in many aspects is the most basic foothold. therefore, the subject’s unique educational value should be based on students’ development to analyze the unique role that different subjects can play. specifically, the development value of each subject to students, in addition to knowledge in one field, from a deeper level, at least it can also help students understand, explain, feel, understand, change their lives in ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1138 it and continue to interact with them a rich and colorful world (including nature, society, people, life, occupation, family, self, others, groups, practice, communication, reflection, learning, inquiry, creation, etc.). moreover, form and realize their wishes, provide different paths and unique perspectives, discover methods and thinking strategies, and unique operational symbols and logic. provide a kind of experience and experience that can only be obtained in this subject’s study; enhance the unique subject’s beauty discovery, appreciation, and expression ability. only in this way can the development of students’ spiritual world be nurtured in many aspects from different subjects’ teaching. while developing the ability to feel, experience, understand, appreciate, change, and create the external world, they can constantly enrich and perfect their lives. finally, experience a rich learning life and meet the growing needs of life. reorganize teaching content according to the needs of realizing the value of education with the above understanding, the development of subject education resources also requires teachers to reorganize and process existing teaching content in two aspects during teaching design. first, the subject’s book knowledge is composed of simple to complex structure chains according to its inherent logic. the organization of teaching content is based on the structure as a large unit so that the main cognitive thread that runs through the teaching is the gradual complexity of the structure. when teaching content related to a knowledge structure, it is divided into two teaching stages. the first stage is teaching a specific structure with knowledge as the carrier, and the second stage is the stage when students use this structure to learn and expand related knowledge with a similar structure. the design of the teaching content of this organization is called the “long-term two-stage” design. its purpose is to enable students to actively participate in learning in the teaching process and form an active learning mentality and ability. we believe that in order for students to master the initiative in learning, the most efficient way is to master and use knowledge structures. the structure has much more robust organizational and migration capabilities than knowledge points. the goal we expect to achieve is the students’ firm grasp and proficient use of structure-related knowledge until internalization, but more importantly, students can discover and form structures and master and use structures flexibly. each subject has its structure group. the learning and internalization of different subject structure groups will help students from many different interlinked structure groups and structural thinking methods. this has a fundamental role for students to discover, understand, and solve problems with a comprehensive vision in a new, unfamiliar, and complex environment. it is essential learning required for people’s survival and development in a complex and changeable era. ability is also an essential basis for students’ learning ability to be self-proliferating. second, re-activate the structured book knowledge with symbols as the primary carrier. the purpose is to achieve communication with three aspects: book knowledge and human life; communication with students’ experience world and growth needs; ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1139 communication with people who discover and develop knowledge and history. in layman’s terms, it is to restore knowledge to a new state closely related to human life and life, to present a state of life. knowledge of the inner life state can most activate and arouse students’ inner needs, interest, and confidence in learning and enhance their desire and ability to explore actively. while searching for these three connections, teachers have also expanded their field of knowledge and turned their attention from studying the teaching content to the students’ pre-existing state, potential state, life experience, and development needs. this is a crucial step in the transition from “teaching” to “education” through teaching. after the teacher has completed the above two aspects of teaching content, making an overall arrangement of the subject teaching time during the semester is possible. the “new basic education” requires breaking the “uniform movement” type of chapter-by-chapter and section-by-section distribution plan in the distribution of teaching time. instead, it advocates dividing each structural unit’s learning according to the “long-distance two-stage” design requirements. the teaching “structure” phase and the application of the “structure” phase. in the “structure” stage of teaching, the method of discovery is mainly used to allow students to start from real problems, gradually find out the structure of knowledge and the steps and methods for discovering the structure, and then form a comprehensive “class structure” of knowledge, methods, and steps through summary mode. the teaching time in this part can be moderately slowed down so that most students have a whole experience of the process of discovering and constructing a “class structure.” in this way, the “class structure” is formed so that students and teachers interact gradually through the teaching process and become the student’s own “class structure.” on this basis, the subsequent teaching phase with “structure” can be carried out in an accelerated manner. according to the actual results of the reform experiment, on the whole, not only will the teaching progress not be slowed down due to the slowdown in the first stage, but it will also be ahead of the original schedule. we use the remaining teaching time brought by the reorganization of the structure and the improvement of students’ learning ability to hold the “subject activity” and the “subject comprehensive activity” that combines the relevant subjects. these activities provide students with a more expansive, richer, vivid, and personalized possible space and stage for active development. comprehensively design flexible teaching programs 7 in order to promote the active and healthy development of students, subject teachers under the guidance of values should complete the last synthesis in teaching design. it is to combine each lesson’s specific teaching content with the teaching process’s prior planning to form a “flexible teaching plan.” the new basic education emphasizes the dynamic generation of lessons in the teaching process but does not advocate that teachers and students ride with loose reins in the classroom. on the contrary, it requires the design of the teaching plan, and in the design of the teaching plan, time and space are reserved for students’ active participation to create conditions for the dynamic generation of the teaching process. the teaching plan is necessary to set teaching goals, but the ye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1140 goals are not limited to cognition but also involve other goals that students may achieve in this class. the setting of goals should be based on teaching content and student status, and possible expectations. goals have “flexible intervals,” which consider the differences between students and consider the possible differences between the expected goals and the actual results. the teaching process’s design focuses on the wholeprocess-related planning of where to start, how to advance, and how to turn. as for the end, when it abruptly stops is not absolute. the important thing is that it will happen naturally, not that the teaching schedule should be set in step with the class. the process design should also have “flexible intervals,” which can be reflected through different assignments, exercises, and activities. the process design also needs to plan a series of aspects such as teacher activities during the teaching process, related student activities, the form and method of organizing activities, the prediction of activity effects and the assumption of expected effects, the way of interaction between teachers and students, etc., and finally form a comprehensive and flexible teaching plan. compared with the style of a typical traditional teaching plan, it designs detailed questions, predetermined standard answers, writes down every sentence the teacher wants to say in class, and accurately calculates the time allocation of different class links. however, this new design requirement seems to be rougher, leaving too much uncertainty, flexible targets, space, and time that can be changed. however, it introduces these uncertainties and variable factors that make classroom teaching possible to be closer to each student’s actual state. it is possible to make students’ minds flying and interested, and it is possible to make teachers and students interact actively, create sparks of creation, and emerge new questions and answers. the “new basic education” is precisely through the in-depth development, recombination, and multi-directional activation of uniformly formulated deterministic teaching content. it is precisely by introducing modifiable factors and uncertainties into the design of the teaching process that the teaching design leaves the possibility of active participation, active interaction, and creation for the practice of teacher and student classroom teaching. in this way, the values of teaching to serve students’ initiative and healthy development can be implemented and transformed into teachers’ pre-planning of their teaching behaviors. moreover, for this value to finally infiltrate and reflect into teaching practice, it provides “combat plan” support. notes 1. “research on new basic education facing the 21st century” is a comprehensive basic education reform research project hosted by the author. the research explores a series of significant issues in the transformational transformation of primary education during the transition period of chinese society at the turn of the century to combine theory and practice. the research started in september 1994 and was carried out in two stages. the first stage is “exploratory research.” at the beginning of 1997, the project was formally approved as a critical project of the ninth five-year plan of china’s national educational science plan. in 2000, the project results of exploratory reye. rebuild classroom teaching values. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1141 search were awarded the first prize of shanghai municipal educational research project excellent achievement. in september of the same year, the research entered the second phase: “extensional and developmental research,” which was completed in 2005. at present, this research has been listed as a critical subject of the national philosophy and social science research “tenth five-year plan.” 2. ye, l. (1994). the spirit of the times and the construction of new educational ideals. educational research, 1994(10):3-8. [chinese] https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfd1994jyyj199410000.htm 3. edgar moran morin, e. & chen, y. (2001) complex thought: conscious science. beijing: peking university press. pp261. [chinese] isbn: 9787301049327. 4. here, “science” is relative to “philosophy” and falls within the category of classical science. that is, science is characterized by the conclusions obtained through empirical research and can be tested. 5. edgar moran. complex thought: conscious science. beijing: peking university press, 2001. 261. [chinese] 6. “new basic education research” has conducted a comprehensive subject teaching reform plan for the three subjects of elementary school chinese, mathematics, ideology and morality, and junior middle school chinese, mathematics, and foreign language since the exploratory stage. the ongoing “new basic education” extension and developmental research continue to deepen the research on the relevant reform plans. the ultimate goal of program research is not a template but to provide a way of thinking and methods. this paper did not discuss specific subject reform plans and cases. 7. the guiding ideology of teaching plan design is related to classroom teaching values and the classroom teaching process view. this is also an important theoretical and practical issue in studying the “new basic education” classroom teaching reform, which the author will discuss in a future article. therefore, the discussion in this aspect of this article can only be summarized. received: 05 january 2021 revised: 27 january 2021 accepted: 15 february 2021 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfd1994-jyyj199410000.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfd1994-jyyj199410000.htm article-lanye-bece_title_july2021 article-lanye-bece_maintextjuly2021 a meta-analysis of the relationships between chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement yuntian xie, 1,2 zifu shi, 1 lin yin, 1 luo lan 1 1. cognition and human behavior key laboratory of hunan province, department of psychology, hunan normal university, changsha 410081, hunan, china 2. department of applied psychology, changsha normal university, changsha 410100, hunan, china abstract: this article aimed to examine the relationships between chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement through a meta-analytical review. after literature screening, 54 studies and 793 independent effect sizes that met the inclusion criteria were incorporated into the analysis (n = 24630). according to the results of the study, positive parenting styles like “emotional warmth and understanding” had prominent beneficial effects on child academic achievement, whilst negative ones such as “punishment and harshness”, “overinvolvement and overprotection”, “preference for the subject”, “rejection and denial”) were significantly unfavorable for child academic performance. in addition, the relation between parental overinvolvement and overprotection and child academic achievement was moderated by parental roles. children’s ages could moderate the relationships between parenting styles (except for overinvolvement and overprotection) and child academic results. the connection between parental preference for the subject and child academic achievement was moderated by disciplines. the effects of parents’ emotional warmth and understanding as well as overinvolvement and overprotection were moderated by times. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 12(1):1589-1595. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab009 how to cite: xie, y., shi, z., yin, l., & lan, l. (2022). a meta-analysis of the relationships between chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement. best evidence in chinese education, 12(1):1589-1595. xie et al. (hunan). chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement. bece, vol.12, no.1, 2022 1590 keywords: parenting style, academic achievement, meta-analysis, embu correspondence to: zifu shi, cognition and human behavior key laboratory of hunan province, department of psychology, hunan normal university, changsha 410081, hunan, china. e-mail: shizf@hunnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:shizf@hunnu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ xie et al. (hunan). chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1591 research aims and hypotheses the present study proposed two hypotheses. h1: child academic achievement is closely correlated with parenting styles in china. h2: parental roles, children’s ages, disciplines, and times can moderate the relation between parenting styles and child academic performance. additionally, given that parents and children’s understanding of parenting styles differ in varying cultural contexts, this study attempted to use meta-analysis to examine the relationships between parenting styles and child academic results as well as the factors influencing them against the backdrop of chinese culture. methodology literature retrieval the present study included literature published both in chinese and english. chinese terms for “parenting styles” and “academic achievement” were used to search for studies in cnki (china national knowledge infrastructure) journal, doctoral dissertations, and masters’ theses databases, china science and technology journal database, and wanfang database. studies in english were identified by searching under keywords “parenting style”, “academic achievement” (or “academic performance”), and “chinese” (or “china”) in ebsco, science direct, and springer link. as chinese version of embu (a parenting style assessment scale) was revised in 1993, we retrieved articles published between january 1993 and december 2018 from may the 26th of 2019 to june the 28th of 2019. inclusion criteria i. studies included must be empirical research with complete data and specified sample sizes. ii. subjects are from china; data related to chinese parenting styles and student academic results must be provided if the sample is a mixture of chinese and foreign subjects. iii. the use of chinese version of embu as a measurement tool must be clearly stated. iv. academic achievement refers to results of chinese, mathematics, english and other subjects. studies using student academic achievement scales are excluded. v. focusing on the relationships between parenting styles and child academic achievement, the study must report r value or f value, t value and x2 value that can be converted to r value. vi. as a result, 54 studies with 793 independent samples (n=24,630) were included in the meta-analysis. coding of literature characteristics the basic information of included studies entailed authors, publication time, sample sizes, subjects’ education levels, subjects’ parents, disciplines, etc. data from each efxie et al. (hunan). chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1592 fect size was reported only once to ensure the independence of effect sizes. an independent sample was coded only once; if a study contained more than one independent samples, then they would be coded separately. the majority of the studies employed the standard chinese version of embu, although a few of them used the simplified version. in terms of the collection time of the research data, in case of not being reported in the study, it was assumed two years after the publication time of the study. thus, this analysis covered a time range from 1997 to 2016, which was divided into two phases with phase one from 1997 to 2006 and phase two from 2007 to 2016, according to the two key points (1997 and 2007) in the five-year plan of china home education work. processes of the meta-analysis first, effect sizes were calculated with pearson product-moment correlation coefficient r meta-analysis method. r value was converted by fisher z and used to compute the weight of effect sizes and the 95% confidence interval. τ 2 was treated as an indicator of the heterogeneity of effect sizes. the present study used q-statistic to test the significance of τ 2 . second, whether to choose the fixed-effects or random-effects model depended on our projections of effect sizes of included studies and analytical aims. in current study, subjects included pre-school children, primary and secondary students, residing in urban or rural areas; the tools used to measure parenting styles were not identical. hence, this study adopted the random-effects model to compute effect sizes while applied the fixed-effects model to the analysis of moderating variables. lastly, the fail-safe number (nfs), trim-and-fill method, and contour-enhanced funnel plot were employed to test the publication bias. the higher the nfs, the less likelihood of publication bias. when nfs is less than 5k + 10, the effect of publication bias is big enough to be attended to. analysis results the test of main effects according to the test results of main effects of parenting styles on child academic achievement, there is a strong and positive correlation between parental emotional warmth and understanding and child academic performance (r = 0.18, 95% ci [0.17, 0.20]); parental punishment and harshness were inversely connected to child academic results (r = -0.12, 95% ci [-0.14, -0.11]); parental overinvolvement and overprotection negatively predicted child academic performance (r= -0.05, 95% ci [-0.06, -0.04]); parental preference for the subject had a significant unfavorable influence on child academic achievement ( r = 0.06, 95% ci [0.08, 0.04]); parental rejection and denial had strong and negative impact on child academic performance (r = -0.12, 95% ci [0.13, -0.10]). in summary, positive parenting styles like emotional warmth and understanding are significantly beneficial for kid academic achievement, while negative ones such as parental punishment and harshness, overinvolvement and overprotection, preference for the subject, rejection and denial are detrimental to child academic results. xie et al. (hunan). chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1593 the test of moderating effects moderating effects of parental roles parental roles significantly moderated the relationship between overinvolvement and overprotection and kid academic achievement (qbetween = 4.00, df = 1, p < 0. 05), with the father’s effect being remarkably greater than the mothers. nevertheless, parental roles did not display prominent moderating effects on the relationship between other parenting styles and child academic performance, with qbetween = 1.01, df = 1, p = 0.32 for the relationship between emotional warmth and understanding and child academic results, qbetween = 0.03, df = 1, p = 0.86 for that between parental punishment and harshness and kid academic achievement, qbetween = 0.25, df = 1, p = 0.62 for that between parental preference for the subject and child academic results, and qbetween = 0.83, df = 1, p = 0.36 for that between parental rejection and denial and kid academic outcomes. the moderating effects of children’ ages children’s ages imposed pronounced moderating effects on the relationships between parenting styles (except for overinvolvement and overprotection) and child academic achievement. specifically, children’s ages significantly moderated the relationship between parental emotional warmth and understanding and child academic performance (q-between = 55.24, df = 4, p < 0.001), and that between parental punishment and harshness and kid academic results (qbetween = 96.74, d f = 4, p < 0.001), with the strongest effects at the kindergarten age, followed by primary and junior secondary school ages, and with the weakest effects at senior secondary and secondary school ages. the primary school age most powerfully moderated the relationship between parental preference for the subject and child academic performance (qbetween = 13.85, df = 4, p < 0.01), while the junior and senior secondary school ages had the slightest moderating effects. on the relationship between parental rejection and denial and kid academic achievement (qbetween = 90.49, df = 4, p< 0.001), the kindergarten age had the most significant moderating effect whilst the secondary school age had the weakest one. the moderating effects of disciplines disciplines significantly moderated the relationship between parental preference for the subject and child academic performance (qbetween = 8.57, df = 2, p < 0.05), with chinese imposing the greatest effect, followed by mathematics and english. however, the moderating effects of disciplines on the relationships between other parenting styles and child academic achievement were not significant, with qbetween = 1.56, df = 2, p= 0.46 for the relationship between parental emotional warmth and understanding and child academic results, qbetween = 1.13, df = 2, p = 0.57 for the relationship between parental punishment and harshness and kid academic performance, q-between = 0.84, df = 2, p = 0.66 for the relationship between parental overinvolvement and overprotection and child academic achievement, qbetween = 0.34, df = 2, p = 0.85 for the relationship between parental rejection and denial and kid academic results. xie et al. (hunan). chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1594 the moderating effects of times the moderating effects of times were not significant on the relationships between parental punishment and harshness and child academic achievement (qbetween = 2.38, df = 1, p = 0.12), between parental preference for the subject and child academic performance (qbetween = 1.54, df = 1, p = 0.22), and between parental rejection and denial and kid academic results (qbetween = 0.76, df = 1, p = 0.39), whereas they were significant or marginally significant on those between the other two parenting styles and kid academic achievement. to be specific, the moderating effect of phase two was remarkably stronger than that of phase one on the relationship between parental emotional warmth and understanding and child academic performance (qbetween = 9.89, df = 1, p < 0.01), and the positive correlation between them was strengthened in phase two. the moderating effect of phase one was substantially stronger than that of phase two on the relationship between parental overinvolvement and overprotection and kid academic results (qbetween = 2.82, df = 1, p = 0.09), and the negative correlation between them was weakened in the second phase. conclusions and discussion the relationship between parenting styles and child academic achievement based on the existing 54 studies and 793 independent samples, this meta-analysis found that there were significant correlations between the five parenting styles and child academic achievement. this conclusion validates h1 and is consistent with the results of a previous literature review that analyzed 39 studies. in addition, different from another meta-analysis conducted by foreign scholars which focused on the relations between authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and neglectful parenting styles and academic achievement of subjects in western countries, the present study drew on five parenting styles (emotional warmth and understanding, punishment and harshness, overinvolvement and overprotection, preference for the subject, rejection and denial) listed in embu to examine their relationships with child academic performance in the context of chinese culture. there were differences in parenting styles cited and the cultural backgrounds of samples between the two meta-analytical studies, but interestingly, both discovered that the degree of correlation between parenting styles and child academic achievement was not very high, with a correlation coefficient of -0.12 – 0.18 found in the present study and a correlation coefficient of -0.16 – 0.17 in the other one. different parenting styles yields distinct influences. the favorable effects of positive parenting styles and detrimental influences of negative ones on kid academic achievement found by the current study are aligned with the results of existent research and support the argument of the human ecology development theory. moreover, it is discovered that parental emotional warmth and understanding has the most salient effect on child academic performance, which highlights the importance of emotional warmth and understanding to children’s growth. besides, the coefficients of correlations bexie et al. (hunan). chinese parenting styles and child academic achievement. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1595 tween child academic results and parental punishment and harshness as well as rejection and denial are relatively large. the moderating effects of parental roles, children’s ages, disciplines, and times first off, as per the analysis results, parental roles cannot significantly moderate the relationships between most of the parenting styles and child academic achievement. however, on the relationship of parental overinvolvement and overprotection and child academic performance, the moderate effect of the father is considerably greater than that of the mother. second, ages can effectively moderate the relationships between most of the parenting styles and child academic results. parenting styles are more closely related to child academic performance at the primary level, whilst less at the secondary level. third, disciplines impose a significant moderating effect on the relationship between parental preference for the subject and kid academic achievement. lastly, as times advance, the favorable effect of the positive parenting style (emotional warmth and understanding) on child academic performance strengthens, while the detrimental effect of negative parenting styles like overinvolvement and overprotection is mitigated. the chinese version of this article has been published in psychological development and education,2022, 38(3):14. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 谢云天, 史滋福, 尹霖, 兰洛. 中国父母教养方式与儿童学业成绩关系的元分析. 心理发展与教 育, 2022, 38(3):14. received: 05 august 2022 revised: 14 august 2022 accepted: 28 august 2022 ar3-zifushi-bece_titlesep_2022 ar3-zifushi-bece_maintextsep2022 bece. newsletter vol.12, no.2, 2022 1657 autocratic parenting style and adolescent perseverance: a moderated mediation model by li, x. n. & liu, h. s. correspondence to: huashan liu, central china normal university, china. email: 15432141@qq.com erseverance, as an important positive mental quality, can predict not only academic performance, but also nonacademic outcomes. the cultivation of perseverance needs the nourishment of a good external environment, including the support of parents, teachers, and peers as well as the influence of socialization, while improper environmental elements such as neglect, autocracy, rough treatment, discrimination hinder the cultivation of individual perseverance. this study constructed a moderated mediation model to examine the relationship between authoritarian parenting style, self-concept clarity, selfworth, and the development of adolescent perseverance. a total of 2,101 adolescents were tested with the family rearing style questionnaire, adolescent self-reported perseverance scale, self-concept clarity questionnaire, and self-worth scale. the results showed that: (i) authoritarian parenting was significantly and negatively correlated with self-concept clarity and perseverance of adolescents and was significantly and positively related to their self-worth; there was a significant positive correlation between self-concept clarity, self-worth, and perseverance of teenagers. (ii) in the mediation chain of autocratic parenting, self-concept clarity, and perseverance, self-worth moderated both the first half and the second half of the path. in the first half of the path, self-worth can alleviate the negative influence of autocratic parenting on the development of self-concept clarity; in the second half of the path, self-worth can enhance the positive impact of self-concept clarity on perseverance. source: educational research and experiment, 2021; 2021(5):84-90. p mailto:15432141@qq.com bece. newsletter vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1837 positive parenting and prosocial risky behavior in adolescents: testing a moderated mediation model by feng, x., dou, k., & tang, y. correspondence to: kai dou, guangzhou university, china. e-mail: psydk@gzhu.edu.cn he study prosocial risky behavior involves risk taking that benefits others or society, such as stopping peer bullying and sacrificing personal time for volunteerism. it is positive behavior as opposed to negative behavior like adolescent smoking and gambling. there are linkages between adolescent risky behavior and environmental factors such as the family and peers. this study examines the relation between positive parenting and adolescent prosocial risky behavior as well as the mediation effect of prosocial peers and moderation effect of individual risk propensity. research findings show that: (i) positive parenting positively predicts adolescent prosocial risky behavior. that indicates positive parenting is a promotive factor in prosocial risk taking among adolescents. therefore, it is important for parents to give children more emotional warmth, allowing them adequate security in order for them to courageously confront the external world. parents should improve their communication with children, devote quality time to them, and create a good familial atmosphere. parental positive responses to the child’s progress, such as prompt praise and appreciation, are conducive to their developing into a helpful person. (ii) prosocial peers mediate the relation between positive parenting and adolescent prosocial risky behavior. in other words, positive parenting can indirectly impact adolescent prosocial risky behavior via prosocial peers. that means parents remain an important social medium in their adolescent children’s life, affecting their choice of interactive partners. prosocial peer affiliation contributes to increasing prosocial behavior in adolescents. parents and educators should pay more attention to the role of peers in the child’s adolescence, giving them proper guidance in peer interaction so as to circumvent deviant peer affiliation. (iii) the indirect effect of positive parenting on adolescent prosocial risky behavior via prosocial peers is more significant among adolescents with high risk propensity than their peers with low risk propensity. risk propensity is an indicator used to measure the individual’s attitudes towards t mailto:psydk@gzhu.edu.cn vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1838 uncertainties. in educating adolescents with high risk propensity, parents and teachers should not overly suppress their risky behavior, but instead, should encourage them to have more communication with prosocial peers and increase their positive and prosocial behaviors. source: psychological development and education, 2024; 40(5):658-666. bece. newsletter bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1344 can after-school service in primary and secondary schools promote educational equity? by zhang, w. p., fu, d., li, w., & zen, x. correspondence to: zhang, w. p., hangzhou normal university, china. e-mail: 441329552@qq.com ublished in china educational technology, the study analyzes the survey data of primary and secondary school students from 32 counties (districts) in 6 provinces (autonomous regions) in china. by using descriptive statistics, chi-square test, propensity score matching (psm) and regression analysis, it examines the differences among students from low, middle, and high income families, to determine if after-school service can promote endowment equity, procedure equity and outcome equity in education in china this will provide valid evidence for optimization of after-school service program in china. research results  after-school service has insignificant effects on endowment equity in education. according to the chi-square test, the overall proportion of students participating in after-school service is not high, and there are significant differences in the proportions of students from low, middle and high income families participating in afterschool services (χ 2 =146.942, p < 0.001). specifically, the proportion of students from low-income families participating in afterschool service is the lowest, and the participation rate is positively related to family economic conditions. this may have something to do with the limitations of after-school service as quasi-public goods.  after-school service has moderate effects on procedure equity in education. results of chi-square test indicate that there is no significant difference in demands for after-school service in compulsory subjects (χ 2 = 1.577, p = 0.455>0.05) and interest development (χ 2 = 0.738, p = 0.691>0.05). nevertheless, there is significant difference in demands for after-school service in competence education (χ 2 = 25.272, p < 0.001), which is more likely to be accepted by high income households. this may be related to family economic conditions and school conditions, for middle and low p mailto:441329552@qq.com bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1345 income families can hardly afford after-school service in art and science, and it is difficult for rural schools to conduct art and science courses due to limited human and equipment resources.  after-school service has significant effects on outcome equity in education. according to the results of psm, students who attend after-school service have better academic performance than those who do not. meanwhile, results of regression analysis also indicate that after-school service helps narrow the gap in academic performance caused by different household economic conditions. thus, after-school service reduces the inequality in educational outcomes among students from different socio-economic backgrounds. based on the research results, the author holds that the nature of afterschool service as non-public goods determines its limitations in promoting educational equity. however, since after-school service is provided by schools, it helps make up for the inequality caused by family conditions to a certain extent. therefore, it is necessary to expand the scope of after-school service to ensure it is available to students from low-income families. schools should be encouraged to invest more in after-school service in competence education and after-school service should play a more important role in reducing students’ homework and extracurricular training burden. source: china educational technology, 2021(11):16-23. family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities: an analysis based on the post-junior secondary education tracking in county b of jiangsu province xinzhuo zhu, jingya luo huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan 430074, hubei, china abstract: the disparities in the quality of senior secondary education opportunities are one of key topics in educational equity research in china as they have a critical impact on students’ access to higher education and even their future occupational attainments. students’ senior secondary education opportunities are related to multiple factors. this study attempted to examine the relationship between family capital and the quality of children’s senior secondary education opportunities. the research into the post-junior secondary education tracking in county b of jiangsu province demonstrated that compared with vocational secondary education opportunities, children’s access to general senior secondary education (including ordinary and key high schools) was significantly and positively affected by family social capital and less so by family cultural capital, but had a weak correlation with family economic capital; and that cultural capital had more significant impact on children’s admission to high-quality senior secondary schools than to ordinary high schools. subjective aspects of family capital helped improve the access to ordinary senior secondary education of children from underprivileged classes, whilst objective aspects of family capital could limit their key high school enrollment opportunity. it was suggested that the government push through the implementation of the “quota allocation policy” to promote balanced distribution of high achieving students; and that disadvantaged families make more efforts to increase their cultural capital, and schools and communities provide more support to disadvantaged groups to compensate for their paucity of cultural capital and to upgrade the quality of senior secondary education opportunities of their children. zhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no.1, 2023 1680 best evidence in chinese education 2023; 13(1):1679-1688. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar029 how to cite: zhu, x., & luo, j. (2023). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities: an analysis based on the post-junior secondary education tracking in county b of jiangsu province. best evidence in chinese education, 13(1):1679-1688. keywords: family capital, cultural capital, economic capital, social capital, senior secondary education opportunities, post-junior secondary education tracking correspondence to: xinzhuo zhu, school of education, huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan 430074, hubei, china. e-mail: 57097061@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:57097061@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ zhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1681 introduction as a result of the universalization of compulsory education and the increasing popularization of senior secondary education in china, child school enrollment is no longer an issue, and high-quality education resources have become the most pressing demands of the public. to undertake reliable studies of the equity of educational opportunities, we need first to identify the quality levels of and quality gaps in educational opportunities, and then to examine whether all groups have equitable access to educational resources of varying quality levels. students’ access to education opportunities is affected by multiple factors such as social structure, national policy, family background, etc. however, compared with social structures and national policies (macro factors), family capital can more reveal the micro mechanism of access to education opportunities. some components of family capital can be changed by individuals through their own efforts, and thus it offers more useful implications for education research. this article focuses on the effects of family capital on the quality of children’s senior secondary education opportunities in attempt to provide explanations for their unequal access to high school education resources. the analytical framework and research hypotheses based on the objective and subjective aspects of family capital, this study tries to explore more practical and operational methods for family capital exploitation and explain the paths of the influences of each element of family capital on the quality of children’s senior secondary education opportunities. first, family economic capital is a key objective factor influencing the quality of children’s high school education opportunities. economically advantaged families can provide their children with superior educational conditions and high-quality educational resources, including residence in the ideal school district, private tutoring, afterschool training programs, etc. such money investment help improve child academic achievements, which in turn, makes children more successful in the competition for high-quality senior secondary education opportunities. in light of this, the study proposes hypothesis 1 (h1): family economic capital has a positive effect on the quality of children’s senior secondary education opportunities; the more investment parents make in child education, the higher the quality of children’s high school education opportunities. second, empirical research from china and other countries confirm that family cultural capital can predict the quality of children’s senior secondary education opportunities. families with more cultural capital usually place more premiums to the quality of their children’s education and create ideal home cultural atmospheres for their children to form proper learning attitudes and habits, which in turn constitute their advantages in educational competition. as a result, the study raises the hypotheses below: h2: home cultural capital exerts a positive impact on the quality of children’s high school education opportunities; the more cultural capital the family has, the higher the quality of the children’s senior secondary education opportunities. zhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1682 h2a: the higher the parents’ education level, the better the quality of children’s high school education opportunities. h2b: the bigger the size of home book collection, the higher the quality of the children’s senior secondary education opportunities. h2c: the higher importance the family attaches to child education, the better the quality of children’s high school education opportunities. third, in recent years, home social capital is also regarded as an important predictor of children’s access to senior secondary education. in contrast with economic and cultural capital, family social capital influences child access to education opportunities primarily through subjective factors. increased social capital can offset the limitation imposed on children’s education opportunities by objective factors. therefore, we propose the following hypotheses: h3: home social capital poses a positive effect on the quality of children’s high school education opportunities; the more social capital the family has, the higher the quality of children’s senior secondary education opportunities. h3a: the more productive the parent-child communication, the better the quality of children’s high school education opportunities. h3b: the more effective the parental supervision of child learning, the higher the quality of children’s senior secondary education opportunities. h3c: the higher the frequency of parent-teacher communication, the better the quality of children’s high school education opportunities. research design data the research team collected data through the survey on the relationship between family education and educational tracking among junior secondary school graduates 2017 in b county, jiangsu province. county b, located in the north of jiangsu province, has a total area of 1467 square kilometers, most of which is constituted by plains. it has 14 towns and one development zone under its jurisdiction, with a population of about 900000. the railway transportation began at the end of 2020 in the county. basically, it is an agriculture-dominated county. according to the comprehensive evaluation of the gdp and gdp per capita of 54 counties (cities) in jiangsu province by the statistical yearbook of jiangsu province (2018), the socio-economic development of county b is approximately of the middle level of the province. in 2017, the enrollment rate of general senior secondary schools in county b was 56.4%. county b is representative of its kind in the whole country in terms of economic, social, and educational development. there are five general senior secondary schools and one vocational secondary school (school y) in county b. in this survey, 902 subjects (1/5 of the total number of grade ten students in the county) were sampled from the tenth graders of the six high zhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1683 schools by stratified sampling. considering that there are differences in class type among the five general high schools and that students in the experimental classes are fewer than those in the ordinary classes, only students of odd numbers were sampled in experimental classes in each school, while students in ordinary classes are randomly selected on the basis of the whole class. classes in school y are set according to specialties; students from various specialties were included in the sample. a total of 902 questionnaires were distributed in this survey. after eliminating invalid questionnaires, the research team obtained 861 valid questionnaires representing a validity rate of 95.5%. variables the dependent variables in this study, the dependent variable is the quality of the subject’s senior secondary education opportunity, and thus high schools that those junior secondary graduates enrolled in were divided into different ranks to define the quality levels of various high school education opportunities. according to the enrollment periods of the schools surveyed, senior secondary education opportunities in county b were classified into three quality levels: school e, as the only high school in county b that can select students in the first enrollment period after the senior secondary school entrance examination, was defined as the high quality general high school (level one); schools d, b, c and a were classified as ordinary general high schools (level two); school y was a vocational secondary school at the third level. independent variables  family economic capital in this study, family economic capital was measured by household annual investment in education, a category-based interval variable. the logarithm of the median of the interval was incorporated in the analysis. the value of the logarithm was positively correlated with the family’s economic capital. the family’s annual investment in education included its annual expenditure on after-school training.  family cultural capital in this study, parental education levels, the family book collection size, and parents’ educational concepts were used to measure institutionalized, objectified, and embodied cultural capital of the family, respectively.  family social capital social capital of the family was divided into two dimensions: “parent-child communication” and “behavior supervision”, according to the commonly used method of operationalization. control variables zhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1684 there are 4 control variables in this study: gender (1 = female, 2 = male), place of residence (1 = urban, 2 = rural), number of siblings (1 = without siblings, 2 = with a sibling or siblings) and type of junior secondary school (1 = urban junior secondary school, 2 = rural junior secondary school). the treatment of missing values as missing data of the variable “household annual investment in education” was as high as 28%, multiple imputation was adopted to address this issue in the sample analysis. we included all variables in the calculation model of multiple imputation and obtained 10 independent data sets after interpolating missing values. statistical analysis of the 10 data sets was conducted and the estimate of the model was established by integrating the results of these processed data. data analysis methods since the dependent variable in this study is a three-category nominal variable, the hierarchical and multivariate logistic regression model was adopted in data analysis. this model is intended to explain the role and strength of the independent variable x in predicting the probability of occurrence of the dependent variable y, and that the dependent variable y has multiple types of values. in the statistical analysis, first “enrolment in the vocational secondary schools” was used as a reference to identify the differences in enrollment between the vocational secondary school and ordinary and high-quality general high schools, and then “enrollment in ordinary general high schools was used as a reference to focus on the differences in enrollment between ordinary and high-quality general high schools. findings of data analysis logistic regression analysis of the effects of the family capital-related variables on the quality of child senior secondary education opportunities the results of model one show that, girls’ probabilities of entering ordinary general high schools and high-quality general high schools (compared with the vocational secondary school) were 0.63 times and 0.68 times those of boys, respectively; that urban students’ probability of entering the high-quality general high school was 2.1 times that of their rural peers; that the number of siblings had no effect on students’ enrollment in the ordinary general high school, but had a significant influence on their enrollment in the high-quality general high school (children without siblings are nearly 100% more likely to enter the high-quality general senior secondary school than their peers with siblings); and that students who had studied in urban junior secondary schools were 2.2 times and 2.4 times more likely to enter ordinary general high schools and high-quality general high schools, respectively, than their peers who had studied in rural junior secondary school. there were no significant influences of gender and types of junior seczhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1685 ondary schools on enrollment in the ordinary general high school and high-quality general high school (when the comparison is limited between these two categories of schools), but the influences of the place of residence and number of siblings remained. when the variable of family economic capital was incorporated in model two, the regression results demonstrated that there was no significant difference in the impact of home investment in education on child education tracking at the senior secondary level (general or vocational education) or on child school streaming between highquality and ordinary senior secondary schools. model three was meant to examine the effect of family cultural capital on the quality of child senior secondary education opportunity. statistical results showed that the children’s probability of entering the high-quality general high school (compared with the vocational high school) would increase by 15.2% with each one year increase of paternal education; that the size of family book collection was positively related only to children’s access to high-quality general senior secondary education (compared with vocational education); and that parents’ educational concepts had positive effects on child access to both ordinary and high-quality general senior secondary education. paternal education level and the number of books in the home significantly promoted children’s access to the high-quality general senior secondary education (compared with the ordinary general high school education), while the regression coefficient of the variable of parents’ educational concepts was not significant. model four showed the effect of family social capital on child senior secondary education opportunity. parent-child communication as social capital could only increase children’s chances of entering the ordinary general high school; children’s probability of enrolling in the ordinary general high school (compared with the vocational secondary school) increased by 23.9% with one-score increase in parent-child communication. parent-teacher communication has a significant positive impact on children’s admission to high-quality general high school. the higher the frequency of communication between parents and teachers, the more likely it was for children to enter the high-quality general high school (compared with the vocational secondary school). behavior supervision has a positive impact on child access to both ordinary and high-quality general senior secondary education. with every one point increase of family behavior supervision, children’s probability of entering ordinary and high-quality general high school would increase by 71% and 82.4%, respectively. in the comparison of high-quality and ordinary general high school education, the influence of parent-child communication and behavior supervision was no longer significant, but parent-teacher communication could still effectively predict child enrollment in the high-quality general high school. model 5 included the variables of family economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital, which could reflect the comprehensive impact of family capital on the quality of children’s education opportunities. first, the coefficients of variables of gender, place of residence, number of siblings and type of junior secondary school became smaller compared with those in model one, and the significance of the variable of gender disappeared, indicating that family capital can somewhat bridge the gaps in senior secondary education opportunities caused by urban-rural division, gender difference and number of siblings. second, the regression coefficient of the variable of family investment in education was significantly smaller compared with that in model two, which means that the effect of economic capital is likely to be mediated by cultural and zhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1686 social capital. third, in models three, four, and five, the coefficients of variables related to cultural capital remain significant, and the coefficient of paternal education level and the size of home book collection remain stable, indicating that institutionalized cultural capital and objectified cultural capital have a consistent and independent positive impact on the quality of child high school education opportunities. in addition, the regression coefficient of parents’ educational concepts has increased, indicating that there existed interaction between embodied cultural capital and other family capital-related variables. last, with the incorporation of the variables of economic and cultural capital, the regression coefficients of variables of parent-child communication and behavior supervision showed a growing tendency, indicating that there was interaction between domestic social capital and economic and cultural capital. the positive effect of nondomestic social capital like the frequency of parent-teacher communication turned negative and was no longer significant, indicating that after controlling for other family capital-related variables, non-domestic social capital no longer had an impact on the quality of children’s education opportunities, and the effect of non-domestic social capital was likely to be mediated by other family capital-related variables. a comparison of the effects of family capital-related variables this study calculated the standardized logistic regression coefficients to compare the effects of home economic, cultural, and social capital on the quality of high school education opportunities. the results showed that regarding their respective influences on child access to general senior secondary education (compared with vocational secondary education), the absolute value of the standardized regression coefficient of the variable of social capital was significantly greater than that of cultural capital, and that the effect of economic capital on the quality of children’s educational opportunities was minimal. only cultural capital plays an important role in child access to high-quality general senior secondary education (compared with ordinary general high education). additionally, the standardized regression coefficients of subjective factors (parents’ educational concepts, parent-child communication, and behavior supervision) were significantly greater than those of objective factors (the paternal education level and size of family book collection) in terms of their effects on child enrollment in the general senior secondary school (compared with the vocational secondary school); regarding their influences on child admission to high-quality general high schools (compared with ordinary general high schools), the standardized regression coefficients of objective factors were significantly bigger than those of subjective factors. that demonstrated that subjective factors played a more important role than objective ones in general vs. vocational tracking, while in high-quality vs. ordinary general senior secondary education streaming, the opposite was true. conclusions and discussions zhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1687 i. there are prominent differences between urban and rural areas in the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. there exist considerable disparities between urban and rural junior secondary school students in the access to both ordinary and high-quality general high school education, with urban students being particularly advantaged in accessing high-quality general senior secondary education. ii. family capital affects the quality of children’s senior secondary education opportunities through cultural reproduction. compared with economic and social capital, cultural capital has a relatively more stable and independent influence on the quality of senior high school education opportunities and is less susceptible to other aspects of family capital. home cultural capital is the most powerful predictor of children’ ordinary and key high school enrollment opportunities. iii. family economic capital has no significant impact on the quality of child senior secondary education opportunities. the research findings show that the amount of family investment in education has no salient association with children’s admission to the ordinary general high school (compared with the vocational high school) and to the key general high school (compared with the vocational secondary school and ordinary general high school). iv. the impact of home cultural capital on the quality of child senior secondary education opportunities has its limitations. parents’ educational concepts have a positive effect on children’s admission to the ordinary and key general high schools (compared with the vocational secondary school), while the paternal education level and size of family book collection can positively influence children’s enrollment in the key general high school (compared with the ordinary general high school). v. behavior supervision as social capital imposes greater effects on the quality of child senior secondary education opportunity than parent-child communication. domestic social capital (parent-child communication and behavior supervision) has significant effects on children’s entrance to ordinary general high schools (compared with vocational secondary schools) and keys general high schools (compared with vocational secondary schools), and the impact of behavior supervision is far greater than that of parent-child communication. vi. subjective aspects of family capital affect the general vs. vocational education tracking, while its objective aspects influence the ordinary vs. high-quality general senior secondary education streaming. subjective aspects of family capital such as parents’ educational concepts, parent-child communication, and behavior supervision have greater impact on child performance in the general vs. vocational education tracking than objective aspects such as family investment in education, the paternal education level, and the size of family book collection, which gives disadvantaged children motivation to compete for more general senior secondary education opportunities. zhu & luo. (hubei). family capital and the quality of senior secondary education opportunities. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1688 the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of central china normal university (humanities and social sciences),61(1):152-164. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 朱新卓 & 骆婧雅. (2022). 家庭资本与高中阶段教育机会获得的质量 — 基于江苏省 b 县初中 后教育分流的分析. 华中师范大学学报 (人文社会科学版), 61(1):152-164. received: 11 november 2022 revised: 04 december 2022 accepted: 11 december 2022 1absbract-xinzhuozhu-bece_titlenov_2023 1absbract-xinzhuozhu-bece_maintextnov2023 bece. newsletter vol.8, no.2, 2021 1147 the influence of school climate on job satisfaction of rural school teachers by wang, z., zhang, y., he, k., & yuan, l. correspondence to: yuan, l., center for teacher education research, beijing normal university, beijing, china, 100875. email: yuanlibnu@163.com recently published study in teacher education research explored the mediating effects of teacher leadership and self-efficacy on school climate perception and job satisfaction, hence the researchers adopted software include the spss24.0 and amos21.0 for data management and analysis, setting up the sampling investigation and mediation model, and putting forward pertinence suggestions according to the results of the study. the researchers took the rural teachers’ job satisfaction as dependent variables and considered teacher self-efficacy and leadership as the mediating variables of school climate perception. at first, this article described statistical variables, and then model checking the two meditation paths, including “school climate→teacher leadership→job satisfaction” and “school climate→teacher leadership→job satisfaction”. the results are as follows:  rural teachers’ satisfaction with the working environment is lower than that of the occupation itself, so a variety of measures should be taken to improve the quality of rural teachers’ working environment.  the school climate perceived by rural teachers has a significant predictive effect on their job satisfaction, in other words, a good school climate of cooperation and trust is helpful to improve teachers’ job satisfaction.  the role of teacher leadership plays a part in school climate perception, which gradually affects the satisfaction degree through the function as a bridge.  the school climate perceived by rural teachers affects their job satisfaction through the mediating role of teacher self-efficacy. source: teacher education research, 2020; 32(6):84-90+98. a mailto:yuanlibnu@163.com bece. newsletter vol.13, no.1, 2023 1690 parental involvement and learning power of secondary school students by fu, g. correspondence to: gan fu, yancheng teachers university, china. e-mail: psyfgan@163.com earning power, as self-directed learning ability, is essential in the era of lifelong learning. parental involvement is a key factor that influences child academic success, and partnerships between families, schools, and communities play a significant role in boosting student learning power. this study investigated a total of 1,686 students from 12 secondary schools in county fn, jiangsu province by random cluster sampling, and obtained 1,633 valid questionnaires from 468 seventh, 388 eighth, 288 ninth, 297 10th, and 192 11th graders. the secondary school student learning power questionnaire and parental involvement questionnaire were used as measurement tools. the parental involvement questionnaire focused on parent-school, parent-child, and parent-community interaction. student learning power was the dependent variable in the study; parental involvement in child education in the home, school, and community was the explanatory variables; the control variables included student gender and grade, and family capitalrelated individual factors such as parents’ education level, school type (urban or rural), and parents being migrant workers or not. research findings demonstrated that parental involvement in the home had the greatest impact on the learning power of secondary school students, followed by parental involvement in the school; that there was a significant difference in learning power between urban and rural secondary school students, with urban students being far more critical, constructive, communicative, and strategic in learning than their rural peers as a result of their varied educational opportunities based on distinct family social and economic resources; and that the maternal education level had a substantial impact on child critical thinking and resilience in learning. given research results, it is recommended that parents should raise their awareness of responsibility assumption in child education and increase their partnership with the school; that schools should optimize their agency in education and encourage parents’ engagement in school activities; and that non-profit organizations should be given full play in promoting the development of learning power of rural secondary students. source: educational research and experiment, 2022; 2022(5):104-112. l mailto:psyfgan@163.com bece, vol.12, no.1, 2022 1543 school bullying: the intolerable evil in children’s growth longjun zhou jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, china “we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.” –albus dumbledore s a result of the fundamental economic, cultural, and social transformations of the past several years, the structure and order of society face the challenge of a perpetually growing anomie. in education, the growing occurrence of school bullying is exemplified by the perpetrators’ younger ages and use of violence, as well as the aggravated consequences. the alarming prevalence of school bullying has not only aroused attention of the public and the media, but also prompted increased academic debate and study on the subject. school bullying, in its broadest sense, refers to harmful behavior on campus committed by teachers, students, or people from outside the school against any individual who violates social norms. school bullying is a term used to describe the physically and mentally harmful behaviors inflicted on students by their school peers or outsiders on campus or occasionally outside of school. school bullying is defined in zhang’s (2011) study as harmful behaviors among students or a student’s long-term exposure to violence imposed by one or more schoolmates; it can take many forms, including physical, verbal, social, online, and sexual bullying on campus. whatever definition you use, school bullying causes varying degrees of harm to students, families, and schools. individually, it could cause severe physical and mental © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. a http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ bece, vol.12, no.1, 2022 1544 trauma to victims. some of them may be beaten so severely by their classmates that they must be hospitalized for treatment; others may become mentally ill because of the constant fear; and still others may undergo irreversible personality changes. as a result, bullying victimization can have a significant negative impact on the bullied student’s long-term development. when school bullies become addicted to violence, they may believe they are the “bosses” on their campus and end up as juvenile criminals. bullying victimization incidents in schools disrupt normal school operations. when there is an incident of vicious school bullying, school leaders and teachers must devote a significant amount of time and energy to dealing with it. with the speed of the internet, once it’s out there, it can spread quickly and hurt the school’s reputation. how to prevent and reduce bullying in schools has become a major topic in the educational world. numerous nations have developed effective prevention techniques to combat this problem. norway, for instance, implemented a zero-tolerance program for bullying and released the anti-bullying declaration. australia established a specific government institution to assist schools in addressing bullying victimization and annually observes “antibullying day” on the third friday of march. the united states and japan have passed anti-bullying legislation to execute comprehensive anti-bullying tactics (hu & li, 2019). in the two 2017 sessions (the national people’s congress, npc, and the chinese people’s political consultative conference, cppcc), legislators and deputies in china have introduced a series of motions on the prevention of school bullying, with a focus on optimizing the school moral education program, enacting specialized laws, adjusting the age of criminal responsibility, reinforcing punishment, and constructing a thirdparty coping mechanism (zhang, 2017). these motions propose to: strengthen moral education and integrate it into intellectual education on a daily basis; maximize the school’s monitoring coverage, as any hidden location on campus could be the site of bullying victimization; and coordinate the school security management and the public security management of the surrounding communities in order to improve the internal and external environment of the school and construct a bullying-free campus. in addition, it is underlined that parents should share responsibilities for the prevention and management of school bullying. they should embrace a democratic approach to parenting and set a good example for their children by exhibiting moral behavior. when children experience issues in their peer connections, parents should be available to talk with them and offer advice on how to develop harmonic and amicable relationships as well as how to defend themselves. it is vital to understand the various elements impacting school bullying and bullying victimization through evidence-based inquiry to design appropriate preventative and intervention approaches. the influences of teachers, students, and school climate on bullying victimization: evidence from china in this issue adds to the empirical experience by examining the relationship between bullying victimization and intervention factors like teacher support, students’ sense of belonging, classroom disciplinary climate, and bece, vol.12, no.1, 2022 1545 cooperation and competition in the chinese context using pisa 2018 china data and binary logit regression analyses (zhu & teng, 2022). according to the research, a student’s sense of belonging significantly lessens the negative effects of bullying victimization; teacher emotional, informational, and instrumental support moderates school bullying; and a disciplinary, cooperative school environment is a strong support for anti-bullying initiatives. from an educational setting’s point of view, it has implications for making bullying less harmful and coming up with different ways to help victims. references byun, s. y. (2014). shadow education and academic success in republic of korea. in korean education in changing economic and demographic contexts (pp. 39-58). springer, singapore. hu, y. & li, j. (2019). who are being bullied? an empirical study on the influence factors of school bullying among chinese middle school students. best evidence in chinese education, 2(1):171-192. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.19.ar1039 zhang, g. p. (2011). a sociological analysis of school bullying. contemporary youth research, 2011(08):73-76+66. zhang, y. (2017). the status quo, causes, and prevention of school bullying. journal of guangxi young cadre college, 2017(5):76-79. zhu, y., & teng, y. (2022). influences of teachers, students and school climate on bullying victimization: evidence from china. best evidence in chinese education, 12(1):1547-1571. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.or065 correspondence to: longjun zhou, ph.d. jiangsu second normal university nanjing 211200 jiangsu china e-mail: e-mail: 294437034@qq.com conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.co015 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.19.ar1039 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.or065 mailto:294437034@qq.com bece. newsletter vol.11, no.1, 2022 1469 the influence of mothers’ perception of co-parenting on preschoolers’ behavioral problems: a moderated mediation model by liu, x., & li, y. correspondence to: yan li, shanghai normal university, china. e-mail: liyan@shnu.edu.cn his study published in psychological development and education undertook a one-year panel survey of 170 five-year-old children in 2 kindergartens of shanghai and their mothers to examine the relationship of children’s behavioral problems with co-parenting, parents’ marital conflicts, and children’s psychological resilience through questionnaire investigation. according to the research theme, the study puts forward the following hypotheses: 1. marital conflicts mediate the relationship between co-parenting and children’s behaviors. 2. children’s psychological resilience moderates the mediation role of marital conflicts in the relationship of mothers’ perceived co-parenting and children’s behavioral problems and moderates the second half of the mediating path. the results of the study are as follows.  the regression analysis shows that mothers’ perceived co-parenting has a significant effect on children’s behavioral problems (β = -0.17, t = -2.40, 95% ci [-0.31, -0.03]); the interaction between mothers’ perceived co-parenting and children’s psychological resilience is not significantly correlated with children’s behavioral problems (β = 0.09, t = 1.47, 95% ci [-0.03,0.21]). the direct effects of mothers’ perceived co-parenting on children’s behavioral problems are not mediated by children’s resilience.  the regression analysis also indicates that the direct effect of mothers’ perceived co-parenting on children’s behavioral problems is significant, and so is the indirect effect of mother’s perceived coparenting on children’s behavior problems mediated by marital conflicts (a*b = -0.09, se = 0.03, 95% ci [-0.16, -0.04]. this confirms that hypothesis 1 holds, that is, marital conflicts play a mediating role between mothers’ perceived co-parenting and children’s behavioral problems.  the results obtained by a moderated intermediary model: the mothers’ perceived co-parenting negatively predicts marital conflicts; marital conflicts significantly and positively predict children’s bet mailto:liyan@shnu.edu.cn vol.11, no.1, 2022 1470 havioral problems; children’s psychological resilience has a negative effect on their behavioral problems. the interaction between parents’ marital conflicts and children’s psychological resilience significantly predicts children’s behavioral problems. the results verify hypothesis 2.  parents’ marital conflicts have a significant positive predictive effect on behavioral problems of children with low psychological resilience (b = 0.40, se = 0.10, p < 0.001, 95% ci [0.20, 0.59]). the fiercer the marital conflicts, the more behavioral problems the children have; the positive predictive effect of marital conflicts is not significant on behavioral problems of children with high psychological resilience (b = 0.04, se = 0.09, p > 0.05, 95% ci [-0.13, 0.21]). this result suggests that high psychological resilience of children can mitigate the negative effects of marital conflicts on their behaviors.  5. child psychological resilience also mediates mothers’ perceived co-parenting through the indirect predictive effect of marital conflicts on children’s behavioral problems. the adjusted mediation coefficient was 0.08, 95% ci [0.04, 0.13]. for children with low psychological resilience, the indirect effect of their mothers’ perceived co-parenting on their behavioral problems is significant, and the coefficient is -0.14, 95% ci [0.24, 0.08]; for individuals with high psychological resilience (psychological resilience of one standard deviation above the mean), the indirect effect of their mothers’ perceived co-parenting on their behavioral problems is not significant, with a coefficient of 0.01, 95% ci [-0.04, 0.08]. the following implications are proposed: 1) in the family, the husband and wife should consciously coordinate with each other in parenting and improve their marital relationship to promote children’s social adaptation and reduce children’s behavioral problems. 2) schools and families can utilize psychological resilience trainings to enhance children’s resilient competence (such as promoting self-esteem and self-confidence to enhance children’s self-efficacy, improving children’s emotion regulation ability, developing children’s cooperation and communication skills, improving problemsolving, etc.) and promote their self-protection capability. source: psychological development and education, 2022; 2022(5):626-634. the growth mindset and student social and emotional skill development: an empirical analysis based on the oecd’s sses zhongjing huang, kaiyue shang, jing zhang east china normal university, shanghai 20062, china abstract: the mindset is a crucial factor influencing the behavior of individuals. this study aims to evaluate the growth mindset of 10and 15-year-old adolescents and the relationship between their mindsets and social and emotional skills from the viewpoints of students, parents, and teachers, using oecd’s sses 2019 data from suzhou city. the research results show that the growth mindset of students is affected by their socioeconomic status; and that the growth mindset of students, parents, and teachers can significantly and positively predict student social and emotional skills? best evidence in chinese education 2023; 14(1):1745-1749. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar041 how to cite: huang, z., shang, k., & zhang, j. (2023). the growth mindset and student social and emotional skill development: an empirical analysis based on the oecd’s sses. best evidence in chinese education, 14(1):1745-1749. keywords: adolescents, growth mindset, social and emotional skill, regression analyses huang et al. (shanghai, china). growth mindset and student social and emotional skill. bece, vol.14, no.1, 2023 1746 about authors: kaiyue shang, department of educational psychology, faculty of education, east china normal university, shanghai 20062, china. jing zhang, department of educational psychology, faculty of education, east china normal university, shanghai 20062, china. correspondence to: zhongjing huang, department of education, faculty of education, east china normal university, shanghai 20062, china. e-mail: zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ huang et al. (shanghai, china). growth mindset and student social and emotional skill. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1747 introduction the growth mindset is a crucial mental attitude in promoting student social and emotional skill development. this study utilized china-related data from the oecd’s survey on social and emotional skills (sses) 2019 to explore developmental levels of the growth mindset among chinese 10and 15-yearold students and to examine the relationship between their growth mindset and social and emotional skills as well as the influence of the growth mindset of parents and teachers on student social and emotional skill development, in an effort to provide valuable insights for the improvement of future education. methodologies sample selection stratified two-stage cluster sampling was employed to obtain data of 10and 15-year old chinese students from primary and secondary schools (excluding schools for children of migrant workers and special education schools) in six districts and four counties of suzhou city. a total of 7,550 subjects were investigated, with 3,800 students from the 10-year-old group (aged between 10 years and two months and 11 years and one month) and 3,750 students from the 15-year-old group (aged between 15 years and two months and 16 years and one month). eventually, 7,268 students completed the procedure of the survey, making up 96.26% of the original participants, and were weighted to represent 150,964 primary and secondary students in suzhou. measurement tools (i) social and emotional skills based on the big five personality traits model, oecd’s sses developed a 96-item questionnaire, in which student social and emotional skills were categorized into five dimensions: task performance, emotional control, collaboration, openness, and interactions with others. (ii) the growth mindset in oecd’s sses, there were three items intended to measure individuals’ growth mindset, corresponding to social skills, emotional skills, and intelligence, respectively. this study chose to incorporate the two items pertinent to social and emotional skills as it focused on these two aspects. to be specific, the following two items were used to measure the growth mindset of students, parents, and teachers: (1) you cannot make too much change to your social skills by yourself; (2) you cannot make too much change to your emotional skills by yourself. (iii) analysis methods huang et al. (shanghai, china). growth mindset and student social and emotional skill. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1748 the study conducted descriptive statistics, correlation, and regression analyses on the growth mindsets and social and emotional skills of students, parents, and teachers, using the software spss 25.0. the growth mindsets of students, parents, and teachers were the independent variables, skills included in the sses were dependent variables, and students’ gender, age, and socio-economic status (ses) were control variables in this study. multi-variate linear regression analyses were performed to evaluate the impact of the growth mindsets of students in the two age groups as well as their parents and teachers on their social and emotional skills. findings the overall status of students’ growth mindset in terms of the growth mindset, the 15-year-old group scored slightly higher than the 10-year-old one, students scored higher than parents and teachers on average, and parents and teachers of the 15-year-olds scored higher than those of 10-year-olds. differences in the growth mindset among various student groups there was no significant difference in the rating of the growth mindset between male and female students. the rating of the growth mindset of the 15-year-olds was remarkably higher than that of the 10-year-olds. students with high ses scored significantly higher than those with low ses. correlations between the growth mindset and student social and emotional skills the growth mindset was positively correlated with the 15 social and emotional subcompetencies among students, and the correlation between the two aspects was stronger among the 15-year-olds than the 10-year-olds. the correlation between the stress resistance and the growth mindset was weaker among the 15-year-old group than the 10year-old one. there was a close relationship between parents’ growth mindset and the 15 sub-competencies of students, which was, nevertheless, weaker than that between students’ own mindset and these competencies. teachers’ growth mindset showed a weak correlation with most social and emotional competencies of students and even a negative correlation with some of them such as sociableness, resilience, optimism, emotional control, and trust. influences of the growth mindset of students, parents, and teachers on student social and emotional skills students’ growth mindset could significantly and positively predict their social and emotional skills, with a stronger predictive power on 15-year-olds’ social and emotional huang et al. (shanghai, china). growth mindset and student social and emotional skill. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1749 skills. overall, parents’ growth mindset had a significant positive predictive effect on students’ social and emotional skills. teachers’ growth mindset had a positive predictive effect on some of the social and emotional skills of students while it had a negative predictive effect on the other ones, with the overall predictive effect being insignificant. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2023, 2023(4):22-32. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 黄忠敬, 尚凯悦, 张静. (2023). 成长型思维如何影响学生社会与情感能力的发展—基于 oecd 社会与情感能力测评的实证分析. 华东师范大学学报 (教育科学版), 2023, 2023(4):22-32. received: 01 may 2023 revised: 10 may 2023 accepted: 20 may 2023 ar1-zhongjinghuang-bece_titlemay_2023 ar1-zhongjinghuang-bece_maintextmay2023 bece. newsletter vol.14, no.1, 2023 1763 technoference and adolescent internet gaming addiction: the mediating role of the need to belong and the moderating role of friendship quality by ding, z. e. & liu, q. x. correspondence to: qinxue liu, central china normal university, china. email: qinxueliu@mail.ccnu.edu.cn nternet gaming, a product of information technology, has become an essential part of adolescents’ lives. while a moderate amount of online gaming helps improve their life satisfaction and promote their pro-social behavior, the internet gaming addiction can lead to various mental problems among them. this study constructed a moderated mediation model based on the problem behavior theory and the individual-environment interaction models to examine the effects of technoference, the need to belong, and friendship quality on adolescent internet gaming addiction. the study recruited as subjects 1,555 boy students and 1,512 girl students aged between 11 and 16 from two junior secondary schools in hubei province. measurement tools included the technology interference in life examples scale, need to belong scale, friendship quality scale, and internet gaming addiction scale. the research findings demonstrated that: (1) technoference positively predicted adolescents’ internet gaming addiction; (2) the need to belong partially mediated the relationship between technoference and adolescent’s internet gaming addiction, indicating that the need to belong was an important explanatory factor in the impact of technoference on adolescent’s internet gaming addiction and that proper control of parental use of mobile phones has the potential of enhancing the quality of child-parent interaction to better meet the child’s need to belong; (3) friendship quality moderated the influence of technoference on the need to belong as well as the impact of friendship quality on internet gaming addiction. specifically, technoference had a weaker impact on the need to belong and the need to belong imposed a smaller effect on internet gaming addiction among adolescents with high friendship quality than among those with low friendship quality. source: journal of psychological science, 2022;45(6):1383-1389. i mailto:qinxueliu@mail.ccnu.edu.cn bece, vol.10, no.2, 2022 1353 qualitative comparative analysis (qca): an innovative approach for integrating qualitative and quantitative analysis longjun zhou jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, chin “such highly qualitative leadership is demanded especially in the realm of the fostering of right international relations. here the demand is simply irresistible.” –john raleigh mott ducational research has long used quantitative and qualitative analysis. quantitative analysis is the process of quantifying things through the use of numbers, which represent quantifiable characteristics of things such as scale, speed, and degree, as well as the spatial arrangement of their constituents (yang, 1995). qualitative analysis is the polar opposite, i.e., evaluating things on the basis of their quality rather than their quantity. a thing's quality refers to its normative nature, which distinguishes it from other things (li, 1997). simply put, quantitative analysis focuses on the "what" and employs numerical expressions to depict a given reality, whereas qualitative analysis aims to comprehend the "why" and investigates how we describe something. qualitative and quantitative analysis, on the other hand, each have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. qualitative analysis enables us to delve deeply into the subject under investigation. it is frequently criticized for its ambiguity and uncertainty, as well as its susceptibility to analyst subjectivity, because it is based on relatively small sample sizes and specific cases rather than on random selection and extensive sampling (sun, 2005). in © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. e bece, vol.10, no.2, 2022 1354 comparison, quantitative analysis is appropriate for large-scale investigations and frequently produces informative results (zeng, 2000); it is performed with a high degree of standardization and is less susceptible to analyst bias. on the other hand, quantitative analysis has a limited depth of inquiry and its results are subject to the influence of social factors. ragin develops qualitative comparative analysis (qca) to bridge the divide between qualitative and quantitative analysis. qca allows for more flexibility in sample selection in response to the uniqueness of each case; it is more focused on the sufficient and necessary conditions for a research result; and it prioritizes investigating the combinatorial factors underlying a social phenomenon.qca is a collection of three fundamental techniques: fussy set qca (fsqca), crisp set qca (csqca), and multi-value qca (mvqca). by establishing sufficient and necessary relationships between explanatory and outcome variables, researchers can investigate the multifactor combinations influencing a particular case using fsqca (ragin & pennings, 2005). the effects of class teachers' leadership and personal characteristics on student academic performance: a qualitative comparative analysis of fuzzy sets the article citing h middle school as a case study in this issue examines 24 grade seven classes at lianyungang h middle school. it employs fsqca to examine the effects of differential combinations of factors on student academic performance, including class teacher characteristics and leadership behavior, by creating truth tables and performing necessary computations. the primary objective of this study is to determine the effect of class teachers' leadership behaviors on student academic achievement and to provide useful guidelines for school administrators in selecting appropriate class teachers (zhao & zhang, 2022). we can draw the following conclusions from the study: i) democratic class teacher leadership is effective in class management and popular with students; ii) class teacher tenure is detrimental to student academic performance improvement; iii) class teachers with a high capacity for democratic leadership can make a significant difference in student academic achievement; iv) the effect of class teachers' marital status and gender on student academic results varies depending on their specific combinations with other factors (zhao & zhang, 2022). references li, f. (1997). research methodologies of modern educational sciences. guangzhou: guangdong higher education press. bece, vol.10, no.2, 2022 1355 ragin, c.c., & pennings, p. (2005). fuzzy sets and social research. sociological methods and research, 33(4):423-430. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124105274499 sun, r.y. (2005). qualitative, quantitative and content analysis: discussion of research approaches in the field of publication and information. journal of modern information, 2005(1):2-6. doi: https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1008-0821.2005.01.001 yang, l.z. (1995). research methodologies of educational sciences. dalian: liaoning normal university press. zeng, j. (2000). a comparison of quantitative and qualitative research methods in educational research. journal of guangxi college of education, 2000(3):12-18. doi: https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1006-9410.2000.03.003 zhao, h., & zhang, j. (2022). the influence of class teachers’ leadership behavior and personal characteristics on student academic performance: a study of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis citing h middle school as a case study. best evidence in chinese education, 10(2):1357-1373. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.or042 correspondence to: longjun zhou, ph.d. jiangsu second normal university nanjing 211200 jiangsu china e-mail: 294437034@qq.com conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.co003 https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124105274499 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1008-0821.2005.01.001 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1006-9410.2000.03.003 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.or042 mailto:294437034@qq.com online shadow education in hong kong: perspectives from secondary school students and private tutors ching ho cheng hong kong adventist college, n.t., hong kong, china abstract: based on the educational hierarchical reproduction theory and the mmi and emi hypotheses, this paper discusses the impact of the tracking of general and vocational education at the secondary level on higher education opportunity equity among social classes. the study finds that increasing gross enrollment rates of both general high schools and secondary vocational schools can help improve the equity in admission opportunities of colleges and universities among social strata; expanding the share of general high school places by adjusting the structure of general and vocational tracks (that is, the generalvocational ratio) can effectively reduce the class disparities in college and university admission opportunities; neither the change in the scale nor in the structure of general and vocational tracks will contribute to alleviating class inequality in top university enrollment opportunities. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(2):1477-1497. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.or063 how to cite: cheng, c.h. (2022). online shadow education in hong kong: perspectives from secondary school students and private tutors. best evidence in chinese education, 11(2):1477-1497. keywords: shadow education, online education, secondary school correspondence to: ching ho cheng, general education department, hong kong adventist college, 1111 clear water bay road, sai kung, n.t., hong kong, china. e-mail: richard.cheng@hkac.edu conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:richard.cheng@hkac.edu http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1478 introduction uring the covid-19 pandemic situation, there have been many transformations in different sectors of society. education is one of these sectors, including in the modes of teaching and learning, as schools need to follow strict virus prevention guidelines. harris and jones (2020) described how covid-19 has shaken the education world and has brought many chaotic moments to schools around the world. although the pandemic has led to ‘undeniable chaos’ (hargreaves and fullan, 2020), it has also made educators change. for example, lessons have been reorganized (zhao, 2020), and computer software has begun to play an even more important role. as for school leaders, many decisions have been made in response to newly required protocols and procedures (netolicky, 2020). furthermore, not only the mainstream schools need to follow the guidelines set by the hong kong education bureau; the private tutoring sector must also follow these rules, as they are also managed by the bureau (eng, 2019). as a result, private tutorial centers in hong kong cannot open for face-to-face lessons, and some of these centers have been forced into bankruptcy. other centers have installed software, such as zoom and google classroom, which allows students to attend lessons online. the focus of this paper is how students and private tutors felt about teaching and learning in online private tutoring. this can help us determine whether online shadow education is a viable alternative during the pandemic. this study attempts to answer several questions: (1) what are students’ and private tutors’ general impressions of online tutoring? (2) what are some of the areas that private tutors need to be aware of in online tutoring? (3) can this type of method (online tutoring) become a future trend for shadow education in hong kong? what is shadow education? shadow education refers to education that is received outside of the mainstream school classroom, and these types of lessons are often called ‘supplementary lessons’ or ‘private tutorial lessons’ (aslam & atherton, 2012; bray, 1999; bregvadze, 2012). in a broader sense, shadow education can represent any form of teaching which works under or in parallel to the ‘light’ that is the general school curriculum (bray & kwo, 2014). this sort of education aims to help students improve their school knowledge (unesco, 2012, p.76), and scholars have noted that schools, families and friends are possible variables which affect the relationship between shadow education and student’s academic achievements (buhagiar & chetcuti, 2013). in modern hong kong society, it is common for students to attend private tutoring after their mainstream school lessons, especially for secondary school students who must take the hong kong diploma of secondary education examination (hkdse) in their final stage of study. this is the norm in hong kong because the general public believes that exam performance can accurately portray students’ abilities (ball, 2016), and this kind of high-stakes testing system has been long established in asian countries (carless, 2011). as a result, most of the pard cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1479 ents in hong kong insist that their children take more classes in order to get good results on the public examination. shadow education around the world the settings of shadow education differ around the world. due to different cultures and societal backgrounds, the form of shadow education has been variously adjusted (bray, 1999). there is a huge demand for shadow education in east asian countries, such as south korea, japan and china. those areas value education and hard work and emphasize academic achievement (liu, 2012). for example, in china, an estimated 55% of urban families invested in supplementary classes (xue & ding, 2008, p. 3). another study pointed out that among 827 grade 10 students in china’s gansu, hunan and jiangsu provinces, 75% attended extra classes after school (shen, 2008, p. 3). in south korea, the case was very extreme; they refer to shadow education as ‘hakwon’, and the lessons usually have 10 to 15 students (kim, 2016). according to kim (2016), the amount of educational expenditure survey for hakwon showed that around 7 million children in korea needed to take hakwon, and of those children, 80.9% were from elementary school, 70.6% from junior form and 50.7% from senior form. as kim (2016) further elaborated, hakwon can help children improve their academic results and increase their chances of matriculating at a prestigious university. this is important in korean society because of the emphasis on academic achievements, as indicated by the country’s program for international student assessment (pisa) results: south korea ranked in the top four countries for its students’ math, reading and science abilities in 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2012 (organization for economic co-operation and development, 2013). shadow education also plays an important role in western societies. according to paiva et al. (1997), 50% of students in rio de janeiro public schools received supplementary lessons after school. this is also very similar to the situation in northern european countries. according to bray (2011), the scandinavian countries provide extra lessons for students who cannot keep up with mainstream school lessons. however, bray also noted that shadow education has likely become more popular because of increased competitiveness in european societies. one of the priorities of shadow education is to help students recap their knowledge and enhance their abilities. as for hong kong, families are fully aware that their children’s public examination results will shape their future. education is one of the main keys to success, and many believe that those who perform well in public examinations will have a better opportunity to enroll in a prestigious university (bray, 2013). further, after they graduate, they may have a higher chance of finding an ideal job. bray’s (2013) study on secondary students’ time use in shadow education indicated that students in hong kong need to take extra classes to fulfil the ‘no loser’ principle. according to bray (2013), form six (grade 12) students in hong kong spent an average of 4.76 hours per week in the tutorial center during the examination season. furthermore, 71.8% of the 1,624 student participants expressed that they had attended tutorial classes during the previous 12 months (bray, 2013). these results imply that the demand for private tutoring is a result of the highly competitive nature of hong kong society. the education and social syscheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1480 tem will create the winners and losers, and students try not to be the losers in this game (bray, 2013). as a result, they invest heavily in shadow education. the public impression of shadow education one of the general impressions of shadow education is that it increases social inequality. in previous literature from bray (1999), private tutoring has been shown to create problems, such as education inequality and economic burdens for families. as has been further highlighted by amartya sen, who won the nobel prize in 1998, private tutoring has increased pressure on these families (2009, p.13). however, many parents still insist that their children go to the tutorial center. they do not want to risk their children being left behind, so they work hard and save carefully in order to send their children to private schools. the study also pointed out that 54% of the parents could not afford the tuition fee of the tutorial center, so they had to forfeit the opportunity (sen, 2009). bray and his colleagues (2018) provide further proof of shadow education leading to social inequality; their paper indicates that the quality of education in cambodia is dependent upon money. that is, students who cannot afford to go to the learning center may not receive a quality education. this social inequality problem is the biggest public impression made by shadow education on the general public. another impression, this one student-centric, is that there might be a backwash against learning in mainstream school after taking private tutorial classes. shadow education may lead students to think that private tutoring lessons are better than mainstream school lessons (yung and bray, 2016). private tutorial lessons focus more on exam skills and techniques, while mainstream schools primarily focus on developing an abilities and character. as a result, students tend to work harder in tutorial centers (zhan et al., 2013). however, there are also some positive aspects to shadow education. first, it has helped students to achieve good scores on their public exams, as can be seen in south korea’s pisa performance. korean children ranked in the top four countries for math, reading and science abilities in 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2012 (organisation for economic co-operation and development, 2013). loyalka and zakharov (2016) elaborated on which group can benefit the most from shadow education; they indicated that those who have higher academic abilities tend to perform better after taking extra lessons, and they further concluded that shadow education can give an additional advantage to those high achievers. yung and bray (2016) argued that shadow education does not only help high achievers but also slow learners, as it provides an opportunity to revise and practice mainstream school lessons. furthermore, the setting of a private tutoring lesson is better than that of a mainstream school, as the teacher does not need to cater to a group of 30 or more students (bray, 2013). as a result, students may have more opportunities to ask questions and quicken their learning progress. yung (2015) also mentioned that students are more willing to speak up during private tutorial lessons. during the pandemic, this advantage became more obvious. students can use online software, such as zoom, to attend tutorial classes, and they can choose whether they want to show their faces (yung, 2020). this has encouraged students to speak during tutorial classes, which can help them learn more effectively (yung, 2020). cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1481 the use of technology in shadow education various online methods have been introduced to improve the covid-19 situation, and zoom has become an integral part of connecting people in their daily lives. students have been able to continue their education through online lessons and have commented that those lessons are convenient, flexible and efficient (horrell et al., 2015). zoom has also provided a platform for other occasions, such as visiting relatives or attending chapel. according to the guardian (2020), 200 million people use zoom every day to socialize, to work and for other kinds of activities. although those who usually do things in person may find this situation frustrating, other groups have actually gained sizable benefits through their use of zoom. elderly persons, for example, have become more sociable because they can use zoom to contact anyone they like (the guardian, 2020). research has shown that technology can provide new ways to conduct private tutoring classes. further, some studies have shown that technology helps students to learn better during their private tutoring classes, since they are more willing to express themselves (yung, 2020). more evidence can be found in the united states of america, where students are more willing to complete online homework than paper-form assignments, and around 73% of middle school students completed their school assignments through use of the internet (debell & chapman, 2006). however, these studies do not fully explain why students are more willing to perform in online classes, and other stakeholders’ points of view have not been included. there is still a need for research related to technology and shadow education in order to show any significant relationship; thus, this research focuses on online shadow education in hong kong. significance of this study in hong kong shadow education study, it has only a limited research related to online shadow education. yung (2020) has mentioned that when students switched to online classroom during the pandemic period, they seemed to have both positive and negative impact in learning. for example, some of the “quiet” students may become active in online setting, whereas some of the students may not even response to teacher’s question. however, there is not enough study focusing on the impact of online shadow education in hong kong, and there should be a voice from private tutors about the impact of online shadow education. as a result, the above literature has mentioned a lot about shadow education from mainstream school teacher’s and student’s perspective, and this research would like to put the emphasis on students and private tutors in hong kong. methodology this study focused on students’ and private tutors’ perspectives about online private tutoring in hong kong, so the data collection methods prioritized expressions and elaboration; individual interview, group discussion and lesson observation were the main methods. all the data were codified and followed all relevant ethical procedures. the students in this research were from different bandings’ secondary schools (band 1 through band 3), which allowed students at different academic levels to express their cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1482 opinions about online private tutoring (chan & bray, 2014). all private tutors included in this study had at least 10 years of private tutoring experience. participants and settings the students in this research had been taking online private tutoring lessons since the beginning of covid-19. they were all form 6 students, as these may have more private tutoring experience than students in other forms (bray, 2014). moreover, form 6 students need to attend the hong kong diploma of secondary education examination (dse) in order to continue their studies. due to worries related to competitive performance on this exam, they have more reason to apply for extra classes (yung, 2020). the tutors included in this research had at least 10 years of private tutoring or teaching experience in the local area. they taught different subjects in their tutorial center, allowing a broader picture of the impact of online teaching and learning in the private tutorial sector during the pandemic. all tutors had some experience dealing with online classes, as they have used them for teaching purposes during the pandemic. twelve students and six private tutors participated in this study. the ethical procedures, which are discussed further in the coming section, were carefully implemented. the participants’ backgrounds were also considered because their academic performance may have affected the results of this study. in similar educational studies, researchers often justified their reasons for choosing a specific group of participants (bui & kong, 2019); for this research, the participants were from schools in three different bandings, which ensures that all variants within the data can be addressed and that the data can capture a broader picture of the hong kong secondary school context. below is the background of the students (table 1). three of the private tutors were from locally famous private tutoring centers, while the other three were from local learning centers. below is the background of the private tutors included in this research. some of the ‘big name’ learning centers in hong kong, such as modern education, can provide extensive resources to students, while local learning centers are more limited. since most of the local learning centers aim to provide basic education support, such as exercise worksheets, to students, they do not provide support comparable to that of some of the big brands in the hong kong private tutoring sector (table 2). all the participants were from hong kong, and their first language was cantonese. as a result, all the interviews and group discussions were conducted in cantonese. this allowed the participants to express their ideas freely, and they were more motivated to speak during the data collection process (longhurst, 2003). the research was mainly conducted in a college meeting room, since the setting is suitable for both individual interviews and group discussions. prior notice was given to the college about using the facility for research purposes, and they agreed to lend their meeting room for this study (table 3). data collection procedure the study was conducted from october 2021 to december 2021, and all participants were able to attend all sessions. there were no dropouts, but the interview schedule was modified because of the participants’ school exams and busy itineraries (figure 1). cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1483 table 1. participants’ backgrounds. band 1 band 2 band 3 4 4 4 table 2. tutors’ backgrounds. local tutors from famous learning centers local tutors in local learning centers 3 3 table 3. below is the demographic background of the subject in this study. name (pseudonym) gender studied/taught subject alan (student) male english and liberal studies betty (student) female english jasmine (student) female english ray (student) male english chris (student) male english, math and liberal studies anna (student) female chinese and english sally (student) female english john (student) male english chan(student) male english and math charlotte(student) female english lucy (student) female english so (student) male english monica (tutor) franchise learning center female english (zoom) kevin (tutor) local learning center male english and math (zoom) lee (tutor) franchise learning center male chinese and math (zoom) francis (tutor) local learning center male english (zoom) wong (tutor) franchise learning center female english (zoom) emily (tutor) local learning center female english (zoom) purposive sampling was used in this research, since there were some criteria for the participants (etikan et al., 2016).for example, students and tutors were required to have experience with online tutoring. the first student’s individual interview took place on 8 october 2021. the interviews were semi-structured in order to allow participants to interact and express related ideas (longhurst, 2003). the student interview process lasted around two weeks, and each interview took around 30-45 minutes to complete, depending upon interaction with the participant. as for the individual tutor interviews, the first was conducted on 25 october 2021, and it was also semi-structured. since the number of tutors was smaller than that of students, all the tutors’ interviews cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1484 figure 1. a brief research process and data collection timeline. were completed within one week. the interview protocol (see sample questions in appendix a) was provided before the interview, which allowed the participants to prepare. all participants gave permission for their interviews to be recorded. after finishing the first stage of the individual interview, participants were invited to attend the group discussion sessions in november. since the group discussion date overlapped with some of the students’ exam dates, the discussion sessions were changed to near the end of november (27 november 2021). the students were separated into two groups with six people in each group, and each group included at least one representative from each banding. during the discussion, they exchanged ideas related to online private tutoring, such as the strengths and weaknesses of that tutoring. the discussion lasted 45 minutes. as for the tutors, all six met early in november and discussed their impressions about online shadow education. during the discussion process, a recorder was again used, and permission was granted by all participants. the third stage of the study was lesson observation, which was used to triangulate the data and find out more about the impact of private online tutorial lessons. three students and their private tutors agreed to be observed by the author during their 45minute online class. however, recording was prohibited during their lessons; only field notes were used to document any details related to the research topic. the observations were conducted through zoom, which is popular online conferencing software in hong kong, and both student and teacher behaviors were marked down for further analysis. during this stage of research, the students and teachers both activated their cameras, allowing for observation of any gestures or expressions. data analysis interview responses and group discussion ideas were transcribed and further analyzed. this analysis was guided by the research questions in this paper. responses that were related to either students’ or tutors’ impressions of online shadow education and teaching and learning strategies were carefully sorted. after determining the key ideas, they were compared and contrasted among the groups, allowing for the identification and validation of the societal situation and any trends. by analyzing and comparing key cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1485 points, societal theories and trends can be clarified (gibbs, 2018), and this research identifies both new trends and novel ideas. as for the lesson observation, field notes, the main instrument in this data collection method, allowed the researcher to mark down responses from the participants and make note of any significant observations related to the study (tenzek, 2018). during the lesson observation, students’ and tutors’ behaviors, as well as the lesson setting, were noted, as this kind of information was considered to be objective information from the participants (tenzek, 2018). in addition to descriptive data, reflective field notes (ideas from my point of view about the reasons students and tutors behaved or reacted in given ways) were also included. the reflective notes allowed me to reconsider the situation and re-evaluate the data. in data analysis stage, for both individual interview and group discussion, thematic analysis was applied in this study. in order to conduct thematic analysis, 6 steps were used in analysis. those 6 steps are familiarization, coding, generating themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the report. according to terry et al. (2017), thematic analysis allows qualitative researchers to effectively present the results to readers. below is a brief explanation of each step. (1) familiarization: familiarize the data first, and try to come up with general questions, ideas or themes from the interview data. (2) coding: identify and mark down ideas that appear in all the data. by doing this, it can help researcher to see whether there are any common patterns among the interview transcripts. (3) generating themes: based on the coding results, researcher can construct several related themes. when constructing those themes, research questions can also put in use to help researcher to build those themes. (4) reviewing themes: the part can check whether the themes and data match with each other, and also it can see whether the data can answer the research questions. (5) defining and naming themes: identify the definition of some of the concepts inside, and see whether any parts of the themes are too thin. (6) producing the report: writing the report, and focus back on the general picture of this topic. ethical considerations ethics in educational and social science research is very important, since there may be many opportunities to work with human subjects. participants may sometimes be misguided or unaware of the ways in which a study will use their information; for this reason, educational and social science researchers must pay special attention to ethics (robson, 2011). in this study, the participants were informed about the research background and purposes. all participants signed consent forms before any research procedures began. the consent forms were from andrews university, which is affiliated with the researcher’s current institution. furthermore, all ethical procedures went through the institution review board, and prior notices were delivered to all the related school principals or school authorities. all the participants could withdraw from the study at any point if they felt uncomfortable with the questions or research procedures. after all cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1486 the interviews, the transcribed data were sent to the related participants so that they could check the accuracy of their responses. the researcher was the only person who could assess the data, but some concepts and ideas were discussed with another colleague. the names of the participants were codified, and only their first names were used when necessary. findings based on the research questions of this paper, the data can be categorized into three aspects: general impressions of online private tutoring classes, areas that need more attention when conducting online classes in shadow education and future trends in shadow education. general impressions of online private tutoring classes generally speaking, students tended to express positive opinions about online classes, as they appreciated being able to attend from home. however, most tutors believed that it would be more productive to interact face-to-face. all students expressed that online tutorial lessons were a secondary but still important aspect of their education.  under the strict social distancing guidelines in hong kong, online tutorial lessons were the only way for me to practice dse.  online classes are fun, since we do not need to go to school in person. however, some students were puzzled by the follow-up question about the usefulness of an online tutorial class. they expressed that online classes were usually carefree and that teachers had obvious difficulty managing the disciplines and technical issues. some participants’ responses are shown below.  my private tutor used 15 minutes to deal with technical issues, but my lesson only lasted for 1 hour. it seemed a bit of a waste of time.  i do not know whether this is true, as i have never taken any online tutorial class before. i would think online class is like talking to a machine/ computer, and it doesn’t motivate me to learn. i would check my phone or even be distracted if i was doing online class at home. as for the tutors, they expressed that online tutorial lessons were essential for them, but like the students, some had doubts about the utility for students. some tutors’ responses are shown below.  online classes have saved my job. i was able to get paid because of this. of course, we all wanted to go back and do our stuff in the old way. however, because of covid-19, we have used some alternative methods. if you ask me about whether this is useful, i can only say it really depends on students. if they are lazy, then online learning won’t work for them. they can get distracted, and if they close the camera, we won’t know what they are up to. so, it really depends on students. for me, i will just do my part, such as changing my materials into an online version for my students, and that’s it.  for me, in this situation, zoom has changed the world of education. students can listen to our lectures whenever they want. it breaks the barrier of locations, races and languages. my impression of online private tutoring is innocheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1487 vative, and i believe in the coming future it will be more innovative in our education field. however, if you ask me whether this is useful for students, i will say it provides them with a choice. they can choose the most suitable method for themselves, but, as you may know, they may choose wrong. they may work better in face-to-face mode. the above results are somewhat similar to those of yung’s 2020 study, which indicated that students expressed positive reactions toward online lessons. as students could stay at home for their lessons, they felt more comfortable. however, in this research, some tutors and students expressed uncertainty regarding whether online private lessons were useful in terms of improving students’ academic performance or increasing their knowledge. as for academic performance, only a few students mentioned that online classes helped them increase their examination marks, such as ‘my grades were better than last year because online private lessons helped me to revise the concepts before my exam’. the tutors indicated that online classes allowed them to revisit concepts with the students, and they believed this would make a difference between those who attended online private tutorial lessons and those who did not. areas that need more attention during the online private tutoring class online shadow education is an alternative because of the pandemic, but students and tutors generally expressed positive impressions of this type of education. however, this study also focuses on those aspects of online teaching to which tutors need to pay more attention. according to the individual interviews and group discussion with the tutors, these opportunities for improvement in online private tutorial classes included ensuring that students were paying attention, privacy problems and issues with online teaching materials. tutors expressed that it was a challenge to make sure their students were in class. some participants’ responses are shown below.  you never know whether they are online or offline, and that is why you need them to open their camera. by doing this, you can ensure that student’s attendance.  i will randomly ask them questions throughout the lesson. if they missed any of them, they would have to copy the answers several times. this can make them pay attention during the online class.  i agree that asking questions is a good way, and i will do the same as well. i usually ask them to turn on the camera only. at least i can make sure they are here. as shown, the most common ways to determine whether the students were still in class were asking random questions and asking them to turn on the camera. however, some tutors reported the use of interesting teaching strategies to increase interaction. some participants’ responses are shown below.  i try to include some trivia questions during the lesson, and i will use kahoot to play a small game with my student. my student pays more attention in class cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1488 because they think that the information in that lesson may help them to win the kahoot game.  i will try to think of some games, such as hangman, for my students to learn new words. as for the privacy problem, all the tutors mentioned that they usually used a virtual background during the lesson. this made them feels more comfortable since they did not want students to know about their background or be distracted by things in their homes. therefore, they suggested that future tutors who would like to use zoom as the main medium do the same thing. they additionally agreed that students should also make use of the virtual background during lessons. lastly, tutors need to be aware of the availability of online learning materials. all tutors agreed that they needed to prepare a set of materials for students to access online, since they cannot provide them with the hardcopy. tutors must also take more time to prepare for the lesson so that it seems ‘tailor-made’ for the course or student. the online private tutorial class required tutors to devote more time to lesson preparation. this was a topic of conversation during the tutors’ group discussion. regarding teaching strategies, the students also provided some ideas about how to motivate them in class. below is an excerpt of one of their conversations. anna: sometimes teachers just teach and ask us to do exercises, so it is easy for us to lose focus. chris: my teacher actually will prepare some mc questions on zoom and ask us to vote. i think it is very interesting. charlotte: so good that you have those activities; my teacher is just like anna’s. chris: i actually think if they have more activities, the lesson will be more interesting. anna: true. for me, i just keep doing exercises. i can do those by myself, why do i need to attend the lesson? the findings from the above showed students suggested more online activities during virtual instruction, which shadow educators can take as a recommendation to improve their lesson quality. this conversation also makes clear that students’ motivation in online private tutorial classes was correlated with the in-class activities. some may feel interested in participating more fully in a class with these activities, while others may question the necessity of their attendance. figure 2 depicts the lesson process, according to anna’s description. as a result, students may become bored and begin to lose interest. they may even begin to think that they can check the answers by themselves; after all, they are form 6 students and therefore old enough to do so. a follow-up question from the interview protocol about motivation in an online private tutorial class showed that half of the students were motivated. anna and charlotte were among those who said they were not motivated because of the boring lesson design. the other half, including chris, mentioned that they were motivated because teachers would use different activities to attract their attention. some of the students cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1489 figure 2. lesson process following anna’s description. even explained that their tutors would provide rewards to encourage them to pay more attention in class. some participants’ responses are shown below.  i was thrilled about getting the coupons from my tutor. she said if i improve my grade on the exam, she will give me $50 starbucks coupons. i did it, and i received my rewards. looking back, i was concentrating during the lesson.  i got a small gift for answering questions during class, and i felt great. after that, i was involved in class. however, when students clarified whether their grades had significantly improved, most said they were more or less the same as before they took the online class, with the exception of some subjects, such as liberal studies. one student expressed that his english and chinese grades had dropped after a recent exam, and he mentioned that languages were difficult to learn through online classes, especially english. he could not use it with his peers in class, and he believed this was the reason that his english grade had deteriorated. therefore, online learning may not be useful for students who would like more interaction. future trends in shadow education responses from tutors on this topic were almost the same. they all believed that in the near future, shadow education will follow mainstream schools to the use of online software. they further provided several reasons for online shadow education. first, the covid-19 situation will remain for quite a while, and no one can predict the day that we will be free from the pandemic. second, shadow education works under mainstream schools (bray, 1999), and that is why shadow education may need to be synchronized with those schools. lastly, online shadow education can help break barriers. students from different countries can attend lessons at the same time, and this can be an opporcheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1490 tunity for some learning centers to expand their business. from the tutors’ perspective, this method of teaching will remain even after covid-19 is no longer a serious issue. as for the students, they also agree that this will be a future trend in education. although some still questioned the effectiveness and efficiency of the practice, there is no doubt that online classrooms have made education more convenient. this parallels the tutors’ statements about the convenience of online education. students could attend the lesson whenever and wherever they wanted, and this allowed them to make good use of their time. however, they also pointed out that in order to make this happen, teaching quality, technical issues and privacy issues should receive further attention. however, generally speaking, online learning will be the future of shadow education. discussion: general impressions from tutors and students this paper primarily focuses on general impressions of online shadow education, and both private tutors and students expressed positive feedback regarding this method of instruction. as mentioned in yung (2020), students felt comfortable with online learning because they neither needed to attend school in person nor reveal their identities. this provided both positive and negative impacts. students were more outgoing in online classes, but the teachers were unable to fully control whether their students were listening during the lesson (yung, 2020). in this research, the students indicated that they felt safe and comfortable with having their lessons at home. some did feel that online tutoring was more ‘distant’ than ‘intimate’, but they mentioned that because their mainstream schools had provided prior online instruction, they had no problem with learning through zoom. the factor that negatively affected their impressions was their tutor’s teaching strategies. it is worthwhile to dig deeply into teaching methods for online shadow education, as it is likely that the most effective will be different from those utilized in face-to-face learning. in the u.s.a., schools and learning centers have developed a set of new curricula and teaching methods, such as collaborative blackboard, in response to the covid-19 situation (netolicky, 2020). teaching strategies should be reflected upon and evaluated every semester, and new methods, such as games, competitions and rewards, can be implemented to attract students. as for the tutors’ perspectives, they provided both positive and negative impressions of online shadow education. as mentioned in the findings, the tutors stated that success in an online tutorial class is dependent upon the student’s attitude. for example, if students decide not to respond to questions or fake their presence, they may not gain any benefit from online private tutoring. however, those who demonstrated commitment and stayed involved by, for example, answering questions, were more likely to have learnt something from their tutors. as a result, tutors were not fully sold on the online methods of teaching, and they still believed that traditional face-to-face lessons would be more effective. these concerns can be somewhat related to previous research results from bray (2011), yung (2020) and cheng (2021), all of which are related to helping students benefit from private tutoring. as yung (2020) concluded, it can be somewhat difficult to maintain discipline and ensure that students are paying attention in class when one is utilizing online teaching methods. cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1491 however, tutors also expressed positive impressions of online tutorial classes. some used economic terms, such as stating that they were able to gain income by conducting online classes throughout the pandemic. due to the strict social distancing policy in hong kong, schools were forced to stop face-to-face classes for almost six months. some private learning centers went out of business because of the pandemic (south china morning post, 2020). the emergence of online tutorial classes allowed many tutors to keep their jobs, which is why, from an economic point of view, they support online shadow education. some of the tutors in this research explicitly expressed that online shadow education can help break barriers and that it has completely changed the world of education. it is noteworthy to hear this belief expressed by tutors, who are major stakeholders in this industry. they generally agreed that online classes in the private tutoring sector can help students learn and revise knowledge at any place or time. students may participate in the class on live stream or view a recorded session at a later time, depending upon the students’ needs, or they may do both. this is a huge benefit and convenience for students, as retention depended almost solely on jotting down notes in the past. as a result, the tutors also expressed positive impressions of online shadow education. although there are some benefits in using online platform as a way to conduct shadow education, a more considerate guidelines or government supports are needed in hong kong. currently hagwons (private lessons) in korea have also switched to online platforms, and scholars indicated that government should provide more supports, such as laws and regulations for private tutors to follow when conducting their classes online (piao & hwang, 2021). in hong kong, online teaching has not received a lot of supports from government, but using zoom as one of the main methods in teaching has become a trend because of covid-19. more can be done in terms of supporting online shadow education in hong kong. areas that require further attention during online tutoring, most of the participants (both tutors and students) agreed that teaching strategies, privacy issues and creating online teaching materials were some of the areas to which tutors need to pay more attention. this research shows that teaching strategies were critical, especially because the relationship between tutors and students was distant. using online software to conduct lessons may result in students being distracted by the surrounding environment or playing with their phones while attending lessons. these distractions were observed in each of the three lesson observations in this study. all students, at some point in the observation, bowed their heads and appeared to stop paying attention to the lecture. during the group discussions, some students also pointed out that interesting teaching methods and rewards can attract their attention and motivate better performance in future lessons. as a result, the methods utilized in online teaching are the first aspect that tutors need to priorities. some of the suggested methods, such as using kahoot or the zoom polling system, can help make the lesson more unorthodox and interesting. also, the tutors suggested trivia questions and question-and-answer interactions to keep students involved in the online classes. cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1492 privacy issues were addressed by both tutors and students in this study. tutors mentioned that they used a virtual background to hide where they were and to help them feel more secure. students, on the other hand, tended to shut off their cameras unless their tutor requested that they switch it on. the students’ behavior in this study was similar to that of the participants in yung’s (2020) research. they would feel more comfortable in an online class, and they would be more expressive because of the camera. going forward, tutors who would like to choose online software as their primary mode of teaching should understand the associated privacy risks. a virtual background or strategically switching the camera on and off should be carefully considered for integration into the lessons, as various kinds of background information may risk a leak of the tutor’s or student’s information, including age, gender or full name (kagan et al., 2020). another issue that can happen in online teaching is the sudden or accidental appearance of strangers who crash the meeting. although this was not addressed by participants in this research, these surprising appearances are related to online teaching’s privacy issues. recent research conducted by kagan et al. (2020) mentioned the risks associated with leaks of personal information or video conference links to the public. if the latter occurs, strangers can suddenly appear in the session and expose disturbing materials to the users. this is another issue to which tutors who plan to use online education should pay attention. finally, a new set of online materials that are suited to the current pandemic situation needs to be created. an example used in a previous section is that some schools and learning centers in the united states have recently developed a set of online learning materials for students to use during the pandemic (netolicky, 2020). in this research, the students were given some online materials, such as online worksheets or textbooks, to enhance their learning. since the covid-19 situation remains uncertain, online teaching may need to be widely used for some time. for tutors, it is necessary to develop a set of new internet-based learning and teaching materials for online shadow education. this will ensure the teaching quality of the lesson and reduce pressure on the tutor. additionally, online shadow education materials should be synchronized with those of mainstream schools. this synchronization also fulfils a primary function of shadow education: to work in integration with mainstream schools (bray, 1999). therefore, updated online materials are needed for tutors to stay competitive, maintain teaching quality and successfully assist their students’ learning. future of online shadow education in hong kong online education in both mainstream and private tutorial schools is now quite popular in hong kong, but only a few studies have discussed the effectiveness of online private tutoring. this research showed that the general impressions of students and tutors regarding online shadow education were uncertain. although some think this is the future of education and its convenience can help students learn, others challenge whether students can really learn at all through a screen. however, researchers and educators should assume that online shadow education will become even more popular in the future. it is quite difficult to turn back to traditional methods, as convenience and breaking barriers are very attractive to students and some tutors. therefore, online shadow education is a method that is worth further investigation and discussion in the future cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1493 (eng, 2019). some of the participants in this study indicated that the future trend in the private tutoring field will be a combination of online and face-to-face work, which can be called a ‘hybrid’ mode of teaching and learning. teachers can use zoom and face-toface teaching at the same time, while students can attend face-to-face lectures or live stream from home. this combination is the future for the hong kong private tutoring sector and is likely a trend for shadow education around the globe. moreover, tutors in this research mentioned that online shadow education can break barriers. online classes have already begun to provide opportunities for tutors since learning centers can now accept students from around the world. economically speaking, this can bring a large amount of income to tutors and learning centers. as a result, when talking about the future of online shadow education in hong kong, some of the tutors in this study expressed optimism about the future of their profession. conclusion and limitation in conclusion, this research has highlighted that online shadow education will very likely be the future for the private tutoring industry in hong kong, as most of the participants in this research expressed a positive impression of the convenience of using online private tutoring. for tutors, this type of teaching can help them maintain their jobs and is a more suitable approach to teaching during a pandemic. although there were a few worries about the effectiveness of online shadow education, these can be solved through teaching strategies and the development of updated online materials and curricula. some of the findings were related to yung’s (2020) study; for example, the students felt more comfortable and expressive while participating in zoom learning. they were more willing to express themselves because they did not need to reveal their faces and identities. however, this study does not reflect only students’ impressions of online shadow education. as a result, the data and implications of this study illustrate some of the trends in shadow education in hong kong. further research is needed on online shadow education, as too few scholars have focused on this area. in this research, students and tutors only expressed their general impression of online shadow education; however, the results of online shadow education, such as whether students have significantly improved after completing a session, have not been adequately examined. this research was limited to the perspectives of students and private tutors, which may not be a wide enough sample to show the whole picture of online shadow education in hong kong. more stakeholders should be involved in this type of research in the future, such as government representatives, parents, school teachers, policymakers and any others who take part in online shadow education, as more ideas from these stakeholders can help to paint a more complete picture (bray, 2014). therefore, future researchers should consider online shadow education to be one of the branches of shadow education study, and they should investigate various topics within this field in order to help educators in hong kong and around the world. furthermore, this research may only reveal some of the potential issues happened in hong kong shadow education, as online education can still have a lot of areas that can be discussed, such as potential governmental supports in hong kong shadow education and the reasons that students felt more comfortable in staying behind the cheng. 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(2020). covid-19 as a catalyst for educational change. prospects, 49:29-33. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-02009477-y https://doi.org/10.5212/terraplural.v.2i2.227239 https://doi.org/10.5212/terraplural.v.2i2.227239 https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311211013825 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139149839.001 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139149839.001 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73612-9_1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73612-9_1 https://doi.org/10.1080/13596740600769123 https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3052401/coronavirus-boosts-fortunes-e-learning-providers-while-hong?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3052401 https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3052401/coronavirus-boosts-fortunes-e-learning-providers-while-hong?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3052401 https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3052401/coronavirus-boosts-fortunes-e-learning-providers-while-hong?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3052401 https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3052401/coronavirus-boosts-fortunes-e-learning-providers-while-hong?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3052401 https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3052401/coronavirus-boosts-fortunes-e-learning-providers-while-hong?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3052401 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483381411.n66 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/21/the-zoom-boom-how-video-calling-became-a-blessing-and-a-curse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/21/the-zoom-boom-how-video-calling-became-a-blessing-and-a-curse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/21/the-zoom-boom-how-video-calling-became-a-blessing-and-a-curse https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483384436.n1 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0738-0593(03)00099-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0738-0593(03)00099-3 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247820981820 https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.193 https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2020.1814697 https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2020.1814697 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03982-0_7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03982-0_7 https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1488241 https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1488241 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-013-9276-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09477-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09477-y cheng. (hong kong). online shadow education in hong kong. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1497 appendix a: sample interview questions questions for the pre-interview 1. have you ever attended online lessons? questions for the interview 1. what are your impressions of online private tutoring? do you think it is useful? why? 2. what teaching strategies did you use during online teaching? why? (tutor) 3. what are some of the difficulties that you faced during online private tutoring? please explain in detail. 4. are you motivated in an online private tutorial class? why? 5. did you feel you had significantly improved your/your student’s academic results after the online classes? why? 6. do you think online private tutoring is useful? can this become a trend? received: 22 june 2022 revised: 05 july 2022 accepted: 11 july 2022 bece_chengchingho_title_july2022 bece_chengchingho_maintext_july2022 bece. newsletter bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1339 who matters, teacher or parents? by zhao, n. n., li, w. t., chen, x. h., & chen, f. m. correspondence to: zhao, n. n., beijing normal university, china. e-mail: zhaonn@xaut.edu.com ublished in tsinghua journal of education, the study examines the influence of parents and teachers on students’ academic performance in chinese through a survey of more than 4,000 students in grades 3 to 6. based on the achievement goal theory, this study constructs a theoretical model of the relationship between students’ perceived achievement goals and their academic achievements in chinese and takes learning style as a mediator variable to explore the influence of students’ perceived achievement goals from teachers and parents on their academic achievements in chinese. the research question of this study is: how do students’ perceived achievement goals from parents (including acquisition goals, referring to students’ perceived parental hopes that they should develop new skills, improve their abilities and acquire new knowledge; results goals, referring to students’ perceived high parental standards in terms of scores and rankings) and achievement goals from teachers (including acquisition goals, referring to the students’ perception that the objective of learning emphasized by teachers is to cultivate skills and abilities; avoidance goals, referring to the students’ perception of teachers’ request for their avoidance to show low ability; targeted goals, referring to students’ perceived requests for high performance from teachers to exhibit their abilities and talent) affect students’ academic performance in chinese? research methods: this study takes more than 4,000 students in grades 3-6 as sample, using students’ academic achievements in chinese, learning style, goal perception and family factors as research tools, to explore the impact of parents’ and teachers’ goals perceived by students on their learning style and academic achievements in chinese and the mediating effect of learning style. research results:  correlation analysis among variables indicates: (i) there is a significant positive correlation between students’ academic achievements in chinese and surface learning style, parents’ expectations, teachers’ acquisition goal, teachers’ targeted goal and parents’ results goal at the level of 0.01. (ii) there is a significant p mailto:zhaonn@xaut.edu.com bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1340 negative correlation between students’ academic achievements in chinese and physical capital and teachers’ avoidance goal at 0.01 level. there is a significant positive correlation between students’ academic achievements in chinese and deep learning style, and a significant negative correlation between students’ academic achievement in chinese and cultural capital at 0.05 level.  this study uses structural equation model to model variables that affect students’ academic performance and draws the following conclusions: surface learning style (β = 0.175, p < 0.001) and perceived acquisition goals from teachers (β = 0.148, p < 0.001) have significant positive influence on students’ academic achievements in chinese. students’ perceived parental acquisition goals (β = -0.101, p < 0.05) have a significant negative impact on students’ academic achievements in chinese. students’ perception of acquisition goal from teachers (β = 0.211, p < 0.001) and parental acquisition goal (β = 0.63, p < 0.001) have a significant positive impact on surface learning style. there is an interaction between students’ perceived parental acquisition goal and perceived acquisition goal from teachers (β=0.506, p <0.001). parents’ expectations interact with students’ perception of acquisition goal from teachers (β = 0.171, p < 0.001). parents’ expectations have a significant positive effect on students’ perceived parental acquisition goal (β = 0.157, p < 0.001), surface learning style (β = 0.071, p < 0.001) and academic achievements in chinese (β = 0.111, p < 0.001). students’ perception of acquisition goal from teachers and parental acquisition goal has an impact on academic achievements in chinese through the mediating effect of surface learning style.  there are two ways to influence students’ academic performance in chinese, and the results of the effect test are as follows: i) teachers’ acquisition goal → students’ surface learning style → academic performance in chinese, the effect value is 0.037, 99% confidence interval is [0.015, 0.054]; ii) parental acquisition goal → students’ surface learning style →academic achievements in chinese, the effect value is 0.11, 99% confidence interval is [0.045, 0.16]. the results indicate that the two paths are not completely valid mediation effect, and acquisition goals from teachers have a more direct impact on students’ academic achievements in chinese than parental acquisition goal. based on the above analysis, the following conclusions are reached: i) achievement goals from teachers and parents can predict students’ academic achievements in chinese. however, whether there are other mediating variables needs to be further examined. ii) compared with parents, teachers have a bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1341 stronger direct influence on students’ academic performance, which suggests that in improving students’ academic performance, teachers should take the initiative. iii) compared with teachers, parents have stronger influence on students’ motivations and strategies, which suggests that parents should play a more direct and important role in the cultivation of students’ learning styles. their influence on students is implicit and internalized, focusing on thoughts, behaviors, and methods. iv) surprisingly, parental acquisition goals have a significant negative impact on students’ academic performance in chinese, which may be attributed to the fact that emphasis on academic achievements can cause excessive stress to children. further research is needed in this regard. v) there should be a clear division of responsibility between parents and teachers in home-school partnership to achieve students’ healthy and comprehensive development. source: tsinghua journal of education, 2021; 42(4):130-140. bece. newsletter bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1337 how do class size and teacher’s academic qualifications affect students’ academic performance? an international comparative study based on pisa 2018 results by yao, h., hu, y. z., & ma, l. c. correspondence to: hu, y. z., east china normal university, china. e-mail: yzhu@dem.ecnu.edu.cn he study, published in tsinghua journal of education, uses pisa2018 results of 15-year-old middle school students from four provincial administrative regions in china (beijing, shanghai, jiangsu, and guangdong) , and other oecd countries as analysis sample to explore the differences in the distribution characteristics of class size and teacher academic qualifications between the four regions of china and oecd countries, and the impact of class size, teacher academic qualifications and their interaction terms on student academic performance. multi-level linearity model is adopted in the analysis. the results of the study are as follows.  there are remarkable differences in the distribution characteristics of class sizes and teacher academic qualifications in middle schools between china and oecd countries. class size in china is relatively larger than that of oecd countries. in terms of teacher education qualifications, the proportion of teachers with a master’s degree in oecd countries is higher than china. in terms of the distribution of teacher academic qualifications corresponding to different class sizes, the distribution curve of class sizes and teachers’ academic qualifications in oecd countries follows the rule of large classes with low teacher academic qualifications and small classes with high teacher academic qualifications, while the distribution curve in the four regions in china presents irregular wave patterns.  reducing class size and upgrading teacher academic qualifications will help improve student performance. when the class size of the four regions in china is reduced from more than 50 students to 4145 students and 46-50 students, the improvement in student academic performance is significant; when the class size in oecd countries is reduced from more than 50 students to 16-20 students, or 2630 students, or 31-35 students, students can improve their performance effectively. in terms of the impact of teachers’ academic t mailto:yzhu@dem.ecnu.edu.cn bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1338 qualifications on student performance, every 10% increase in the proportion of the master’s degree in the faculty will result in an average increase of 10.2 points in mathematics scores for students in the four regions of china, and an average increase of 5.6 points for students in oecd countries.  a quadratic test of class size in oecd countries indicates that class size has a non-linear relationship with the improvement of student academic performance, and the best marginal benefit range for measuring the impact of class size on student performance is 21-30 students per class.  the interaction between class size and teacher academic qualifications is tested, and it is found that class size and teacher academic qualifications have a “mutually independent” effect on student academic performance in china, while in oecd countries, they have a “mutually substituting” effect on student academic performance. both have their own specific role thresholds. the research results indicate that the benefits of reducing class size and upgrading teachers’ academic qualifications are not only reflected in student performance improvement, but also in the development of students’ non-cognitive abilities. reducing class size helps to regulate student behavior and enhance students’ emotional skills. upgrading teacher academic qualifications can also promote pertinent instructions according to students’ peculiarities and guide individual students to achieve distinctive and diversified development. these benefits beyond academic achievements deserve further studying. in benchmarking the relevant indicators of oecd countries to promote the development of education in china, it is necessary to consider china’s economic development level as a upper-middle-income country, the scarcity of high-quality educational resources and the unbalanced development of education at the current stage. under the principle of steady change and gradual advancement, empirical models based on large sample data should be built to measure the marginal costs and marginal benefits of different programs to formulate a more scientific and efficient strategy for the high-quality development of compulsory education. source: tsinghua journal of education, 2021(5):40-54. can educational robots improve student creativity: a meta-analysis based on 48 experimental and quasiexperimental studies haoxiang hou, 1 xianyi zhang, 2 dan wang 2 1. faculty of education, jiangnan university, wuxi 214000, jiangsu, china 2. wuxi teacher development college, wuxi 214000, jiangsu, china cultivating innovative talents has become a critical strategy for building china into a strong country in science and technology. catering to the trend of educational reform in the intelligent era, the use of robotics in developing student creativity proves to be of greater practical value. the findings of this study are that: first, the overall effect of educational robotics on student creativity reaches above-moderate level; second, educational robotics has more significant effects on creativity of primary and junior secondary students; third, in terms of subjects, robotics courses can most effectively promote student creativity; fourth, among various teaching topics, prototype creation has the most substantial impact on student creativity; fifth, in terms of instruction methods, inquiry-driven teaching can best stimulate student creativity; sixth, compared with ordinary classrooms, the laboratory environment is more favorable for the development of student creativity. the paper also offers recommendations for popularizing robotics curriculum at different education levels. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(1):1449-1454. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab001. how to cite: hou, h., zhang, x., & wang, d. (2022). can educational robots improve student creativity: a meta-analysis based on 48 experimental and quasiexperimental studies. best evidence in chinese education, 11(1):1449-1454. keywords: educational robot, creativity, artificial intelligence, software programming, teaching mode hou et al. can educational robots improve student creativity? bece, vol.11, no.1, 2022 1450 about the authors: xianyi zhang, wuxi teacher development college, jiangsu wuxi, 214000, china dan wang, wuxi teacher development college, jiangsu wuxi, 214000, china correspondence to: haoxiang hou, faculty of education, jiangnan university, jiangsu wuxi, 214000, china. email: 1296910644@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:1296910644@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ hou et al. can educational robots improve student creativity? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1451 this paper uses meta-analysis to code and analyze experimental research on robotics education in china and other countries and combines field research to investigate the effect of robotics education on student creativity, aiming to provide useful references for the implementation of robotics curriculum in schools. in this study, three teaching methods are discussed to utilize educational robots to develop student creativity: the robotics-based inquiry-driven method; the robot design-based teaching method; the robotic application project-based teaching method. research design methods and instruments the present study uses meta-analysis to examine the sample data in existing research to systematically evaluate the results of numerous studies by quantitative synthesis. samples and parameters such as the mean values and standard deviations of the experimental and control groups are extracted from the experimental studies to calculate standardized mean differences (smd) which are treated as effect sizes. hedges’ g value is one of the estimated values of smd, a computation result combining the smd with the mixed variance of the control group and the experimental group. compared with cohen’s d and glass’ values, it is more suitable for the meta-analysis of effect sizes based on relatively small sample sizes and limited number of studies. hence, hedges’s g value is used as the final effect size to demonstrate the effect of robotics education on student creativity. data selection and coding the present study searched chinese and foreign literature databases for journal articles, dissertations, academic conference papers, etc. to acquire as many samples as possible. a total of 852 pieces of literature addressing the relationship between educational robots and student creativity and published between 2001 and 2020 were obtained. all of them adopt randomized experimental or quasi-experimental methods and encompass experimental and control groups, sample sizes in statistical results, means, standard deviations, experimental periods, and other data. the following criteria were used to decide whether to include the study in the analysis: i) applying robotics in educational and teaching activities, including the cases wherein the experimental group employs robots in teaching while the control group adopts conventional teaching methods; ii) treating student creativity as the dependent variable in both the experimental and the control group; iii) providing sufficient data for the computation of the average effect size (the data resulting from the experimental and control group analysis must include sample sizes, means, standard deviations, etc.). after several rounds of screening, 48 papers were selected, and 6,057 samples extracted for this meta-analysis. the included literature covers all the education levels ranging from kindergarten to university; subjects such as mathematics, geography, science, and robotics; teaching programs like prototype creation, engineering production, scientific inquiry, and result verification; teaching methods including inquiry-driven, design-based, and project-based instruction; teaching locations including experiment rooms and classrooms. this paper classifies hou et al. can educational robots improve student creativity? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1452 student creativity into three categories: a-creative thinking (critical thinking, logical thinking, divergent thinking, imagination, spatial thinking ability, etc.), b-practical innovation ability (practical operation, problem solving, engineering, scientific inquiry, etc.), and c-creative personality and psychology (personality traits, perseverance, teamwork, interest in learning, etc.) results the test of overall effect the test results demonstrate that hedges’ s g-values of both the fixed effects model and the random effects model are greater than 0, and the p-value in the two-tailed test is less than 0.001, indicating that robotics education has a significant positive impact on student creativity. compared with fixed-effects models, random-effects models are more useful in addressing the measurement discrepancy between various study results and the overall effect size. according to the theory of smd statistics, when 0.51≤smd≤1, it is considered an effect size of above-moderate level. thus, the analysis results of summary effect size (smd = 0.576) in this study demonstrate that robotics education exerts an above-moderate positive impact on student creativity. the test of effects on different categories of student creativity robotics education has significant effects on student creativity in different categories and in various combinations of these categories. specifically, student practical innovation ability (b category) is most significantly enhanced (smd = 0.453, p < 0.001) by robotics education, followed by student creative thinking (a category) (smd = 0.386, p < 0.001), while student creative personality and psychology (c category) is moderately improved (smd = 0.283, p < 0.001, 0.21 ≤ smd ≤ 0.50). in terms of student creativity in different category combinations, the configuration of a and b categories is most substantially and positively affected by educational robotics (smd = 0.757, p < 0.001), indicating that the robotics curriculum significantly bolsters student creative thinking and practical innovation ability. tests of various mediating effects i. robotics education engenders differential effects on student creativity at different education levels. due to the limited sample size of kindergartens and universities, the comparison is focused on the different effects on the creativity of primary, junior secondary, and senior secondary students. the creativity of junior secondary students is most significantly boosted by robotics education (smd = 0.607, p < 0.001), followed by that of primary students (smd = 0.435, p < 0.001), but it has no significant effect on the creativity of senior secondary students. ii. there are subject differences in the effects of robotics curriculum on student creativity. in the robotics course, the boosting effect on student creativity is the hou et al. can educational robots improve student creativity? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1453 most remarkable, reaching the above-moderate level (smd= 0.606, p< 0.001), followed by the mathematics course (smd = 0.466, p < 0.001). the sample sizes of geography and science courses are too small to represent significant effect. iii. mediating effects diverge among various teaching programs in robotics curriculum, while all of them can significantly promote student creativity. programs such as hands-on creation, experimental verification, process participation are exceptionally effective in enhancing student innovation ability. iv. in terms of the mediation of different teaching methods, the influence of inquiry-driven teaching on student creativity is extremely significant (smd = 0.927, p < 0.001), followed by that of design-based teaching (smd = 0.598, p < 0.001) and project-based teaching (smd = 0.529, p < 0.001), which implies that robotics curriculum can maximize its effect on the cultivation of student creativity through project exploration, high student participation, hands-on learning and other methods. v. robotics education at various teaching locations can all contribute to the development of student creativity. in the ordinary classroom, robotics teaching yields a significant effect on the advancement of student creativity (smd = 0.485, p < 0.001). in the laboratory environment, the creation of learning situations and interaction with educational robots significantly improve the effect of robotics education on student creativity (smd = 0.578, p < 0.001), highlighting the relevance of strengthening laboratory environment construction. conclusions and discussion popularizing the robotics education curriculum the positive effect of robotics curriculum on student creativity reflects the substantial benefits of intelligent education for student creativity development. therefore, it is of vital importance to incorporate the education of intelligent robots into the school curriculum to improve students’ literacy in programming control, human-computer interaction, algorithm programs, neural networks, and intelligent ethics. emphasizing the cultivation of student creativity at basic education levels it is recommended to invest more in promoting student creativity by robotics education at the primary and secondary stages. the secondary school level is particularly critical to the comprehensive development of student innovation ability. constructing a robot maker teaching model suitable for student innovation capability hou et al. can educational robots improve student creativity? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1454 the effects of various teaching programs and methods on student creativity in robotics education suggest that teaching modes that assist in prototype creation and inquirydriven learning is most beneficial to enhancing student creativity. strengthening the construction of the laboratory’s tangible and soft conditions tangible conditions cover the following facilities that enable students to experience robotic learning: equipment for conception, such as multimedia devices, drawing tools, and electronic whiteboards; designing equipment, including modeling software, robot making software, online robot simulation platform, etc.; operation facilities, such as lego robots, arduino robots, and assembly welding equipment; presentation facilities, providing students with display platforms to test the performance of their robots. soft conditions involve teaching program making, case demonstration, information resources, cognitive tools, dialogue and collaboration instruments, and social network support. the effective integration of tangible and soft conditions creates an environment facilitating robotic experimental teaching and promoting student innovation thinking, hands-on creation, and teamwork skills. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2022, 40(3):99-111. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 侯浩翔, 张先义, 王旦. (2022). 教育机器人可以提升学生创造力吗?—基于 48 项实验与准实验 研究的 meta 分析. 华东师范大学学报: 教育科学版. 40(3):99-111 received: 07 april 2022 revised: 20 april 2022 accepted: 11 may 2022 1-absbract-haoxianghou-bece_title_may2022 1-absbract-haoxianghou-bece_maintextmay2022 bece, vol.12, no.2, 2022 1609 evidenced-based educational reform supported by education quality monitoring: china’s exploration and experience jijun yao school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, jiangsu, china “every child should have the opportunity to receive a quality education.” –bill frist n china’s educational community, there is a consensus that any decision-making or advance in reform must be based on scientific evidence. it has been realized that the traditional instruction modalities that draw on educators’ personal experience have become ineffective in accomplishing better education in the new era. in this context, china’s educational administrators have been committed to constructing an evidence-based system to enable reform in education. in the construction and application of regional education quality monitoring databases: a case study of suzhou’s education quality monitoring in this issue of the journal (shen & luo, 2022), suzhou’s education quality monitoring (eqm) research team presents their city’s experiences in developing eqm databases. suzhou, a city with a high level of socioeconomic development, has made successful experiments in evidence-based educational reform. it has created a citywide eqm system, which can provide comprehensive evaluation of student academic performance as well as useful information about school operation, teachers’ instruction behavior, students’ learning behavior, and home education, etc. as a result, ample data are available for systematic analyses of teaching and learning processes and © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. i http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ bece, vol.12, no.2, 2022 1610 outcomes. technically, suzhou’s eqm system has incorporated big data analytics and ai assessment technologies; it also enables longitudinal research on student long-term development. such educational database design is original and cutting-edge in china. the significance of suzhou’s exploration in eqm database construction is remarkable. first, there are big gaps in social development level among regions in china. attitudes towards evidence-based educational reform vary in different areas. it necessitates pioneers and successful stories from relatively developed regions which can serve as role models for less developed ones by sharing valuable experience. suzhou proves to be a good example in this regard. second, suzhou’s practice provides a useful reference for global evidence-based educational reform. its eqm database architecture is top-notch in operational procedure and technological application, and has many advantages in supporting educational decision-making and practice. although each country has its own national circumstances and educational conditions, we believe that suzhou’s technical innovation in eqm can go beyond regional and national boundaries and has the potential of universal application. third, suzhou’s evidence-based educational reform focuses on issues of chinese features. chinese society tends to overemphasize student academic achievements. this has caused a series of problems, but also offers a chance to achieve the breakthrough in educational reform. for its regional eqm, suzhou has established a complete feature database system focused on student academic performance, which is a reasonable and effective strategy under china’s circumstances. this pathway can not only assist in responding to the most pronounced and critical issues, but also ignite a larger scale of educational reform and make it a successful change. as the evidence-based educational reform is still in its infancy in china, the exploration in this area, including suzhou’s, is undergoing progressive improvement. despite the remarkable achievements that have been made in suzhou’s eqm, there is still room for improvement in obtaining more reliable and robust evidence. we believe that over time, with the continuous efforts of researchers and practitioners, china’s, including suzhou’s, educational reform based on empirical evidence will surely generate more salient results and provide valuable insights to its counterparts worldwide. references shen, j. & luo, q. (2022). the construction and application of regional education quality monitoring databases: a case study of suzhou’s education quality monitoring. best evidence in chinese education, 2022; 12(2):1613-1628. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.re031 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.22.re031 bece, vol.12, no.2, 2022 1611 correspondence to: jijun yao, ph.d. school of educational science nanjing normal university nanjing 210024 jiangsu china e-mail: e-mail: yaojijun_njnu@163.com conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.co020 mailto:yaojijun_njnu@163.com bece. newsletter vol.16, no.1, 2024, bece 1823 factors influencing child aesthetic development: an empirical analysis based on the survey data of over 70,000 chinese children by yi, x., xu, s., & du, l. correspondence to: xiaoming yi, nanjing normal university, china. e-mail: yixiaoming@njnu.edu.cn he study examined factors influencing child aesthetic development, using sharpley value decomposition and mediation effect model analysis. it was based on a sample of 71,546 students (9-18 years old) from grades four throughout 12 from 189 schools across china. research findings: (i) individual-, family-, school-, community-related factors had differential levels of effect on child aesthetic development in the order: individual > family > school > community. among all the specific factors, the child’s curiosity, attitude towards life, and the school’s aesthetic education resources were the three most impactful factors in child aesthetic development. there were gender and educational phase differences in the impacts of these factors. (ii) the analysis based on the mediation effect model revealed that parental penchant for arts promoted child aesthetic development through parentchild interactions; that the teacher’ quality of aesthetic education significantly mediated the effect of the school’s aesthetic education resources on child aesthetic development; and that effective publicity of arts activities was supportive to the role of social aesthetic education resources. suggestions were also proposed as follows: i) establish aesthetic education goals for developing student practiceand real life-based aesthetic literacy and foster students’ self-motivation in this regard; ii) give full play to the family’s role in nurturing the child’s aesthetic competence; iii) create learning and living environments that facilitate aesthetic education; iv) implement teaching patterns with diverse aesthetic experiences and practices; v) increase publicity of social aesthetic activities via various channels and fully leverage social aesthetic education resources. source: educational research, 2023; 44(6):78-94. t mailto:yixiaoming@njnu.edu.cn overview and insight from the china research report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the organization for economic cooperation and development fengping zhao 1 , weijie meng 2 , fangmei li 3 , longjun zhou 4 1. shandong changle no.2 middle school, changle 262400, china 2. nanjing yutong experimental school, nanjing 211100, china 3. nanjing dianji institute of psychological education, nanjing 210000, china 4. jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, china abstract. social and emotional skills are important for students in 21st century study, life, and future work. in 2018, the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) officially launched the first round of social and emotional skills tests for 10-year-old and 15year-old students worldwide. after 3 years of research, the first round of global data collection ended and at the end of 2019 the oecd published the social and emotional ability assessment international report. as one of the participating cities, suzhou, china, successfully completed the first round of testing and released a series of reports. this article summarizes the research work of the oecd and china on social and emotional capabilities of students and discusses a few insights from the data. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 9(1):1169-1195. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.re055. how to cite: zhao, f., meng, w., li, f., & zhou, l. (2021). overview and insight from the china research report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the organization for economic cooperation and development. best evidence in chinese education, 9(1):1169-1195. keywords: student social and emotional abilities, educational evaluation, oecd, china, education zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.8, no.2, 2021 1170 about the author: fengping zhao, shandong changle no.2 middle school, changle 262400, china. e-mail: zhaofengping5138@163.com weijie meng, principal of nanjing yutong experimental school, 22 jiangjun avenue, jiangning district, nanjing 211100, jiangsu, china. e-mail: 13608955415@126.com fangmei li, nanjing dianji institute of psychological education, nanjing210000, jiangsu, china. e-mail: 1037576462@qq.com correspondence to: longjun zhou, jiangsu second normal university, nanjing 211200, jiangsu, china. e-mail: 294437034@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:zhaofengping5138@163.com mailto:13608955415@126.com mailto:1037576462@qq.com mailto:294437034@qq.com zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1171 ocial and emotional abilities are widely regarded by researchers as core elements of human growth and development. the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) proposed that education in the 21st century must break the constraints of a singular emphasis on academic, scientific and technological ability. rapid world changes and increasing maturity of the application of automation technology, make the development of social emotional abilities crucial (unesco, 2019). the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) also emphasizes that, in modern life, children’s success is inseparable from a complete set of cognitive, social and emotional skills, such as achieving goals and interacting with others. the ability to cooperate effectively and manage emotions is essential to meet the challenges of the 21st century (oecd, 2015). therefore, it has become the consensus of educators worldwide to regard social and emotional abilities as an important component of student training. oecd started the survey of social and emotional skills (sses) research in 2013, with the aim to promote the balanced development of cognitive ability and social emotional ability. compared to earlier started projects that focused on cognitive ability (e.g., pisa, iels, piaac and others), the sses project fills a gap in the oecd ability assessment project and guides the future development of global education and the shift in the focus of talent training. the sses project is not a simple international competition. rather, it aims to discover the effectiveness and blind spots of various countries’ education policies through evaluation and research. the objective is to analyze problems existing in the development of education in various countries and show their respective achievements and advantages, to provide countries around the world with experiences from other countries. in 2018, the social and emotional skills assessment was officially launched. at the end of 2019, the first round of the official assessment was completed in 10 cities from nine countries around the world. on 7 september 2021, the oecd released a global assessment report (oecd, 2021) at its headquarters in paris based on this survey. the report provides an overview of the social and emotional abilities of young people in the ten participating cities, and reports on the factors that affect social and emotional abilities. from an international perspective, it provides information for the improvement of social and emotional abilities, educational decision-making and educational practice in various countries. definition and value of social and emotional capabilities definition of social and emotional competence the proposed assessment of social emotional ability is based on research of social and emotional ability. social skills are considered a cognitive skill that allows effective performance in a group. social skills encompass skills found in the three dimensions of communication, cooperation and identification. these skills ultimately enable individus zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1172 als to show appropriate behaviors during group activities (gold, 2009), including communication skills and the ability to cooperate with others. emotional ability refers to a person’s ability to master their own emotions, to bear external pressure, and to use emotions to facilitate interpersonal relationships, including empathy, emotion recognition, emotion regulation, understanding of experiences, and recognition of one’s own desires (huy, 1999). emotional competence develops through interpersonal communication, social structure and culture (turner & stets, 2005). thus, some scholars combine these abilities under the term social emotional competence. elias et al. (1997) defined social and emotional competence as the ability to understand, manage and express the social and emotional aspects of life. this ability can help individuals successfully manage their life affairs, such as learning, establishing interpersonal relationships, solving daily problems, and adapting to complex needs in growth and development. osher et al. (2016) suggested that social emotional competence is a series of core competencies related to self-adjustment and social development that children master and apply, including recognizing and managing emotions, setting and achieving positive goals, appreciating others, establishing and maintaining good relationships, and making responsible decisions. at the national level, the british ministry of education defines socialemotional competence as including the five aspects of “self-awareness, managing feelings, motivation, empathy, and social skills” (lendrum & humphrey, 2010). singapore’s ministry of education suggests social-emotional competence is at the core of 21st century skills and goals, describing social emotional competence as “skills for recognizing and managing emotions, developing care for others, making responsible decisions, building positive relationships, and effectively handling challenging situations” (tan et al., 2017). australia also pays attention to the development of students’ social and emotional well-being; its definition includes seven dimensions: overall social and emotional health, psychological flexibility, positive social orientation, positive work orientation, positive school indicators, positive family indicators, and positive community indicators (frydenberg et al., 2017). china’s “social emotional learning and school management improvement project” team proposed that social emotional competence is the ability to acquire knowledge, skills, and attitudes to enable the emotional experience of understanding and managing relationships with themselves, with others, and with the collective; it includes self-awareness and self-management, cognition and management of others, collective cognition and collective management (mao et al., 2018). related organizations have also expounded on the definition of social emotional competence. for example, the american non-profit organization, collaborative for academic, social, and emotional learning (casel), works from a perspective of joint development of human cognition, sociality, and emotion, suggesting that social emotional capabilities specifically include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. the world economic forum (2016) summarized ten social and emotional skills, including four competencies (problem solving/critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration) and six zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1173 character qualities (curiosity, initiative persistence/grit, adaptability, leadership, social and cultural awareness). the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd) defines social and emotional skills as an individual ability consisting of a characteristic quality of individuals facing different situations. the oecd (2015) divides this quality into three categories: 1) the ability to achieve goals, including persistence/perseverance, self-control, and the passion to achieve goals; 2) the ability to collaborate with others, including social interaction, respect, and care; and 3) emotional management capabilities, including self-esteem, optimism, and self-confidence. thus, while the definition of social emotional abilities differs among theoretical foundations and research perspectives, scholars, organizations, countries, and researchers, all definitions emphasize the involvement of an individual’s abilities to manage internal and interpersonal domains. the value of social and emotional capabilities social and emotional abilities are of great significance to individual development and i affect students’ academic and life success. numerous domestic and foreign scholars have conducted research on the value of social and emotional abilities from different perspectives. such research has helped individuals achieve professional success and happiness in life and has promoted the overall ability of individuals to meet the requirements of future social contexts. several studies focus on the impact of social and emotional skills on student academic achievement. social and emotional abilities affect academic performance nearly all empirical studies on social emotional ability have confirmed that social emotional ability has a positive impact on students’ academic performance. durlak et al. (2011) conducted a meta-analysis of the results of the social and emotional learning (sel) program covering 213 schools and 270,034 students from kindergarten to high school. using meta-analysis of the results of the program revealed that compared to control students, students who received the intervention of the sel project had an 11% higher performance (alzahrani et al., 2019). the authors also note that social and emotional abilities have an impact on children’s learning outcomes and their ability to engage in good behavior. elias (2008) studied third grade students from urban ethnic minorities in the united states and showed that the social emotional ability of these minority students had significant predictive ability on their academic performance, with a regression coefficient of 0.619. zhou (2010) and liu (2017) found that, in chinese students, a complex interaction exists between children’s personality, academic performance, and social adjustment. they also found that social and emotional abilities of students, as assessed by parents, can significantly predict student academic performance (regression coefficient = 0.37). liu (2017) found that self-esteem, self-motivation, and emotional percepzhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1174 tion components of the trait emotional intelligence can significantly predict mathematical ability in primary school students. social and emotional abilities affect personal income many empirical studies have shown that cognitive ability has a positive effect on wages and economic growth (hanushek, 2013). the potential explanatory effect of noncognitive abilities on income, independent of cognitive abilities, has also received attention (huang & xie, 2017). heckman (2006) found that non-cognitive abilities not only affect educational decision-making, but also affect an individual’s social performance and professional income in a study of participants in the general educational development (ged) program in the united states. some scholars suggest that non-cognitive skills, like obedience, loyalty and persistence, are more important than cognitive skills, especially in the low-skilled labor markets (bowles & gintis, 2002), such as the service industry (mýtna kureková et al., 2016). other studies have supported this conclusion. adhitya et al. (2019) analyzed data from the fifth indonesia family life survey (ifls), and found that personality characteristics affect job prospects in the labor market. for example, conscientiousness and extroversion had a significant positive effect on job success. responsible people tend to work hard, be productive, punctual, and organized. extroverted individuals were more willing to take on social activities and leadership roles, and this had a positive impact on their careers. succi & canovi (2020) used a questionnaire to compare views of students and employers on the importance of soft skills in different european countries and found that 86% of respondents indicated that they have paid increasing attention to soft skills in the past 5-10 years, and that companies believe soft skills are more important than academic performance of students/graduates. social emotional ability contributes to personal happiness harvard university began a comprehensive longitudinal study in 1938 that has lasted nearly a century. the longitudinal study involves three classes of people, including 268 harvard graduates, 456 urban blue-collar males, and 90 high-iq middle-class women. researchers tracked participants from birth to old age to explore correlates of happiness and longevity. in 2012, the project leader released an adult development prospective report that, combined with the analysis of tracking data in these 814 people for nearly a century, found that happiness is closely related to good interpersonal relationships and an optimistic attitude (vaillant, 2012). other research results also show that personal happiness is closely related to social emotional ability. on the one hand, good social and emotional abilities can continuously and cumulatively affect other areas of an individual’s life, help students better adapt to school life, achieve better academic performance, obtain a higher professional status, and effectively enhance life satisfaction (heckman & kautz, 2012). on the other hand, the level of students’ social and emotional ability is directly related to their future marital status, health status, and moral level. for example, social and emotional abilities zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1175 play an important role in improving health-related outcomes (e.g., obesity, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases), which is beneficial to their health and longevity (oecd, 2015; atkins et al., 2020). perseverance, emotional stability and social skills enable people to better transform ideas into actions, establish positive relationships with family, friends and communities, avoid unhealthy lifestyles and dangerous behaviors, reduce anti-social behaviors, and protects individuals from infringements of aggressive behavior, leading to a greater positive life experience (liu & liang, 2021). oecd research also indicates social and emotional skills have a positive impact on personal well-being and social progress; such skills act by promoting a healthy weight, alleviating depression, reducing problem behaviors, increasing subjective wellbeing, improving life satisfaction, and increasing helpful life behaviors. increased higher education, enhances the ability of individuals to translate intentions into actions, and improves the life prospects of disadvantaged children. at present, most oecd countries and partner economies recognize the need to strengthen the development of students’ social and emotional capabilities. both national and local policy documents of these countries emphasize the importance of enhancing a student’s autonomy, sense of responsibility, and ability to cooperate with others. oecd’s research and promotion of social and emotional capabilities although scholars have reached a basic consensus on the definition and value of social and emotional competence, there seems to be little on how to best measure these skills. based on the casel competency framework, nine social and emotional assessment tools have been identified that can be used for the reference and selection of school districts and schools (wiglesworth, humphrey, kalambouka & lendrum, 2010). a social emotional competence questionnaire (secq) based on the casel theoretical model has been developed that aims to assess children and adolescents (grades 3-12) based on self-reports about themselves and others, and how they respond in home, school and community environments (haggerty et al., 2011; zhou, ee, 2012). the oecd has been measuring the abilities of students since the 1990s using large-scale international education evaluation projects to allow participating countries to examine their own education quality and fairness and to develop efficiency from the perspective of international comparison. this allows countries to stabilize and improve education by monitoring the indicator system and to promote education reform and development. since the beginning of the 21st century, the oecd has included measures of students’ non-cognitive abilities, with the goal of quantifying other aspects of personal development through assessment of students’ social, emotional and other noncognitive abilities. from march 23 to 24, 2014, policy makers, including 11 education ministers and deputy ministers, took part in an oecd informal ministerial meeting on skills for social progress in sao paulo, brazil. they agreed it was necessary to promote development of a “complete child” with a balanced set of cognitive, social and emotional skills zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1176 so that they can better face the challenges of the 21st century (oecd, 2015). on march 10, 2015, the oecd released “skills for social progress: the power of social and emotional skills,” a report that presents the oecd’s comprehensive analysis of the role of emotional skills, and a strategy to improve these skills. the report includes an analysis of the impact of social and emotional skills on individual happiness and social progress (covering all aspects of life, including education, labor market output, health, family life, citizen participation, and life satisfaction). the report draws four important conclusions: 1) sense of responsibility, social skills, and emotional stability are the most important dimensions of social and emotional skills affecting children’s future prospects; 2) early intervention in social and emotional skills can effectively improve skills and reduce education, labor market, and social inequality; 3) within a cultural and linguistic background, social and emotional skills can be reliably assessed; and 4) providing relevant information and formulating guidelines will help educate stakeholders to promote children’s social and emotional development (oecd, 2015). on this basis, the oecd organized and established a social and emotional skills research project team in 2016 to carry out the evaluation of social and emotional skills and to set up a steering committee composed of internationally renowned experts that could provide guidance and attract participating countries and regional representatives. in december 2017, the oecd released the report, “personality matters: relevance and assessment of personality characteristics,” that evaluated the socio-emotional skills of students aged 10-15 years-old in some cities and countries around the world over three years (oecd, 2017). the outcome was an approved monitoring tool of the development of students’ social and emotional skills to explore the impact of personal, family and school characteristics on the development of students’ social and emotional skills. further, the monitoring tool can be used to assess which emotional and social skills best predict students’ later achievements. decision makers and practitioners can then be provided with reliable, effective and internationally comparable information on the development of students’ social and emotional skills. in addition, policies and measures that can be implemented for improvement can be made available. research subjects sses is aimed at students aged 10 years and 15 years. the project team believes that the 10-year-old student group (between 10 years and 3 months to 11 years and 2 months) is able to express personal feelings relatively stable. this earliest age group is in the middle stage of elementary school. the 15-year-old student group (15 years and 3 months to 16 years and 2 months) is in formal education, has not yet undergone vocational education triage, and is done in cooperation with the international student assessment project (pisa) the student groups in middle school are consistent, which is convenient for data comparison. research model zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1177 since goldberg first proposed the “big five” personality factors (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, affinity, and neuroticism) in 1971, these personality factors have been used in large sample research. repeated discovery until it becomes a factor of a personality trait model recognized by the western psychology circle (mueller & plug 2006). the social and emotional competence assessment framework constructed by the oecd is based on the big five personality traits model, and considers five dimensions: 1) task performance (conscientiousness); 2) emotional control (emotional stability); 3) collaboration (affinity); 4) openness; 5) interactions with others (extroversion) (kankaraš, 2017). task performance includes achievement motivation, i.e., setting high standards for oneself and working hard to achieve these standards; self-discipline, i.e., controlling impulse, delaying gratification and maintaining focus; conscientiousness, i.e., fulfilling promises; and perseverance, i.e., persistence and commitment to goals. emotional control includes stress-reduction (effectively adjusting anxiety and coping with pressure); restraint (controlling temper and emotions); optimism (a positive attitude toward individuals and life). interactions with people others includes vitality (staying active throughout the day); decisiveness (controlling behavior); and being kind (willingness to interact with others). collaboration includes empathy (looking at problems from the perspective of others); cooperation (getting along with others); and trust (believing that most people have good intentions). openness includes curiosity (a willingness to learn and explore new things); creativity (generating new ideas or products); and inclusiveness (being open to diverse views). complex skills include self-efficacy (belief in one’s ability to complete tasks and achieve goals); critical thinking (being able to reflect on oneself and base ideas on independent thinking and critical analysis); and metacognition (recognizing and adjusting the thinking process and subjective experience). using the big five personality traits, the oecd selected three to four social and emotional abilities under each dimension, for a total of 19 skills. each skill is described by approximately 10 items, and a likert five-point scale used by survey respondents for each question. after the second round of on-site testing in 2018, the four skills of perseverance, courage, metacognition and critical thinking, which had low reliability and efficiency, were deleted, leaving a final version with 15 skills (figure 1). through surveys of students, parents and teachers, mutual confirmation is used to measure the development level of students’ social and emotional abilities and to relate other variables to the development of social and emotional abilities (chernyshenko et al., 2018). research methods the sses project uses a random stratified sampling method, requiring each participating country or region to randomly select schools first, and then randomly select students who meet the age requirements from within these schools. the sses project requires that each participating country or region select 3,000 10-year-old and 15-year-old students. in addition to the information from these 6000 students, information about their parents, teachers, and schools are also needed because the information collected by the zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1178 figure 1. the five dimensions and 15 sub-competencies in the assessment. sses project includes not only information about students’ social and emotional skills, but also information about their long-term home and school environment. the project team developed four types of questionnaires; one for students and one for each of parents, teachers, and principals closely related to the growth of the students. at the same time, schools provided data on each student’s academic performance and school behavior. triangulation of measures was used to improve objectivity and accuracy in measures of students’ social and emotional abilities (kankaraš et al., 2019). student questionnaires included personal background information, such as student’s learning expectations, ideal jobs, interactions with parents and friends, school life, etc., as well as self-evaluation information on social and emotional skills and behavior. each selected student had a parent or guardian fill out a parent questionnaire, which includes family background information, such as family economic and social status, parent-child interaction information, child-child interaction information, parent’s understanding and practice of social and emotional skills. in addition, parents were asked to evaluate their child’s social and emotional skills. each selected student also had a teacher familiar with him or her fill out the teacher questionnaire. the teacher questionnaire includes background information on the teacher, such as teaching practice, professional development, and the teacher’s understanding and practice of social and emotional skills. the teacher also provided an evaluation of the student’s social and emotional skills. finally, the principal of each selected middle school filled out a principal questionnaire. the principal questionnaire includes information on the community where the school is located, the overall situation of teachers and students, the school’s zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1179 teaching and evaluation policies regarding social and emotional skills, and the organization and management of the school (fang, 2020). after the selection of survey items in 2017, followed by the field test in 2018 and official test results in 2019, the oecd’s formal assessment of social and emotional abilities finally settled on a student questionnaire containing 65 questions (the 15-yearold group has 68 questions). the parent questionnaire contains 53 questions, the teacher questionnaire contains 34 questions and the principal questionnaire contains 32 questions. it is worth noting that after the oecd integrated the data analysis of all participating countries, some items that did not meet measurement standards were deleted for the final form of the test questionnaire (oecd, 2021). after two years of work, on september 7, 2021, the oecd presented the first round of evaluation results of the global social and emotional ability research project. a survey of the social and emotional abilities of chinese adolescents in the international comparative study of social and emotional skills organized by the oecd, 10 cities in 9 countries, including the united states, russia, finland, south korea, canada, italy, portugal, and turkey, participated in the project. china was also a participating country with151 primary and secondary schools in six districts and four county-level cities under the jurisdiction of suzhou city participating in the assessment project, including 3,647 10-year-old students and 3,621 15-year-old students. after comparative analysis of the data, the project team positioned the development level of chinese students’ social and emotional ability development in different age stages in the world, further explored factors affecting the development of chinese students’ social and emotional abilities, and proposed intervention measures. overview of the sses project in china advancement of the sses project is divided into three phases: 2017 is the tool development phase (item trial); 2018 is the field test phase (field test); and 2019 is the official evaluation phase (main study). in april 2018, china formally joined the project, and subsequently carried out translation of various instruction manuals, localization of assessment tools, training of assessors, and training of school coordinators, school sampling, and on-site testing. in november 2018, the china social and emotional ability project team cooperated with the suzhou bureau of education to conduct on-site tests with 1,500 students from 30 primary and secondary schools in 10 districts and counties of suzhou. at the same time, 1,500 students’ parents, 858 teachers and 30 principals filled out a questionnaire survey. from the end of 2018 to the first half of 2019, the project team conducted follow-up surveys, data sorting and classification, and wrote field test survey reports to prepare for the official evaluation in the second half of 2019. sample selection zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1180 in the next formal testing phase, all schools in the ten districts and counties of suzhou participated in sampling, and random sampling was conducted at the levels of schools and students. for school sampling, 76 schools were sampled from 387 primary schools (10-year-old students), and 75 schools were sampled from 88 high schools and vocational schools (15-year-old students). for student sampling, based on the teacherstudent association table provided by the sampled school, 50 students were randomly selected among students enrolled at the school. after these two steps, a total of 7,550 primary and secondary school students from 151 primary and secondary schools had been selected. in the formal testing phase, the overall participation rate of the sampled students was as high as 96.26%, and a total of 7,268 students completed all tests, representing 150,964 elementary and middle school students in suzhou. among the 7,268 students in the final sample, 3,647 (50.2%) were in the 10-year-old group, 3,621 (49.8%) were in the 15-year-old group; 3,838 (52.8%) were boys, 3,417 (47%) were girls, and 13 (0.2%) had unknown gender); 3,447 students (47.4%) were studying in schools in the downtown area, and 2,459 students (33.8%) were studying in schools in counties and towns. there are 1,362 students in rural schools (18.7%). among the 15-year-old students, 2,811 (77.6%) and 810 (22.4%) were enrolled in regular high schools and vocational high schools, respectively. while carrying out the student survey, another 7,136 parents, 3,732 teachers and 151 principals participated in filling out the parent questionnaire, teacher questionnaire and principal questionnaire respectively (zhang et al., 2021). evaluation tools the social and emotional ability evaluation items included four types of evaluation questionnaires: student, parent, teacher and principal questionnaires. among them, the student questionnaire mostly concerns students’ self-assessment of their social and emotional abilities, but also includes items related to the student’s school and family environment. the parent questionnaire includes information about the child’s social and emotional abilities, the child’s growth history, the family environment, and the parents’ social and emotional abilities. the teacher questionnaire collects the teacher’s assessment of the student’s social and emotional abilities and the teacher’s report on the school’s learning environment. the principal’s questionnaire covers the broader social background of the school and its students, and the existing resources and programs at the school aimed at improving the learning environment. the 2019 oecd official assessment of social and emotional ability provided seven online assessment questionnaires at the suzhou assessment site. there were two student questionnaires, one for the 10-year-old group and one for the 15-year-old group. the parent questionnaire for these two age groups is the same. the teacher questionnaire consists of two parts. the first part, completed by teachers of both age groups, includes the teacher questionnaire survey and auxiliary test anchor questions. every participating teacher completed this part. the second part had two versions, one for the 10-year-old group and the other for the 15-year-old group. the teacher was asked to zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1181 complete this part for each student who “he/she knows best.” the main questionnaires for the two age groups are the same (zhang et al., 2021). variable table of influencing factors data analysis also examines factors that affect students’ social and emotional abilities. factors come from the five main categories of background variables, student variables, teacher variables, school variables, and family variables. the relationship between social, family and student variables is also examined, for a total of 30 basic measures, as shown in table 1. china sses test results data analysis results are presented in three parts. the first part uses descriptive statistics to show the overall scores of social and emotional abilities, as well as the big five personality traits and its 12 sub-categories in terms of age, gender, urban and rural areas, and school categories. the second part uses multiple regression analysis to explore the effect of social and emotional abilities of 10-year-old and 15-year-old students on outcome variables, such as personal life and behavior. the third part uses multiple regression analysis to examine the influencing factors of social and emotional abilities, including the effects of background variables, student variables, teacher variables, school variables, and family variables. the development level of chinese students’ social and emotional abilities  task abilities students in the 10-year-old group have higher task ability than those in the 15-year-old group, and the monthly age within the 10-year-old and 15-year-old groups is positively correlated with task ability. within age groups, 10-year-old girls have higher task ability than boys, while the task ability of 15-year-old boys is higher than that of girls. urban students have higher task abilities than rural students (gao et al., 2021).  emotional abilities students in the 10-year-old group generally have higher scores in the emotional regulation dimension than those in the 15-year-old group. students in the 10-year-old group generally believed that they were very optimistic and did a good job of emotional control, but the parents of the 10-year-old group did not agree. contrarily, the 15-year-old students’ self-evaluation scores were lower than the scores from their parents. students in both age groups were below the international average for stress resistance, which also has the lowest score among the 15 abilities. boys perform better than girls overall when it comes to emotional regulation, especially in terms of stress resistance. the performance of students in urban areas is better overall than that of students in rural areas (liu et al., 2021).  collaboration zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1182 table 1. table of variables affecting social and emotional abilities. main variable basic variable background gender; age; socio-economic status (parents' highest education, family possessions, family equipment, family book collection) student sense of security; friendships; good habits of friends; high expectations of friends; extensive social relationships; indoor activity time; online time; outdoor activity time; growth mindset teacher teaching age; educational background; opportunities to participate in socialemotional ability-related training (referred to as "training opportunities"); frequency of participation in social-emotional ability-related training (referred to as "training frequency"); teacher-student relationship; high teacher expectations, etc. school school belonging; school cooperation atmosphere; school competition atmosphere; campus bullying; extracurricular activities, etc. family parenting style (understanding father/understanding mother, punitive father/punitive mother); parent-child issues; high expectations of parents the students in suzhou, china self-report collaboration as quite high, especially empathy, trust, and cooperation abilities, which are higher than the international average. the self-evaluation score of the 10-year-old group is significantly higher than that of the 15year-old group, while the evaluation scores of parents and teachers of the two age groups are relatively close. the collaboration ability of female students in the 10-yearold group is higher than that of boys, while in the 15-year-old group, boy collaboration scores are higher than that of girls. in addition, students in central urban areas are generally better than rural students in collaboration ability (tang et al., 2021).  openness for the average of the three sub-categories of openness (tolerance, curiosity, and creativity), the self-evaluation of suzhou students is higher than the international average. in contrast, the 15-year-old group’s self-evaluation is lower than that of the 10-year-old group, and boys’ self-evaluation is higher than that of girls, especially in terms of creativity. this gap in creativity scores between boys and girls is even larger in the 15-yearold group. the openness of students in central urban schools is significantly higher than that of rural students, but the effect size is not large (shao et al., 2021).  communication ability the overall score of suzhou students in communication ability is higher than the world average, indicating that the confidence of suzhou students in themselves is higher than the international average. the difference in self-evaluation of communication ability between students in the 10-year-old group and the 15-year-old group is relatively large, while the gap in parental evaluation for the two age groups is relatively small. there are also significant differences in the communication abilities of students of different gender groups. girls in the 10-year-old group show significantly higher level of sociability and courageousness than the boys. the vitality of boys in the 10-year-old group and 15year-old group are significantly higher than that of girls. student communicative ability zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1183 in central urban schools is higher than that in county and rural areas. there is no significant difference in the communication ability between ordinary high school and vocational high school students (huang et al., 2021). the scores of students in all 15 social and emotional abilities are slightly higher in the 10-year-old group than in the 15-year-old group (the standard deviation of the 10year-old group is 83.68-124.40, and the standard deviation of the 15-year-old group is 73.00-91.94). within the two age groups, no significant gender differences are present in most social and emotional abilities. however, among the 10-year-old students, girls scored higher in most social and emotional abilities, especially in empathy, cooperation, rapport, perseverance and tolerance, whereas among the 15-year-old students. with the exception of tolerance, boys scored higher than girls in most social and emotional abilities. the social and emotional abilities of most students are not significantly affected by the school’s socioeconomic level for either age group. however, a general trend exists for the scores of social and emotional abilities of students from schools with high socioeconomic levels to be slightly higher than those of students from schools with low and medium socioeconomic areas. students in ordinary high schools and vocational high schools have no significant differences in social and emotional abilities, but students in ordinary high schools generally score slightly higher in tolerance, curiosity, and creativity. factors affecting the development of chinese students’ social and emotional abilities elucidating the factors that affect the development of chinese students’ social and emotional abilities is an important goal of the evaluation project. in this regard, china’s assessment project starts with the analysis of social background, summarizes the relationship between social and emotional abilities and various influencing factors from background variables, individual student factors, family factors and school factors, and collects students’ non-intellectual data through field investigations. the data on development level are then placed in the international environment for horizontal comparison, and finally specific educational intervention measures are proposed. in the evaluation report of task ability, family education and school education have a great influence on students’ task ability. among them, in family education, different types of parents have different effects on students’ task ability. understanding mothers have a stable and positive influence on the task ability of students in both age groups, while the influence of punitive parents is more complicated. punitive mothers in the 10-year-old group have a positive effect on students’ task ability, but punitive fathers have a negative effect on perseverance. in the 15-year-old group, punitive fathers have a positive influence on students’ task ability and punitive mothers have a negative effect on students’ self-control and responsibility. in school education, teacher-student relationship, school belonging, and school cooperation atmosphere have the greatest impact on students’ task abilities, reflecting the key role of school environment in the formation of students’ responsibility levels (gao et al., 2021). zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1184 of the many factors that affect emotional ability, more than 30 variables in the five categories of background, student, teacher, school, and family all have consistent and significant effects on students’ emotional regulation abilities, and most of these are positive effects. in background variables, the higher the parents’ educational background and the greater the number of family possessions and book collections, the better the students’ emotional regulation ability. in student variables, security, friend relationships, outdoor activity time and growth-oriented thinking have a significant positive impact on emotional regulation, while online time has a significant negative impact on emotional regulation. in teacher variables, the quality of the teacher-student relationship is positively correlated with a student’s emotional regulation, and teachers’ participation in social and emotional ability cultivation training helps the students’ ability development. in school variables, the three variables of school atmosphere of cooperation, extra-school activities and especially, the sense of belonging to school significantly increase development of students’ abilities. in family variables, understanding parents, especially understanding fathers, have a positive effect on the development of children’s emotional regulation ability, while parent-child problems have a negative effect on ability development (liu et al., 2021). in the analysis of factors affecting collaboration ability, the 30 scales can be divided into positive and negative. most are positive factors, including family possessions, family collection of books, sense of security, friendship, good friends, indoor activity time, outdoor activity time, understanding mothers, understanding fathers, high expectations of parents, teacher-student relationship, school belonging, school atmosphere of cooperation, and off-campus activities. negative factors for collaboration include online time, parent-child problems (tang et al., 2021). the openness of students is also affected by student, teacher, school and family factors. for background variables, parents’ highest education level, family possessions, and family’s collection of books have a significant positive impact on the openness of both 10-year-old and 15-year-old groups. among student variables, security, friendship, good habits, outdoor activities, timeand growth-oriented thinking have a significant positive impact on the openness of students. one age group difference is that “widespread social friendship” has a negative impact on creativity in 10-year-old students, while it has a positive impact on creativity in 15-year-old students. teacher education and teacher-student relationship have a significant positive impact on openness for both groups of students. among school variables, the sense of belonging to school, school atmosphere of cooperation, school atmosphere of competition, and off-campus activities all have significant positive effects on openness. among family variables, parenting style and parental expectations have a significant impact on students’ openness. students in both age groups with understanding parents have a greater openness. in the 10year-old group, punitive mothers also have a positive impact on students’ openness. parent-child difficulties have a significant negative impact on openness (shao et al., 2021). students’ communicative ability is also affected by numerous variables. in student variables, sense of security, friendships, friends with good habits and personal outzhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1185 door activity time significantly increase communication abilities of 10-year-old and 15year-old students, while time spent online has a significant negative effect on the communication ability of students. the teacher-student relationship has a significant positive effect on the communication ability of both 10 and 15-year-old students. the sense of belonging to school and extracurricular activities significantly affect students’ communicative ability in a positive way. parental rearing styles have a significant positive impact, while parent-child problems have a significant negative impact, on students’ communication skills (huang et al., 2021). from the general analysis results, the sense of belonging to school, cooperative learning atmosphere, friendships, and sense of security are positively correlated with the social and emotional abilities of most students. high scores in school belonging are closely related to social and emotional abilities. parent-child issues and greater participation in daily online activities are negatively correlated with all social and emotional abilities. the relationship between students’ social and emotional abilities and personal life and behavior in addition to the basic level assessment, the chinese assessment project team analyzed the correlation between 15 social and emotional abilities and the personal life characteristics and behavioral performance of students in the 10-year-old and 15-year-old groups. characteristics included academic performance (language, mathematics and art), psychological well-being (current psychological well-being, life satisfaction and exam anxiety), and involved in classroom activities, smoking and 10 other behavioral indicators. life satisfaction, current psychological well-being, and exam anxiety are similarly affected by a student’s age and gender. older students, especially older girls, showed lower life satisfaction and lower current psychological well-being, and higher test anxiety. in terms of related abilities, optimism is most closely related to life satisfaction and current psychological well-being, followed by vitality and trust. exam anxiety is most influenced by anti-stress and optimism abilities of students (yuan et al., 2021). to measure behavior performance, the project team set up 10 and 14 behavior indicators in the questionnaire surveys of students, parents, and teachers for each age group, such as whether they are “honest” and “do housework,” or “have difficulty concentrating.” for the 15-year-old age group, additional behavior indicators were included, such as “handling the extra change”, “playing truant”, “and smoking” and “drinking.” all 15 social and emotional abilities are negatively correlated with students’ negative behaviors. for example, inattention and insomnia are negatively correlated with most social and emotional abilities. especially in the 15-year-old group, all 15 social and emotional abilities are weakly correlated with bad behaviors such as absenteeism, smoking, and drinking, while positive behavior indicators, such as observing rules and participating in classroom activities, have moderate to strong correlations with most social and emotional abilities (yuan et al., 2021). zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1186 conclusions and enlightenment china has begun to pay attention to improving students’ non-cognitive abilities such as collaboration and emotional abilities. in june 2013, the ministry of education issued “opinions of the ministry of education on promoting the reform of comprehensive evaluation of education quality in primary and secondary schools,” which noted that it is necessary to “effectively reverse the tendency of evaluating the quality of primary and secondary schools solely based on students’ academic test scores and school enrollment rates, and promote the overall development of students.” healthy growth, with key indicators such as personality quality, emotional behavior control, interpersonal communication and curiosity and thirst for knowledge, included in the annex “comprehensive evaluation index framework for primary and secondary education quality (trial)” are all social and emotional skills. the main components of the survey have strong similarities with the corresponding indicators of the oecd’s social and emotional skills (ministry of education of china, 2013). in september 2016, the research report, “core competence of chinese student development,” was released. it clearly stated that students should have the necessary qualities and key abilities to adapt to lifelong learning and lifelong development. these key abilities are divided into three aspects: cultural foundation, independent development, and social participation. it is comprehensively expressed as the six qualities of humanistic background, scientific spirit, learning to learn, healthy living, responsibility, and practical innovation, which are further refined into 18 basic qualities such as humanistic feelings, aesthetic appeal, rational thinking, social responsibility, national identity, and labor awareness. in the document, non-cognitive ability is introduced into pedagogy research and education evaluation system, and development of non-cognitive abilities in young people is emphasized in basic education in china (core literacy research group, 2016). however, according to the latest data from the international student assessment project (pisa) released in december 2019, although chinese teenagers ranked first in the world in the three cognitive abilities tests of reading, mathematics and science, they showed a low sense of belonging to the school, low levels of satisfaction with schools, lack of autonomy and self-consciousness for self-planning (du, 2019), there is still much room for improvement in the non-cognitive abilities of chinese students (zhang, 2020). the evaluation of social and emotional abilities carried out this time is a response to china’s long-standing problems of emphasizing cognitive abilities and neglecting non-cognitive abilities: the cultivation of chinese youth’s social and emotional abilities is of great significance to the promotion of china’s educational reform. this is not only the presentation of the sses evaluation results, but also some enlightenment based on the analysis of the china social and emotional ability evaluation report. social and emotional abilities can be improved with intervention zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1187 the measurement results of social emotional skills only illustrate a state, and ultimately point to specific intervention methods. social and emotional abilities are different from cognitive abilities, and they are more malleable. from the perspective of life course, adolescents are very sensitive to external interventions from family, school, etc. some important non-cognitive abilities such as achievement motivation, self-discipline and sense of responsibility are moldable in the adolescence. during this period, through effective educational intervention and systematic learning, the development of children’s social and emotional abilities can be promoted, and the children’s happiness and achievement motivation can be improved. the “perry preschool education project” is the best example of success with non-cognitive interventions. the project included 123 children aged 3 to 4-years with an intellectual development level below 85 points in a comparative experiment that conducted educational interventions on social and emotional abilities of 58 children in the experimental group (children were randomly assigned to experimental or control group), teaching them how to be friendly with others and conducting weekly home visits to improve the parent-child relationship; the remaining 65 children in the control group received no educational intervention. subsequently, the two groups of children were followed up until they reached adulthood. the study found that educational intervention had no impact on the cognitive abilities of these children, but greatly improved their social and emotional abilities, leading them to have happier marriages, more harmonious family relationships, better health, a higher quality of life and lower crime rates (berrueta-clement, 1984). in china, in 2012, the department of teacher work of the ministry of education of china and unicef cooperated on the “social and emotional learning and school management improvement project.” the project took place in 250 project schools in five provinces (cities, districts) in western china and implemented pilot projects aimed at improving students’ social and emotional abilities. through the cooperation of school, family and community education, china is promoting the social and emotional learning of children and young people, so that students can learn self-esteem and self-management, will have social awareness and good interpersonal communication skills, can understand the emotions of others and have empathy, can form positive interpersonal relationships and creatively solve problems and can make responsible decisions in a variety of different situations (mao et al., 2018). the project is an overall intervention that includes thematic courses, teaching reforms, changes in the school environment, and home-school cooperation. further, the project provides an intervention template that can be used as a reference for improving the social and emotional abilities of chinese young people. in 2018, the china education innovation research institute of beijing normal university released the “21st century core literacy 5c model research report” (in chinese), which listed communication and cooperation as one of the five core literacy components of young people in the 21st century. within this component, communication and teamwork focused on reflecting individual social skills, communication emphasized respect, understanding, empathy and cooperation emphasized the necessity of zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1188 persistence and compromise under the premise of achieving common goals (xu et al., 2020; kang et al., 2020). driven by that report, the research and intervention practice for improving chinese adolescents’ non-cognitive abilities has been further developed. cultivation of students’ social and emotional abilities is a systematic project the results of the sses evaluation point to four aspects in the cultivation of social and emotional abilities: students, parents, teachers and schools. many successful intervention programs in the past have shown the same characteristics. first, establish a good, close and supportive relationship between parents, teachers and children, and provide guidance. second, ensure home, school, and workplace consistency with the quality of the community’s learning environment. third, provide skills training for children and teachers using orderly, active, focused and clear learning practices. fourth, establish a connection project between children and adolescents, and ensure previous inputs are tracked and supplemented (oecd, 2015). the cultivation of social and emotional abilities must be regarded as an ecosystem, with multiple levels including students, teachers, parents, and communities. at the nation level, many countries incorporate social and emotional skills learning along with academic skills learning into their education policies. schools should be encouraged to adjust their curricula, focusing on character education and relationship education. for example, since the united states congress approved the “partnership in character education program” in 1994, funding has been provided to state and local educational institutions to support the development of character education (us department of education, 2005). the same is true in south korea; in the national curriculum revised in 2009, creativity and character education were the focus of reform, and “creative experience learning activities” were introduced to strengthen students’ creativity and character education in primary and secondary school curricula (national youth policy institution, 2009). in 2019, the united kingdom’s department of education issued a statutory guideline on relationship education, requiring that relationship education and health education is included in the compulsory courses of primary and secondary schools starting from september 2020, to help students be adequately prepared for future life (uk department for education, 2019). in recent years, china has gradually realized the importance of non-cognitive abilities in curriculum reform and has promoted the cultivation of non-cognitive abilities, focusing on the training and assessment of students’ non-cognitive abilities in terms of curriculum and evaluation. in this way, the education system pays attention to well-rounded development of students. in addition, the development of social and emotional abilities must be synergetic. the oecd evaluation results show that schools, teachers, families, and communities all play an important role in improving the social and emotional capabilities of individuals. methods that can improve social and emotional skills include optimizing the family, school and community environments, creating a family atmosphere that is conducive zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1189 to improving social and emotional abilities, enhancing students’ sense of belonging to the school, improving teacher training regarding social and emotional abilities. the teachers’ own social and emotional abilities can be used to directly influence students, constructing a new type of teacher-student relationship. acknowledging the subjectivity of families, communities, and students, respecting the wishes of students, paying attention to the emotions of stakeholders, forming a joint force for education, and striving to create an ecosystem full of emotional care are all further ways in which social and emotional skills might be improved. the evaluation of social and emotional abilities requires more localized measurement indicators as a soft skill, social and emotional abilities cannot be measured through traditional academic level tests in the same way as cognitive abilities, but instead rely mostly on self-reporting and observer reporting methods. the self-reporting method is the subjective report of emotional cognition, feeling and experience from the perspective of the experience. to avoid the subjectivity of a single perspective, such data are typically confirmed using other observers’ reports. another method of evaluation is to base evaluation on a specific theoretical model, determining the dimensions and indicators of evaluation, formulating evaluation tool scales, collecting data on students’ social and emotional behavior, and evaluating students’ social and emotional abilities through experiments and data. social and emotional abilities attach importance to performance-based and strengths-based evaluations and focus on students’ strengths and growth thinking. the method used in the sses test is to build an evaluation dimension based on the big five personality traits model. at the same time, it absorbs the evidence from the previous methods. in addition to students, the sses collects relevant questionnaire information from parents, teachers, and schools, providing a check of data to ensure objective and accurate evaluation results. before now, limited by a lack of evaluation methods, the effectiveness of social and emotional abilities has not been effectively tested. although some domestic scholars have tried to use foreign verified evaluation tools, such as the east asia-pacific early child development scales (eap-ecds) developed by the asia-pacific early childhood network (rao et al., 2014)and the caregiver-reported early development index (credi) for children aged 0-3 years developed by professor dana charles mccoy of harvard university in the united states(mccoy et al., 2018）. the credi scales evaluate all aspects of child development and were introduced to china (zhang, et al 2018), but due to the differences between chinese and western cultural backgrounds and educational systems, the effectiveness of its evaluation has been questioned. in the context of cultivating social and emotional abilities to promote the overall development of students, a lack of evaluation tools are a key factor restricting development of social and emotional abilities in our country. therefore, it is urgent to build chinese localized evaluation indicators (zhang & liu, 2021). although the sses test still uses the interzhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1190 national measurement tools provided by the oecd, in terms of specific factors, more consideration is given to localization, and the design of the questionnaire can be better adapted by participating countries. each participating country can add or modify questionnaire items. for example, in the chinese test, the socio-economic status variables are not directly provided in the oecd youth social and emotional ability research database. china lists the highest education level of parents, family possessions, family equipment, and family book collection. related basic variables are incorporated into background variables to consider the impact of background factors of chinese families on students’ social and emotional abilities. although we agree with the results of the sses test, based on the representativeness and objectivity of the test results, we still have a couple of reservations about the sses test. first, in terms of sample selection, can a sample of a city accurately represent all chinese youth? second, do international measurement tools suit chinese students in a different cultural context? can china build up localized evaluation indicators of measurement tools to promote the overall development of its students? in summary, the construction of china’s social and emotional ability measurement indicators requires the joint efforts of researchers in 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(2010). the relations of temperamental effortful control and anger/frustration to chinese children’s academic achievement and social adjustment: a longitudinal study. journal of educational psychology, 102(1): 180. doi: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a001590 8 https://en.unesco.org/events/social-and-emotional-skills-and-education-2030-agenda https://en.unesco.org/events/social-and-emotional-skills-and-education-2030-agenda https://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/character/brochure.html https://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/character/brochure.html https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067424 https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067424 https://doi.org/10.1080/02667361003768526 https://www.weforum.org/reports/new-vision-for-education-fostering-social-and-emotional-learning-through-technology https://www.weforum.org/reports/new-vision-for-education-fostering-social-and-emotional-learning-through-technology https://www.weforum.org/reports/new-vision-for-education-fostering-social-and-emotional-learning-through-technology http://hdl.voced.edu.au/10707/443447 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.02.008 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.02.008 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.09.001 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.09.001 https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9mmuwa27io1wu0chnct3ila https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9mmuwa27io1wu0chnct3ila https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9mmuwa27io1wu0chnct3ila https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9mmuwa27io1wu0chnct3ila https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9mmuwa27io1wu0chnct3ila https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=cjfd&dbname=cjfdlast2021&filename=zjyx202102012&uniplatform=nzkpt&v=gjzpcd%25mmd2ffp31nys5nyy7ypvriigpgq0apwzrb%25mmd2bmfhf9mmuwa27io1wu0chnct3ila https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.09.007 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.09.007 https://news.ruc.edu.cn/archives/282383 https://doi.org/10.3760/cma.j.issn.0578-1310.2018.02.002 https://doi.org/10.3760/cma.j.issn.0578-1310.2018.02.002 https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/6140 https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/6140 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0015908 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/a0015908 zhao et al. china report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the oecd. bece, vol.9, no. 1, 2021 1195 received: 18 september 2021 revised: 22 september 2021 accepted: 23 september 2021 review-longjunzhou-bece_title_sep2021 review-longjunzhou--bece_maintextsep2021 bece. newsletter vol.11, no.2, 2022 1535 effects of exercise intervention on child mental health by yan, j., qian, k. j., tao, b. l., zhang, w, j., zhong, b. b., & jiang, y. y. correspondence to: jun yan, college of physical education, yangzhou university, china. e-mail: yanjun@yzu.edu.cn ublished in sports and science, this study conducted a 12-week experiment on 169 primary school students, to examine the effects of exercise intervention on child physical self-esteem (physical self-esteem is an important part of overall self-esteem and the earliest developed component of self-consciousness, involving the individual’s views and evaluations on their own appearance, physique, physical ability, etc.), self-concept, and mental health, as well as the mediating role of physical self-esteem and self-concept in the influence of exercise intervention on child mental health. the findings of the study include:  according to data analysis, exercise intervention has a positive impact on child physical health, self-concept, and mental health. child physical self-esteem and self-concept are significantly and positively correlated with child mental health, so is child selfconcept to child mental health.  as per mediating effect analysis, total effect of exercise intervention on child mental health is 0.281; the path coefficients of exercise intervention to physical self-esteem, physical self-esteem to mental health, exercise intervention to self-concept, self-concept to mental health, and physical self-esteem to self-concept is 0.149, 0.394, 0.175, 0.517, and 0.280, respectively. all the path coefficients reach the significant level.  the specific components of mediating path are displayed as follows: (1) indirect path (exercise intervention → physical selfesteem → mental health); (2) indirect path (exercise intervention → self-concept → mental health); (3) indirect path (exercise intervention → physical self-esteem → self-concept → mental health). the effect sizes of the three paths are 0.059, 0.091, and 0.021, accounting for 21%, 32.38%, and 7.47% of the total effect, respectively. the mediating effects of all three paths reach significant levels. p mailto:yanjun@yzu.edu.cn vol.11, no.2, 2022 1536 the study drew the following conclusions: (1) exercise intervention significantly promotes child physical self-esteem, self-concept, and mental health. it imposes a direct effect on child mental health; the longer children exercise, the better their mental health. (2) exercise intervention affects children’s mental health through the mediating role of physical self-esteem and self-concept; that is, the longer the children’s physical exercise, the higher the levels of their physical self-esteem and self-concept, which in turn, raise their mental health levels. source: sports & science, 2022; 43(3):89-96. bece. newsletter vol.14, no.2, 2023 1780 a meta-analysis of the relationship between perceived social support and student academic achievement: the mediating role of school engagement by wu, j., fu, h., & zhang, y. correspondence to: hailun fu, shandong normal university, shandong, china. e-mail: f_hailun@163.com cademic achievement is a crucial indicator of students’ cognitive ability and learning outcomes and is influenced by factors such as perceived social support and student school engagement. prior studies have addressed the joint effects of the two factors on student academic achievement. nevertheless, no specific analysis has been conducted on the relationship between perceived social support and student academic performance or potential mediating and moderating effects on this relationship. this meta-analysis included 78 effect sizes extracted from 41 studies and examined their validity and the mediating effect of student school engagement as well as other relevant moderating effects. research findings indicate that:  perceived social support has a positive effect on student academic achievement, despite the effect size being modest. the correlation between overall perceived social support and student academic performance is stronger than that between perceived teacher support, parental support, peer support and student academic achievement, respectively. in addition, perceived social support and its above subdivisions significantly and positively predict student school engagement, with a greater effect on student school engagement than on student academic achievement.  the academic phase can only moderate the relation between the perceived teacher support and student academic performance, while academic achievement indicators can moderate the relations of perceived social support and its subdivisions with student academic achievement. economic conditions and cultural background have no significant moderating effect on the relationships of perceived social support and its subdivisions with student academic performance.  the direct influences of perceived social support and its subdivisions on student academic achievement are all significantly positive, which are partially mediated by student school engagement. this partial mediating effect is remarkable among middle school students, but insignificant among high school students. this study drew on the meta-analysis structural equation model theory and employed the web masem application to test the mediating effect of student school engagement, which is the first experiment of the application. the experiment provides educators with scientific evidence and novel pera mailto:f_hailun@163.com vol.14, no.2, 2023 1781 spectives for rational considerations of the relationship between social resources and student academic development and for deeper explorations of effective educational paths to improving student academic achievement. source: advances in psychological science, 2023; 31(4):552-569. the “theatre effect” of shadow education: a study based on data from china education panel survey haiping xue, dancheng xu capital normal university, beijing 100089, china abstract: based on data from the china education panel survey in the academic years of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015, this article sought to investigate whether shadow education can yield the “theater effect” and whether the “theater effect” of shadow education is heterogeneous between families of different socio-economic status as well as between urban and rural families, using the hierarchical linear bernoulli model. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 13(2):1709-1713. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar038 how to cite: xue, h., & xu, d. (2023). the “theatre effect” of shadow education: a study based on data from china education panel survey. best evidence in chinese education, 13(2):1709-1713. keywords: shadow education, theatre effect in education, peer effects xue & xu. (beijing). the “theatre effect” of shadow education. bece, vol.13, no.2, 2022 1710 correspondence to: haiping xue, capital normal university, beijing 100089, china. e-mail: xuehaiping_416@163.com conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:xuehaiping_416@163.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ xue & xu. (beijing). the “theatre effect” of shadow education. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1711 introduction when a student successfully improves his/her academic achievements with the help of shadow education, his/her classmates and their parents will follow suit and join in afterschool supplementary tutoring. an analogy is made between this phenomenon and the scenario in the theatre where if some viewers stand up from their seats to get better view, those sitting right behind will stand up too, and eventually all those sitting behind them will rise. this is how the term “theatre effect in education” was coined. this study established its theoretical framework based on the reference group theory and the effectively maintained inequality (emi) theory. data from the china education panel survey (ceps) in the academic years of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 were utilized to investigate whether shadow education can produce the “theater effect” and the differences in the “theater effect” of shadow education between families of different socioeconomic status (ses) as well as between urban and rural families. the hierarchical linear bernoulli model was used in the analysis. in addition, the lag phase of shadow education participation rates of class and school peers was incorporated in the regression model to test the robustness of the “theatre effect” of shadow education. research hypotheses in this study, classmates and schoolmates were treated as the reference group of the individual student. a reference group is typically used by an individual as a standard for evaluating themselves and their behaviors and plays the role of “norm-setter”. the individual student has the most communication with their classmates during the school days. classmates play the major role of norm-setting of the reference group. therefore, hypothesis one (h1) was proposed: the higher the shadow education participation rate of class and school peers, the greater the probability of the individual student participating in shadow education, and class peers pose a greater influence on individual’s participation in supplementary tutoring than schoolmates. families of middle ses are typically more engaged in the educational competition, so more likely to participate in shadow education due to the peer effects. hence, suggested were hypothesis two (h2): the higher the shadow education participation rate of classmates and schoolmates, the more likely it is that students with parents of the middle occupation level will participate in shadow education; and hypothesis three (h3): the higher the shadow education participation rates of classmates or schoolmates, the greater the probability that students from middle-income families will participate in offcampus supplementary tutoring. urban parents and students are more ready to make decisions about participating in shadow education, because they have more chances to be influenced by their peers due to their constant interactions. thus, hypothesis four (h4) was proposed: classmates’ or schoolmates’ shadow education participation has a greater effect on urban students’ participation in after-school tutoring than that of rural students, that is, there is heterogeneity between the class or school peer effects on urban and rural students’ participation in shadow education. xue & xu. (beijing). the “theatre effect” of shadow education. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1712 data sources and variables data sources this study sourced data from ceps, which set the 2013-2014 academic year as the baseline and the grade 7 and grade 9 in that year as the initial points of investigation. a follow-up survey was conducted to gather information for the 2014-2015 academic year. using multi-stage probability-proportional-to-size sampling (pps), the study randomly selected 28 county-level regions as investigation sites, from which 483 classes from 112 schools were randomly sampled. all students from the sampled classes were included as research subjects. the samples for the two academic years were made up of 14376 and 6726 students, respectively. variables  the independent variable: participating in shadow education or not.  dependent variables: the shadow education participation rate of class peers and that of school peers.  control variables: individual-, family-, and school-related factors that may influence student shadow education participation. research methods null model the total difference in the shadow education participation rate was decomposed into individual and school levels in order to examine whether there are significant gaps in student shadow education participation rate between schools. full model based on the zero model, the full model was constructed by incorporating studentand school-related variables to examine their influences on students’ decisions on shadow education engagement. conclusions according to the descriptive statistics, in the 2013-2014 academic year, 47% of junior secondary school students engaged in shadow education, and the shadow education participation rates of students’ class and school peers were both 47%; in the 2014-2015 academic year, 50% of students participated in shadow education, and the shadow education participation rates of students’ class and school peers were 46%. research findings based on the hierarchical linear bernoulli model show that: (i) the “theater effect” exists in shadow education, which is supported by the fact that the shadow education participation rates of class and school peers have robust and significant positive effects xue & xu. (beijing). the “theatre effect” of shadow education. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1713 on students’ participation in after-school tutoring; (ii) the “theater effect” of shadow education of classmates has a greater impact than that of schoolmates, which is evidenced by the analysis result that the coefficient of the variable of the shadow education participation rate of class peers is greater than that of shadow education participation rate of school peers; (iii) the “theater effect” of shadow education is heterogeneous among families of distinct ses, with the strongest impact on students from families of middle ses; (iv) the “theatre effect” of shadow education varies between urban and rural families, with more significant influences on urban students than on their rural counterparts. the chinese version of this article has been published in china economics of education review, 2022, 7(1):75-98. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 薛海平 & 徐丹诚. 影子教育的剧场效应研究—基于中国教育追踪调查数据分析. 教育经济评论, 2022, 7(1):75-98. received: 14 january 2023 revised: 17 february 2023 accepted: 22 february 2023 ar3-haipingxue-bece_titlemarch_2023 ar3-haipingxue-bece_maintextmarch2023 bece. newsletter bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1346 effects of problem-based learning on student problem-solving skills by wang, h. j., cao, l., & he, m. z. correspondence to: cao, l., china west normal university, china. e-mail： caolei115@163.com o explore the effect of problem-based learning on student problemsolving skills, this study conducted a meta-analysis of 34 experimental or quasi-experimental studies in china and other countries and tried to answer the following questions: 1) compared with traditional teaching methods, does problem-based learning affect student problem-solving skills more significantly? 2) in problem-based learning, how do the education levels, teaching periods, disciplines, teaching settings, and assessment tools impact student problem-solving skills? the results of the study: the random effect model is used to aggregate the effect indicators, and the combined effect size of problem-based learning on student problemsolving skills is 0.66, the 95% confidence interval is 0.46 0.87, and p < 0.05, indicating that the research has reached a statistically significant level, and that the overall effect of problem-based learning on student problem-solving skills is at a moderately high level. detailed analyses: as students at different education levels have different cognitive characteristics, this study analyzes four groups of students from elementary school, junior secondary school, senior secondary school, and university, and finds that the combined effect size is 0.47, 0.84, 1.27, and 0.45 for elementary school, junior secondary school, senior secondary school, and university students respectively. the combined effect values at different education levels are all positive, indicating that problem-based learning has a positive impact on students at all stages. the effect is the most significant on senior secondary school students, and weaker on elementary school and university students and above. in terms of education periods, the effect size is 0.62, 1.01, and 0.59 for 0-2 months, 2-4 months, and more than 4 months respectively. problembased learning has a positive effect on student’s problem-solving skills in all the three periods. the effect is most remarkable when the education period is t mailto:caolei115@163.com bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1347 controlled in 2-4 months, and the effect is relatively weak in 0-2 months or for more than 4 months. from the perspective of disciplines, the effect size is 1.18 for mathematics, 1.05 for nursing, 0.78 for chemistry, 0.76 for sports, 0.57 for physics, 0.51 for science, 0.48 for robots, 0.28 for education, and 0.42 for others, indicating that problem-based learning has the most significant positive effect in mathematics, physics, chemistry, nursing, and sports, while its effect in education and other subjects is relatively weak. this study involves three types of teaching settings, that is, ordinary classrooms, laboratories, mixed indoor and outdoor locations. the combined effect size is 0.72 in ordinary classrooms, the 0.44 in laboratories, and 0.67 in mixed indoor and outdoor locations. it shows that the implementation of problem-based learning in ordinary classrooms has the greatest positive effect on students' problem-solving skills. from the perspective of assessment tools, the study divides the literature sample into three categories by questionnaire method, self-diagnostic tests, and teacher-made objective assessments. the effect size is 0.91, 0.38 and 0.82 respectively. a student problem-solving skill has nothing to do with assessment tools, but the results obtained by different assessment tools differ. based on analysis results, the research puts forward the following suggestions: i) design problem-based learning according to students’ cognitive characteristics at different education levels. ii) optimize the application of problem-based learning in various disciplines, iii) incorporate virtual technology and diversify the teaching settings. iv) integrate multiple assessment methods and tools. source: open education research, 2021; 27(5):91-98. who teaches in rural schools in underdeveloped areas? an investigation based on a survey of 5,554 teachers from 117 towns in h province in wuling mountains zone, china tianjiao zhang, 1 weiping wang, 2 li yi 3 1. party school of shanghai xuhui district committee of c. p. c., shanghai 200030, china 2. jingxiangyi education institute, hangzhou normal university, hangzhou 310000, zhejiang, china 3. hunan first normal university, changsha 410000, hunan, china abstract. teacher shortage is a major hindrance to china’s rural education growth in underdeveloped areas, as well as one of the main causes of educational injustice. we conducted a survey of 5,554 teachers from 117 towns in h province in the wuling mountains zone to investigate the issue of rural school teacher supply. from geographical, emotional, and institutional perspectives, we used a polynomial logit model to examine the validity of the “hometown effects” hypothesis. the findings showed that hometown effects exist in china in all three dimensions. the institutional hometown effects are the most pronounced; when compared to open recruitment, teachers sourced through teacher supply augmentation programs (such as the secondary normal graduates program, special position program, and targeted position program) are more likely to teach in rural schools, particularly more disadvantaged village primary schools or teaching sites. china’s policy of increasing teacher supply has had a considerable positive influence on rural school staffing. students from rural areas make better teacher candidates; feelings for hometowns should be encouraged among normal school or university students in pre-service education; and the implementation of teacher support policies should be emphasized to retain rural teachers and improve their teaching quality. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(1):1429-1448. zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no1, 2022 1430 doi: 10.15354/bece.22.or060. how to cite: zhang, t., wang, w., & yi, l. (2022). who teaches in rural schools in underdeveloped areas? an investigation based on a survey of 5,554 teachers from 117 towns in h province in wuling mountains zone, china. best evidence in chinese education, 11(1):1429-1448. keywords: rural teachers, hometown effects, teacher supply augmentation policy, teacher shortage about the authors: weiping wang, hangzhou normal university, hangzhou 310000, china. e-mail: weipingzhang@hznu.edu.cn li yi, hunan first normal university, changsha 410000, china. e-mail: lily_yi2011@163.com correspondence to: tianjiao zhang, party school of shanghai xuhui district committee of c. p. c., shanghai 200030, china. e-mail: tjzhang17@fudan.edu.cn funding: this study is supported by 1) the project of research on the strategies for improving basic education after-school service quality in the context of double reduction policy, sponsored by party school of shanghai committee of c. p. c. (school of administration) (2021shb015); 2) the project of research on the strategies for enhancing the it-supported instruction skills of local public-funded normal school students in the context of new normal education, sponsored by hunan provincial department of education (20c0411). conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:weipingzhang@hznu.edu.cn mailto:lily_yi2011@163.com mailto:tjzhang17@fudan.edu.cn zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1431 introduction as per the teacher-to-class ratios in compulsory education schools released in the report on china’s rural education development 2019, china’s rural schools are experiencing a serious teacher shortage (wu & qin, 2019). south reviews (2021) published a report entitled “china needs more rural teachers” in 2021, which emphasized the critical issue of rural teacher shortage. it was widely shared on social media sites like phoenix and tencent, and it drew a lot of attention and discussion. rural teachers face a variety of issues, including low pay, insufficient social support, limited professional development, a lack of incentive mechanisms, a higher number of problem students, difficult class management, low social status, poor living conditions, potential cultural conflicts, and so on (neeshatlen, 1985; yarrow, 1999). these disadvantages in rural school working and living situations make teacher recruitment and retention challenging in the growth of rural education in impoverished areas around the world. as a result, the question of “who teaches in rural schools” has become a hot topic in academia. since its foundation, the people’s republic of china has implemented a number of teacher supply augmentation measures to alleviate the rural teacher shortage. the central government began implementing the secondary normal graduates program in several provinces in the early 1980s, in which graduates from junior colleges and secondary normal schools were selected and assigned to teach in local rural schools. for the next two decades, and until the early 21st century, this initiative was a major source of rural teachers. the influence of urbanization on the countryside as well as the structural changes in rural schools has made it more difficult to recruit and retain rural teachers, as well as to improve the quality of rural education at the turn of the 21st century. the ministries of education and the finance collaborated in 2006 to develop the special position program, which used central government financing to hire college graduates to work in rural compulsory education institutions (ministry of education, 2006). the initiative began in western china and was eventually expanded to the central and eastern parts of the country. in the meantime, the state council issued the measures for the implementation of free education for students of normal universities affiliated to the ministry of education (ministry of education, 2007), requiring the six normal universities affiliated to the ministry of education to provide free education to their students. in 2013 and 2015, jiangxi normal university and fujian normal university, both joint establishments of provincial governments and the ministry of education, joined the free education program. the measures to implement public-funded education for students of normal universities affiliated to the ministry of education were published by the state council in 2018, and the “free education program” was renamed the “public-funded teacher education program” (also known as the targeted position program). the special position program and the public-funded teacher education program have gained widespread acclaim in society for significantly reducing staffing shortages in rural parts of western china, and also for helping to attract and retain rural teachers and improve compulsory education quality (pu et al., 2019). preferential policies such as the particular position program and the public-funded teacher education zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1432 program were first adopted in the western regions due to regional special demands and the state’s limited financial capability. however, there are impoverished and underdeveloped areas in the central provinces that confront similar issues, such as local budget deficits, poverty-stricken rural areas, stymied rural school growth, and a rural teacher shortage. despite little funding from the central government, several provinces strive to address staffing issues in rural schools by increasing teacher labor supply, improving teacher quality, and reducing structural human resource imbalances. hunan province in central china, for example, drafted the opinions on strengthening primary and secondary teacher education in 2005 and pioneered the targeted position program for village primary teacher education in china. the provincial government and lower levels of government contribute to the funding of this initiative. the provincial department of education uses the joint money to commission local normal institutions and universities to train suitable teachers for specific rural schools. as a result, open recruitment, the secondary normal graduates program, the targeted position program, the special position program, temporary teachers, and other sources of rural teacher supply exist in present china. this study applied a polynomial logit model to assess the validity of the “hometown impacts” hypothesis in the geographical, emotional, and institutional dimensions, based on the findings of a survey of 5,554 teachers from 117 towns in h province in the wuling mountain zone. a literature review and research hypotheses some studies claimed that “hometown effects” (also known as “draw of home”) exist in the teacher labor market, which are not common in other professions (reininger, 2012; cannata, 2010; goff & bruecker, 2017; engel et al. 2014). according to the “hometown effects” hypothesis, teachers prefer to teach in the place where they grew up or in an area that is similar to their home environment. in their research of teacher distribution at new york state, boyd et al. (2005; 2013) find that 61% of teachers start their careers in schools within 15 miles of their homes, and more than 80% in schools within 40 miles. in a survey conducted in gansu province, china, wei (2016) discovered that 93% of teachers begin their careers in native countries, 51% in native towns, and 23% in native villages. furthermore, wei et al. (2020) find that rural teachers who start their careers in the same region as their birthplace have much lower employment mobility than those who start their careers in a different region. a survey of 40 rural schools in guangdong and other provinces found that localization is an important geographical aspect of rural teacher employment, with many teachers working in their hometowns (liu, 2019). according to monk (2007), people who are interested in rural education and have strong feelings about rural living will opt to teach in rural areas, despite the fact that interests and feelings are vulnerable to spatial linkages. as a result, hometown effects, which are a distinctive feature of the teacher labor market in china and other countries, are universal. governments all over the world are forming rural teacher education and selection programs based on the localization tendency of the teacher labor market, such as the grow-your-own program in the united states, the indigenous teacher education program in australia, and the publicfunded teacher education program in china, to name a few. zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1433 localized selection of teachers in rural or distant locations is the most successful strategy to attract and retain rural teachers, according to academia and governments. teachers with local “registered residences” (also referred to as “huji” or “huko” in china) are more likely to work in local town schools or in more remote rural schools and teaching sites in china, according to a well-known occurrence. there are discrepancies in how chinese researchers and their international colleagues define the variable “returning to hometown”. when assessing the variable “returning to hometown,” foreign scholars typically mention the distance between the school and the home or calculate the distance using the school’s and home’s zip codes (boyd et al, 2013). in china, “returning to hometown” refers to returning to work in the area of one’s registered residence or birthplace; scholars commonly utilize the county-level division of administrative regions (in china, a county is a lower-level administrative unit than a city) as a criterion to separate natives and foreigners, i.e., people from outside a certain county (liu, 2019). as a result, we suggest the first hypothesis (h1): teachers with a local registered residency are more likely to teach in rural schools, implying that rural teachers have geographical hometown effects. researchers also pointed out that many front-line teachers in rural areas spent part of their childhood or schooling in the area (monk, 2007). according to surveys, 72.3% of teachers who have worked in rural schools for a long time were raised in rural areas, and 60% acquired their education in rural schools. in contrast, chinese research focuses on geographic hometown preferences associated with registered residence, but there is little talk about emotional hometown impacts deriving from teachers’ early life or education experiences in local places. our second hypothesis (h2) is that: based on geographical hometown effects related to the registered household, there is an emotional hometown preference based on teachers’ rural life experience, i.e., teachers who grew up in rural areas or attended rural schools are more likely to teach in rural schools. china’s education administration system differs from that of various western countries. in china, the county-level government is primarily responsible for funding primary and secondary schools in towns and villages. as a result, the county-level government is also responsible for teacher recruitment and appointment based on the staffing needs reported by the towns and villages under its jurisdiction. government policies have a greater impact on teachers recruited through teacher supply augmentation initiatives. the targeted position program in h province requires program participants to agree to teach in the areas of their registered residency for 5-7 years after graduation, and the county bureau of education sets their compensation and other perks, such as bianzhi membership (a system of officially budgeted posts in china). the county government may take into account teachers’ preferred working locations as well as their registered residences when making teacher appointments. teachers, on the other hand, are typically assigned to areas where teaching staff is in limited supply throughout the year (wei, 2016). as a result, while examining teachers’ hometown preferences within a county region, we must consider this institutional aspect. the third hypothesis (h3) we propose is that: after accounting for geographical and emotional hometown effects, institutional hometown effects exist, as evidenced by the fact that students educated through teacher supply augmentation programs are more likely to teach in rural schools. research design zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1434 sample summary the wuling mountains zone is a theoretical economic notion employed in the state’s efforts to alleviate poverty, and it spans most of the wuling mountains. the wuling mountains zone is economically poor and has a large underprivileged population due to its physical location. it is one of the most important beneficiaries in the country’s poverty alleviation program. the participants in this study are rural teachers from 117 towns in seven counties in h province in central china’s wuling mountains zone. the following factors influenced the sample selection: (i) according to national criteria, the seven counties studied are destitute. the wuling mountains zone is one of china’s 14 most impoverished areas, with insufficient basic public services, severely outdated infrastructure in education, culture, health, and sports, and per capita education and health spending of only 51% of the national average. recruiting and keeping talented rural teachers in this area is a common problem in socioeconomically underdeveloped areas. (ii) h province was one of china’s first provinces to adopt the targeted position program. in 2006, h province launched a special program to recruit junior secondary school graduates for 6-year pre-service education in order to provide targeted training of multi-disciplinary primary school teachers for towns and villages, one year ahead of the ministry of education’s and its six affiliated normal universities’ free teacher education program (hunan first normal university, 2017). h province has acquired a large number of teachers as a result of various sorts of teacher supply augmentation schemes during the last 10 or more years, ensuring the sample’s representativeness. the wuling mountains zone encompasses the counties and cities of h province’s western, northwestern, and central regions, with the western half of the province having the most counties. we chose four counties at random from the province’s west, two from the northwest, and one from the central region based on geographical distribution, and conducted a two-month field study in each of the seven counties in 2020. the seven counties have a total of 117 towns and nearly 15,000 primary and secondary school teachers, as shown in table 1. a total of 5,554 questionnaires were obtained for this study, all of which were legitimate. variables and measurement the dependent variable the school type, which is a categorical variable, is the study’s dependent variable. county-level schools (referring to primary and secondary schools in the county’s metropolitan areas), town-level nineand 12-year schools, town junior secondary schools, town primary schools, village primary schools, and teaching sites are all covered. this paper groups town-level nineand 12-year schools, town junior secondary schools, and town primary schools into one category in the regression model for statistical convenience, making school type a categorical variable with three categories: county-level schools, town primary and secondary schools, and village primary schools and teaching sites, which are coded as 0, 1, and 2, respectively. independent variables zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1435 table 1. sampled counties. sampled counties numbers of towns under jurisdiction numbers of teachers retrieved questionnaires valid questionnaires validity rate a 12 1,641 718 718 100% b 19 2,244 1,005 1,005 100% c 17 3,417 1,358 1,358 100% d 26 3,405 1,832 1,832 100% e 20 5,730 596 596 100% f 23 n/a 0 0 n/a total 117 5554 5554 100% notes: 1. respondents are grades 1-9 teachers (no secondary vocational and high school teachers surveyed); 2. due to some emergencies, the investigation team failed to distribute the questionnaires in f county, and only conducted interviews in this county. the teacher’s registered residence, rural living and education experience, and teacher supply sources are the three independent factors in this study. for the teacher’s registered residence, the inquiry provides five options: the town or village where the school is located; other towns or villages within the local county; the local county’s urban region; other counties within the province; and other provinces. there is just one option for this question. we combine “other counties within the province” and “other provinces” into one category: registered residence outside the local county, and come up with a variable with four categories of registered residence, with 1, 2, 3, and 4 representing registered residence in the town or village where the school is located, other towns or villages within the local county, the local county’s urban area, and outside the local county, respectively. furthermore, we collect information about teachers’ birthplaces, determine whether the teacher is a local based on their response to the question “whether your birthplace is the same as the location of the current school” in the questionnaire, and create a dummy variable for teachers’ birthplaces, with 0 indicating “no” and 1 indicating “yes”. in addition, with the variable of five or more years of early rural life or education experience, the questionnaire evaluates emotional hometown impacts. teachers’ rural experience or schooling experience is treated as a dummy variable, with 0 indicating “no” and 1 indicating “yes.” the source of teacher supply is a categorical variable, with 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 representing open recruitment, temporary teachers, the targeted position program, the special position program, the secondary normal graduates program, and other supply sources (such as inter-school teacher rotation), respectively. control variables individual characteristics of teachers, such as gender, age, ethnicity, and proximity to the school, serve as control variables in this study. gender is a dummy variable (0 = female, 1 = male); age is a continuous variable; proximity to the school is a dummy variable (0 = no, 1 = yes); and ethnicity is a categorical variable (0 = han nationality, 1 = miao nationality, 2 = tujia nationality, 3 = other ethnic minorities). zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1436 the model and analytical approach this study employs polynomial logit regression to analyze the dependent variable “school type,” which is a multi-category variable. the model is as follows:     ln ln iij i j ib i p y j x x p y b x                where b signifies the baseline group and j specifies the number of school types in the categorical variable, i.e., j =1, 2, 3... the anticipated probability of each category can be computed by solving the equation below (yang & zhang, 2020):      1 exp = = exp i j ij i j i mm x p y j x x        thus, we obtain the frequency ratio of each category relative to the baseline group. in the examination of regression findings, the odds ratio is utilized to calculate and evaluate the model’s regression coefficients. to further address the research issue, the study employs stepwise regression to examine the hometown effects of rural china’s teachers. research results sample descriptions table 2 provides a summary of the subjects. (i) female teachers account for 16.46% more than their male counterparts, which is in line with china’s current gender structure in elementary and secondary schools. (ii) the proportions of young and older teachers are greater than those of middle-aged teachers, according to the age distribution pattern. (iii) currently, 72.04% live within walking distance of a school. (iv) the ethnicity of the subjects in the sample is quite diverse. more than half of the subjects are miao and tujia ethnic groups, which corresponds to the existing population situation in the wuling mountains zone). (v) in terms of professional titles, the teaching staff is primarily made up of firstand second-rank teachers, with senior teachers accounting for approximately 11.76%. (vi) pre-service education was provided to over 60% of teachers through teacher supply augmentation initiatives. (vii) the vast majority of study participants were students from rural elementary and secondary schools. therefore, sample distribution is consistent with general features of participants, indicating that the sample is ideal and representative. localization of rural school staffing zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1437 table 2. a sample summary. variable sample classification frequency percentage (%) gender female 3,234 58.23 male 2,320 41.77 age 18-27 1,485 26.74 28-38 1,295 23.32 39-55 2,311 41.61 56-77 435 7.83 others 28 0.50 living around school locations or not yes 1,553 27.96 no 4,001 72.04 nationality han 2,066 37.39 miao 1,763 31.91 tujia 1,567 28.36 other ethnic minorities 129 8.19 professional title the third-rank teacher and others 1,240 22.32 the second-rank teacher 1,503 27.06 the first-rank teacher 2,158 38.85 senior teacher 653 11.76 sources of teacher supply open recruitment 1,158 20.85 targeted position program 1,078 19.41 special position program 1,076 19.37 secondary normal graduates program 956 17.21 temporary teachers 470 8.46 others 816 14.69 school type village primary schools and teaching sites 949 17.09 town-level 9and 12year schools 667 12.01 town primary and secondary schools 2,644 47.61 county-level schools 1,294 23.30 notes: 1. percentiles 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 are employed to divide age groups 2. the targeted position program includes the ministry of education’s public-funded teacher education program and local level targeted position programs. 3. the special position program includes nation level and local level programs. the data in table 3 show that rural teachers in the county’s territory have a high rate of localized employment. more than half of the teachers working in rural primary schools or teaching sites (475/949 = 50.5%) have a registered residence in the local towns or villages. teachers, who live in other towns or villages in the county, or beyond the county, are less likely to work at rural primary schools or teaching sites; instead, they prefer to teach in town primary and secondary schools, or at the county level. furthermore, teachers who live in the county’s urban areas are the least likely to work in village primary schools or teaching sites. a close link exists between rural teachers’ registered residence and their school category (p < 0.001), indicating that teachers with local registered residency are more likely to accept work in rural schools. as a result, h1 has been certified. zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1438 table 3. school types of teachers with different registered residence. variable names # of teachers from the local town and village # of teachers from other towns or villages of the local county. # of teaches from urban areas of the county # of teachers from outside the county total village primary schools and teaching sites 475 193 112 169 949 town primary and secondary schools 1460 856 447 548 3,311 county-level schools 225 394 548 127 1,294 total 2,160 1,443 1,107 844 5,554 chi2 688.2650 p-value 0.000 (***) note: levels of significance: ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05, +p < 0.1 table 4. school types of teachers from different teacher supply sources. variable open recruitment temporary teachers targeted position program special position program normal college or university student program other sources total village primary schools and teaching sites 178 158 155 221 133 104 949 town primary and secondary schools 595 287 704 719 593 413 3,311 county-level schools 385 25 219 136 230 299 1,294 total 1,158 470 1,078 1,076 956 816 5,554 chi2 378.1099 p-value 0.000 note: levels of significance: ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05, +p < 0.1 the influence of teacher supply augmentation programs on rural school staffing as mentioned before in this study, due to china’s unique educational administration system, rural teachers may experience local effects as a result of institutional arrangezhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1439 ments. so, how do different teacher supply programs affect teachers’ hometown preferences? there are substantial disparities in school categories among teachers produced by different programs (p < 0.001), according to data from table 4. teachers in village primary schools or teaching sites are mostly from the special position program (221 teachers), which is part of the policy to increase teacher supply. the majority of targeted position program and special position program teachers (704 and 719, respectively) chose to work in town primary and secondary schools, which offer superior working conditions, accounting for about half of the entire staff. the study results from 117 towns in h province suggest that educational policies may have a significant impact on the hometown effects of rural china teachers. due to the fact that the special position program recruits teachers based on the staffing needs of local schools as opposed to the distribution plan of county-level educational authorities, the influence of teachers’ independent decisions on hometown effects cannot be neglected. therefore, additional research is required to explore institutional hometown impacts. the effects of geographical influence, emotional preference, and policy guidance on rural teachers’ employment the results of a regression study of the impacts of geographical influence, emotional preference, and policy advice on teachers’ choice of school types are presented in table 5. the registered residence of teachers is used to assess geographical hometown impacts, whereas their early rural life or schooling experiences are utilized to measure emotional hometown effects. the scope of model 1 is limited to evaluating the effect of teachers’ registered residence on their employment and school kinds. in model 2, the early rural life or education experience of teachers is included in model 1. the source of teacher supply is added as a variable in model 3. due to the inability to conduct direct comparisons between the mlogit model’s regression coefficients, we must convert them into odds ratios in order to evaluate and present the results of the analysis (hong, 2015). the relationship between geographical hometown effects and teachers’ choice of school types using teachers employed by county-level schools as the baseline group, model 1 demonstrated that after controlling for variables such as gender, age, ethnicity, and whether or not they live around the school location or not, teachers from the local town or village are more likely to work in village primary schools or teaching sites than teachers with registered residence outside the county, with a 2.147 times higher odds ratio (e 1.147 -1 ), which is statistically significant (p < 0.001) than teachers with registered residence within the county. in a related manner, teachers who were native to the town in which the school is located were 1.254% more likely to teach in the town’s primary and secondary schools than teachers whose registered residences were outside of the county (e 1.006 -1, p < 0.001). in a fundamental sense, this is in line with the statistical descriptions made in the past. zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1440 table 5. results of the regression analysis of hometown effects on rural teachers’ employment. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) model 1 model 2 model 3 variable school types (county-level schools as the baseline group) i ii i ii i ii gender 0.747*** 0.813*** 0.747*** 0.811*** 0.808*** 0.843*** (0.108) (0.085) (0.109) (0.085) (0.111) (0.086) age -0.035*** -0.039*** -0.036*** -0.041*** -0.046*** -0.042*** (0.005) (0.004) (0.005) (0.004) (0.006) (0.005) living around the school location or not -0.838*** -0.654*** -0.843*** -0.700*** -0.836*** -0.711*** (0.115) (0.092) (0.119) (0.095) (0.121) (0.096) nationality (han nationality as the baseline group) miao -0.723*** -0.508*** -0.727*** -0.510*** -0.748*** -0.539*** (0.112) (0.088) (0.112) (0.088) (0.115) (0.090) tujia -0.506*** -0.254** -0.512*** -0.261** -0.552*** -0.301** (0.115) (0.092) (0.115) (0.092) (0.119) (0.094) other ethnic minorities -1.582*** -0.516* -1.589*** -0.521* -1.631*** -0.564* (0.383) (0.235) (0.383) (0.235) (0.389) (0.240) registered residence (registered residence outside the local county as the baseline group) local town or village 1.147*** 1.006*** 1.149*** 0.999*** 1.137*** 0.886*** (0.163) (0.137) (0.164) (0.137) (0.172) (0.142) other towns or villages in the local county -0.610*** -0.349** -0.610*** -0.363** -0.482** -0.332** (0.156) (0.124) (0.156) (0.124) (0.162) (0.129) urban areas of the local county -1.318*** -1.166*** -1.318*** -1.156*** -1.137*** -1.108*** (0.168) (0.127) (0.168) (0.127) (0.173) (0.132) early rural life or education experience 0.035 0.230* 0.168 0.311** (0.135) (0.108) (0.138) (0.111) teacher supply sources (open recruitment as the baseline group) temporary teachers 2.656*** 2.039*** (0.264) (0.240) targeted position program 0.308* 0.646*** (0.154) (0.114) special position program 1.032*** 0.988*** (0.155) (0.126) secondary normal graduates program 0.363* 0.604*** (0.168) (0.123) other sources -0.105 -0.015 (0.162) (0.116) constant terms 1.918*** 2.971*** 1.915*** 2.917*** 1.649*** 2.434*** (0.195) (0.162) (0.197) (0.164) -0.242 -0.194 pseudo r2 0.092 0.093 0.118 log likelihood -4746.895 -4743.728 -4610.350 aic 1.739 1.740 1.697 bic -37564.929 -3754543 -37657.16 sample size 5,500 5,500 5,500 5,500 5,500 5,500 notes: i: village primary schools & teaching sites; ii: town primary & secondary schools. 1. values in parentheses are standard errors. 2. levels of significance: ***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05, +p<0.1 zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1441 in the meantime, we observed that teachers with registered residences in other towns or villages within the county do not demonstrate a positive hometown preference for the local rural schools compared to teachers with registered residences outside the county, and the likelihood is even significantly reduced (the coefficients in model 1 are -0.610, and -0.349, respectively, and the p-values are both less than 0.001). as a result, we can conclude that the geographical characteristic of hometown effects is not positively correlated with teachers’ registered residence in the local county (as was assumed in prior research), but rather with teachers’ registered residence in the local town, a smaller administrative area. this cautions us that, in the context of china, a more comprehensive examination of the consequences of geographical hometown is required. the survey results from hubei, jiangsu, and henan confirmed that teachers from local towns had the lowest turnover rates (liu, 2019). the relation between emotional hometown effects and teachers’ choice of school types the coefficient of determination of model 2 is improved, and the model’s significance is maintained, when the variable of early rural life or teacher education experience is introduced. teachers with five or more years of early rural life or education experience are more likely to work in village primary schools or teaching sites (with a positive coefficient) than in county-level schools after controlling for variables such as gender, age, ethnicity, registered residence, and whether or not they live near the school location, though the difference is not statistically significant. nonetheless, compared to those with no such experience, teachers with five or more years of early rural life or education experience had a 26% greater odd ratio of working in town primary and secondary schools (e 0.230 -1), which is statistically significant (p < 0.01). the findings of stiut (2010) and boylan (2010), who both believed that teachers’ prior rural living or job experience had a beneficial effect on their extended stay at rural schools. as a result, h2 is only partially accepted. the relationship between policy-guided hometown effects and teachers’ choice of school types in order to investigate the impact that the teacher supply augmentation programs have on hometown effects, model 3 contains the variable of teacher supply sources as an independent variable. as a consequence of this, the model’s coefficient of determination rose from 0.093 to 0.118, which indicates that the model’s explanatory power has improved and that this improvement is statistically significant. taking teachers employed at county-level schools as the baseline group, model 3 demonstrates that after controlling for the variables of gender, age, ethnicity, registered address, and whether or not the teacher lives near the school location, teachers produced through the targeted position program by the ministry of education and local governments have a 36.10% higher odds ratio (e 0.308 -1) of working in village primary schools and teaching sites, and a 90.81% higher odds ratio (e 0.646 -1) of working in town primary and secondary schools, compared to those recruited through open recruitment, and these differences are statistically significant (p < 0.1 and p < 0.001, respectively). zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1442 there is no question that the hometown effects associated with the targeted position program are partially attributable to the rigorous and forceful implementation of pertinent policies, which state that graduates who benefit from the program must return to work in their original region of residence. moreover, the majority of students trained under local targeted position programs come from towns or villages. this substantially increases the likelihood of teachers returning to the town or village. then, what about graduates of the specific position program, which does not restrict the supply of students but instead creates special posts based on the needs of local schools? under the same control conditions, in comparison to the baseline group (consisting teachers from county-level schools), teachers recruited through the special position program are much more likely to work in village primary schools and town schools than those recruited through open recruitment. the odds ratios are 1.801 times (e 1.032 -1) and 1.689 times (e 0.988 -1) higher, respectively, which is statistically significant at the 0.001 level. similarly, teachers recruited through the secondary normal graduates program in the early stages are far more likely to work in rural primary schools and urban schools than those recruited through open recruitment (with positive coefficients, significant at levels of 0.05 and 0.001, respectively). since the 1980s, the implementation of teacher supply augmentation programs in china has significantly reduced the teacher shortage in rural schools, particularly in remote and disadvantaged village primary schools and teaching sites, as indicated by the data presented above. effective educational policy direction generates considerable institutional impacts in the local community. as such, h3 is confirmed. in addition to this, the impact of the control factors should not be disregarded. when compared to the baseline group of county-level school teachers, the likelihood that male teachers will work in town primary and secondary schools, as well as village primary schools and teaching sites, is significantly higher than the likelihood that female teachers will do the same (p < 0.001) in models 1, 2, and 3. the likelihood of a teacher working in a rural school decreases significantly with the teacher’s age (with negative coefficients, p < 0.001). teachers who live in close proximity to schools are less likely to work in town schools and village primary schools (with negative coefficients, p < 0.001). it is statistically significant that teachers of han nationality are more likely to work in town schools and village primary schools than teachers of ethnic minority backgrounds (such as miao, tujia, and other ethnic minorities). this suggests that han educators have a greater propensity to work in rural schools. robustness check in the robustness test, teachers’ registered residence is replaced by birthplace, sources of teacher supply are by means of joining bianzhi, and the mlogit model is used for regression analysis. as shown in table 6, the model’s analytical results remain significant despite slightly reduced values of coefficients of determination, suggesting the model’s remarkable robustness. in this study, the impacts of control variables such as gender, age, ethnicity, and proximity to the school are consistent with previous analytical findings. zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1443 table 6. robustness check on hometown effects on rural teachers’ employment. (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) model 1 model 2 model 3 variable school types (county-level schools as the baseline group) i ii i ii i ii gender 0.862*** 0.933*** 0.862*** 0.930*** 0.972*** 0.954*** (0.105) (0.081) (0.105) (0.081) (0.116) (0.087) age -0.029*** -0.035*** -0.032*** -0.039*** -0.043*** -0.044*** (0.004) (0.003) (0.005) (0.004) (0.008) (0.006) living around the school location or not -0.895*** -0.669*** -0.944*** -0.758*** -0.912*** -0.686*** (0.113) (0.090) (0.117) (0.093) (0.131) (0.101) nationality (han nationality as the baseline group) miao -0.811*** -0.576*** -0.815*** -0.581*** -0.825*** -0.640*** (0.107) (0.083) (0.107) (0.083) (0.120) (0.091) tujia -0.554*** -0.295*** -0.560*** -0.304*** -0.561*** -0.363*** (0.111) (0.087) (0.111) (0.087) (0.125) (0.095) other ethnic minorities -1.432*** -0.403+ -1.437*** -0.407+ -1.395** -0.212 (0.373) (0.222) (0.373) (0.222) (0.445) (0.253) birthplace 0.848*** 0.593*** 0.852*** 0.603*** 0.718*** 0.535*** (0.096) (0.074) (0.096) (0.074) (0.109) (0.081) early rural life or education experience 0.239+ 0.414*** 0.377* 0.505*** (0.130) (0.103) (0.153) (0.116) ways of joining bianzhi (joining bianzhi through examinations as the baseline group) from temporary positions 2.127*** 1.730*** (0.240) (0.202) from targeted position program 0.285 0.539*** (0.179) (0.136) from special position program -0.198 -0.081 (0.159) (0.118) from secondary normal graduates program -0.115 0.202+ (0.150) (0.106) constant terms 1.259*** 2.474*** 1.198*** 2.364*** 1.222*** 2.157*** (0.173) (0.140) (0.175) (0.141) (0.282) (0.215) pseudo r2 0.040 0.041 0.052 log likelihood -5020.523 -5012.341 -4066.613 aic 1.835 1.834 1.805 bic -37095.184 -37085.711 -29858.928 sample size 5,500 5,500 5,500 5,500 5,500 5,500 notes: i: village primary schools & teaching sites; ii: town primary & secondary schools. 1. values in parentheses are standard errors. 2. levels of significance: ***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05, +p<0.1 zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1444 the key explanatory variable, birthplace, is a dummy variable with a value of 0/1 (0 = non-local birth, 1 = local birth). it has a positive regression coefficient of p0.001, indicating that, after controlling for variables such as gender, teachers born locally are more likely to work in village primary schools and teaching sites, or town primary and secondary schools (than county-level schools), and the difference is statistically significant. the findings of the emotional hometown effects tests also show that the impact of teachers’ early years of rural living or education is favorable (all coefficients were positive) and statistically significant (p < 0.05). as a result, the geographical and emotional influences of home are still present. the impact of the variable “the way of joining bianzhi” confirms that institutional hometown impacts are also significantly good. teachers who join bianzhi as temporary teachers are more likely to work at village primary schools and town schools than at county-level schools, compared to the baseline group (teachers who join bianzhi through examinations). joining bianzhi from the targeted position program and the secondary normal graduates program had both positive and statistically significant regression coefficients. nonetheless, there is no statistically significant difference (p > 0.1) in rural school employment between teachers who join bianzhi through the special position program and those who join through examinations. after substituting teachers’ registered location and sources of teacher supply with other key explanatory variables, the impact of geographical, emotional, and institutional hometown effects on rural teachers’ employment remains significant, according to the results of the robustness test. the modified model yields essentially identical analytical results to the original model. consequently, we believe the model estimation results of this study to be reliable. conclusions and suggestions this study applies the polynomial logit model to assess hometown effects from geographical, emotional, and institutional aspects based on a survey of 5,554 teachers from 117 towns in h province in the wuling mountains zone. the conclusions are as follows. (i) teachers with local registered residences are more likely to work in rural schools in china, proving the importance of geographical hometown effects. however, based on the subdivisions of registered residence, we find that the scope of local registered residence pertaining to this topic is limited to the local town, a smaller administrative division, as opposed to the local county (assumed by preview studies). wei’s (2016) research in gansu province and liu’s (2019) research in guangdong, zhejiang, shanxi, sichuan, and guizhou provinces supports the conclusion. (ii) teachers with at least five years of rural life or education experience are more likely to work in village schools or teaching sites, demonstrating a favorable effect of teachers’ hometown attachments on their employment in rural schools. in recruiting and educating rural teachers, consideration should be given to the motivational effect of teachers’ attachment to their hometown. existing studies have also indicated that it is difficult to attract a sufficient number of qualified teachers using only market-based strategies in underdeveloped regions. incorporating spiritual components such as emotions, wills, and beliefs into teacher zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1445 education and recruiting is not only helpful in enhancing the retention rate of competent employees, but also in instilling a feeling of civic responsibility in teachers towards their hometowns (li, 2020). (iii) the results of regression analysis show strong institutional hometown effects after controlling for geographical and emotional hometown preferences. those educated by teacher supply augmentation programs are more likely to work in rural schools, notably village primary schools and teaching sites in more backward conditions, than those employed through open recruiting. it demonstrates how educational programs have aided in the expansion of china’s rural workforce. preliminary studies have not paid enough attention to the policy-induced local consequences. because of the severe lack of available human resources in rural schools, both the central and local governments have been making efforts to increase the number of available teachers (wang & wu, 2019). the central and local authorities have come to the conclusion that selecting, training, and recruiting students of local origins as rural teacher candidates under the logic of hometown effects is an effective way to ensure a sufficient supply of rural teaching staff. this conclusion has led to the formation of a consensus among the central and local authorities. however, an excessive reliance on institutional hometown effects may lead to some negative consequences, such as a high rate of default on the part of normal school students educated under the free teacher education program (ren & chen, 2020), and a high turnover rate of teachers produced by the special position program who only use rural school positions as a transition in their careers (wang & feng, 2020). on the basis of this study’s empirical findings and results from prior research, we provide some policy recommendations for attracting and keeping rural teachers. first, the geographical quality of hometown effects is most prominent within a constrained administrative region, i.e., the local town. its conclusion for policymakers is that more students from native towns should be recruited into future rural teacher education programs, and that when staffing rural schools, graduates should be encouraged to teach in their native towns’ rural schools. it is important to note that this recommendation may be more applicable in developing countries and regions, particularly those with large disparities in educational resources between urban and rural areas or with distinct racial or ethnic cultural characteristics, where teachers have stronger ties to their native lands and are obligated to care for their families and relatives, and where working close to home helps them achieve work-life balance (an & cao, 2017). second, in the pre-service education of rural teachers, their attachment to their hometowns should be fostered (zheng & hu, 2018). according to existing research, 72.3% of teachers with extensive experience in rural schools were raised in rural areas, and 60% have schooling experience in rural settings (boylan & mcswan, 1998). in a longitudinal research study, hernan (2018) evaluates the effects of two distinct approaches to rural teacher training. the first program engaged pre-service teachers in a variety of classroom-, school-, and/or community-based professional activities; the second program directly recruits and trains students from rural backgrounds. it is determined that the second strategy is superior to the first because those with a background in rural life are better able to comprehend rural culture and integrate into rural life. zhang et al. who teaches in underdeveloped rural chinese schools? bece, vol.11, no. 1, 2022 1446 third, to maintain an appropriate supply of skilled rural teachers, it is crucial to invest more in the targeted position program through partnerships with secondary normal schools, normal junior colleges, and normal universities, and to improve the educational quality of the program. however, strengthening the execution of rural teacher support policies is more crucial. according to merrow (1999), addressing the teacher shortage solely through recruitment is a “wrong diagnosis” and a “phony cure.” increasing rural teachers’ compensation, elevating their social status, and providing them with more accolades may be more effective solutions to the rural school staffing issue. in conclusion, the present study attempts to experimentally answer the question, “who teaches in rural schools?” based on the hometown effects hypothesis. it has broadened the scope and dimensions of the concept by sparking discussion on the institutional aspect of hometown effects. however, the limitations of this study should be acknowledged. first, there are significant gaps between central and western china, as well as between poor regions in various provinces. this study focused on the origins of rural teachers in the wuling mountains zone in central china, and the sample is somewhat unrepresentative, which hinders the generalizability of the findings. second, the hometown effects hypothesis is a western academic theory. to confirm the explanatory power and scope of applicability of the theory in china, it is necessary to conduct additional empirical studies based on evidence. furthermore, this study identified the institutional impact of hometown effects on rural teachers in china, but the influence mechanism of pertinent policies on rural teachers’ employment decisions remains to be investigated. references an, x. m., & cao, x. m. 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(2018). return and hope: the oral history of young rural teachers. nanning: guangxi education publishing house. zhao, y. & liu, j. (2017). implementation of free education policy for normal students in china and strategies for improvement. education exploration, 2017(4):89-93. received: 19 april 2022 revised: 29 april 2022 accepted: 10 may 2022 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227137 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227137 originalarticle-tianjiaozhang-bece_title_may2022 originalarticle-tianjiaozhang--bece_maintextmay2022 bece. newsletter vol.13, no.1, 2023 1691 the effect of maternal coping strategies for sibling disputes on sibling relationships among preschool children in two child families by xu, l., tian, p. p., & hong, x. m. correspondence to: xiumin hong, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: xiuminhong@163.com ibling relationships are long-lasting kinship which can tremendously influence a child across his or her life span. the sibling relationship research has drawn increased attention in china in the wake of the implementation of the comprehensive three child policy. child-, family-, school-, and society-related factors may all impact sibling relationships. family-related factors include parents’ marital relationship, parent-child relationship, parenting style, and parental coping strategies for sibling disputes. preschool childhood is a pivotal stage in a child’s development and a vulnerable phase in sibling interactions. the mother is the main caregiver of her children in the early childhood, and competition for maternal attention is one cause of sibling disputes. this study attempted to explore maternal coping strategies for sibling conflicts and their impact on sibling relationships among preschool children. it randomly selected 125 mothers with children in three public kindergartens in beijing as the research subjects. the children were aged between three and six with inter-sibling age gaps of 1-12 years. all mothers sampled have given birth to two children. preschool children’s sibling relationship questionnaire and maternal coping strategies for sibling conflicts questionnaire were the measurement tools in the study. according to the research findings, among maternal perceptions of children’ sibling relationships, warmth scored the highest in mean value, followed by competition and confrontation. in terms of mothers’ coping strategies for sibling conflicts, the child-centered approach scored the highest, followed by approaches of control and nonintervention. regarding the association between the maternal coping strategy for sibling disputes and sibling relationship, it was found that the child-centered approach effectively predicted sibling warmth; and that there were significant and positive correlations between maternal control and non-intervention and sibling competition and confrontation. therefore, the mother’ attitudes towards sibling conflicts are closely related to sibling relationships between her children. the mother’s positive approaches were conducive to the formation of warm relations mailto:xiuminhong@163.com vol.13, no.1, 2023 1692 ships between siblings, whilst her negative approaches were more likely to induce sibling competition and confrontation. parents should increase their knowledge about how to deal with sibling disputes and help their children acquire the ability to get on well with their siblings and learn how to interact with peers through sibling conflicts. source: journal of capital normal university, 2022; 2022(4):163-171. the role of education in urbanization: an empirical study based on china’s provincial-level panel data from 2005 to 2020 boshen wan, 1 weifang min 1,2 1 peking university, beijing 100871, china. 2 east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china abstract: urbanization is a crucial factor in economic growth and common prosperity and thus an inevitable pathway to a nation’s modernization. to achieve the goal of common prosperity of chinese society as a whole, it is imperative to enhance the education level of its farmers, accelerate the construction of the new countryside, and develop modern, large-scale agriculture, so as to liberate more farmers from the agricultural labor and allow them to enter the secondary and tertiary sectors of economy that provide higher incomes. this study seeks to verify the promotional effect of education on the urbanization level by utilizing the provincial-level panel data from 2005 to 2020 in china. the two-way fixed effects model is adopted in the analysis. research findings include that: (i) investment in education has substantial promotional effects on the urbanization level; (ii) economic growth and technological advancement significantly advances the progression of urbanization; (iii) the development level of the region can moderate the impact of education on urbanization. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 15(2):1801-1805. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar097 how to cite: wan, b., & min, w. (2023). the impact of family background on subject selection in senior secondary school students in the context of the reform of college entrance examination: an empirical study based on survey data from zhejiang province. best evidence in chinese education, 15(2):1801-1805. keywords: education, urbanization, two-way fixed effects model, panel threshold regression wan & min. (beijing & shanghai, china). role of education in urbanization. bece, vol.15, no.2, 2023 1802 about the author: boshen wan , graduate school of education, peking university, beijing 100871, china. correspondence to: weifang min, institute of economics of education, peking university, beijing 100871, china; educational economics laboratory, east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china. e-mail: wfmin@pku.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:wfmin@pku.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ wan & min. (beijing & shanghai, china). role of education in urbanization. bece, vol.15, no. 2, 2023 1803 introduction education is one of the major drivers for urbanization. educational advancement leads to the increased agricultural productivity, liberating more farmers from agricultural labor, who can move to cities or start up their own businesses in towns, thus promoting the development of towns. in the meantime, the enhanced quality of education contributes to the improvement of comprehensive competence of individuals, facilitating the migration of the rural population and its adaptation to urban life. existing research largely used the average years of education as a proxy variable for the development level of education, with few studies focusing on the impact of investment in education on the urbanization level. research into the relation between investment in education and urbanization is of significant practical implications, potentially providing relevant evidence for policy makers. analysis framework push-pull-mooring migration model the push and pull theory is an important theory in population migration research, which describes human migration as the result of joint effects of the push from the native place and the pull from the targeted destination (dorigo & tobler, 1983). mooring factors refer to the intervening obstacles, both personal and social, that undermine the migration intention of individuals and retain them in the original residence. they are related to personal needs for stable life, psychology, and relationships. to choose to migrate, the individual needs to forgo the stable state of life. paths of the impact of education on the urbanization level drawing on bruce moon’s push-pull-mooring migration model, this study analyzed the three paths through which education affects the urbanization level: (i) educational development helps boost the productivity of rural areas, so reducing the demand for agricultural labor and increasing the migration intention of rural population; (ii) educational development offsets the effect of mooring factors on the migration of individuals to certain extent, thus promoting the urbanization of the population; (iii) education contributes to enhancing the attraction of the city and strengthening its convergence effect, so increasing the pull of urban areas in terms of migration. research design variables and sources of data dependent variable wan & min. (beijing & shanghai, china). role of education in urbanization. bece, vol.15, no. 2, 2023 1804 this study used the urbanization rate of permanent residents as the proxy variable for the urbanization level of each province, measured by the statistical caliber of urban permanent residents/total permanent residents. core independent variable the average years of education of the labor force served as the core independent variable to represent the quantitative characteristics of a region’s stock of human capital. investment in education was the proxy variable for the region’s overall quality of education. the study derived data in this regard from the china educational expenditures statistical yearbook, which includes various types of educational expenditures such as national fiscal education funds, publicly budgeted education funds, organizational investment, and social donations in each province. investment in education is proportionate to the size of the population of the region. given that, this study calculated the per capita educational expenditure by dividing total educational expenditure with the population of registered residence, which entered the model for regression. control variables control variables for this study included per capita regional gross domestic product (gdp), the number of patents, the industrial structure optimization index, the proportion of foreign direct investment (fdi) in gdp, and the proportion of total import and export in gdp. results of the analysis i. regression results based on the core independent variable as a quantitative index without incorporating any control variable, the average years of education had no significant impact on the level of urbanization. with control variables included, the average years of education in test and those of the next year still had no effect on the urbanization rate. among aforementioned control variables, only per capita gdp and the number of patents had significantly positive impacts on the urbanization level. the average schooling years of the year after the next significantly affected the urbanization rate. ii. regression results based on both the quantitative and qualitative indexes the per capita educational expenditure had a significantly positive effect on the urbanization rate. the per capita gdp and the number of patents could remarkably and positively impact the urbanization level. at the same time, the average years of education, the proportion of fdi in gdp, and the share of import and export in gdp had no substantial effect on the urbanization level. wan & min. (beijing & shanghai, china). role of education in urbanization. bece, vol.15, no. 2, 2023 1805 iii. non-linear relation between education and urbanization when other conditions controlled, the lower the city’s economic growth rate, technological level, and industrial structure optimization index, the more promotional effect the education expenditure had on urbanization. conclusion using provincial-level panel data from 2005 to 2020 in china, this study examined the impact of education on urbanization, taking into consideration the quantity and quality dimensions of education. based on the analysis results, it reached conclusions as follows: (i) the quality of education is more fundamental to the rise of urbanization level than the stock of human capital; (ii) economic growth and technological advancement can significantly advance the progression of urbanization; (iii) the development level of the region can moderate the promotional effect of education on urbanization.. reference dorigo, g. & tobler, w. (1983). push-pull migration laws. annals of the association of american geographers, 73(01):1-17. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2023; 41(10):40-52. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 万博绅, 闵维方. (2023). 教育影响城镇化水平的实证研究—基于中国 2005—2020 年省级面板数 据.华东师范大学学报(教育科学版), 41(10):40-52. received: 12 october 2023 revised: 29 october 2023 accepted: 07 november 2023 ar-weifangmin-bece_titlenov_2023 ar1-weifangmin-bece_maintextnov2023 the impact of family background on subject selection in senior secondary school students in the context of the reform of college entrance examination: an empirical study based on survey data from zhejiang province jianzhen zhang, xiaoyu liang zhejiang normal university, jinhua 321004, zhejiang, china abstract: subject selection is one of the key components in the new college entrance examination system. this study analyzed the data from a sample survey of college entrance examination participants in zhejiang province between 2017 and 2020 using descriptive statistics, factor analysis, cross analysis, and binary logistic regression in an effort to research into the impact of family background on subject selection and academic achievements in senior secondary school students. research findings showed that: (i) students from families of higher social and economic status were more likely to be academically high-achieving; (ii) student family background had a significant impact on their subject selection, specifically represented by a positive effect of home economic capital on student choice of subjects requiring higher learning costs, a positive effect of family perception of the importance of mathematics, physics, and chemistry on student choice of science subjects, and a positive effect of family cultural environment on student choice of liberal arts subjects; (iii) personal factors such as gender and academic results are crucial for students’ decisions on subject selection, with male and high-performing students showing preferences for science subjects. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 15(1):1783-1787. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar082 how to cite: zhang, j., & liang, x. (2023). the impact of family background on subject selection in senior secondary school students in the context of the reform of college entrance examination: an empirical study based on survey data from zhejiang province. best evidence in chinese education, 15(1):1783-1787. keywords: reform of college entrance examination, subject selection, academic achievement, family background zhang & liang. (zhejiang, china). family background and subject selection in high school students. bece, vol.15, no.1, 2023 1784 about the authors: xiaoyu liang, college of geography and environmental science, zhejiang normal university, jinhua 321004, zhejiang, china. jianzhen zhang, college of geography and environmental science, zhejiang normal university, jinhua 321004, zhejiang, china. e-mail: zjz@zjnu.cn correspondence to: jianzhen zhang at zhejiang normal university of china. conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:zjz@zjnu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ zhang & liang. (zhejiang, china). family background and subject selection in high school students. bece, vol.15, no. 1, 2023 1785 introduction in november 2014, implementation measures for subject selection in zhejiang province’s general college entrance examinations was issued in zhejiang province, one of the pilot regions for the reform of college entrance examination (cee) in china. according to this policy, the “x” in the previous “3+x” model of the cee was replaced by “selecting three subjects from a range of seven ones.” years of experiences of zhejiang province yielded evidence for empirical research on the efficacy of the reform of cee, and at the same time, issues with subject selection were observed, such as the overly utilitarian mentality, confusion, and anxiety among students during the selection process (du & jin, 2016). do family background disparities lead to differences in decisions on subject selection among students? this article investigated the impact of family origins on student academic performance and subject selection behavior concerning the high-stake examination, based on data from a sample survey. research design and methods sample selection and data sources this study conducted a questionnaire survey on “how family background affects students’ selection of subjects under the new college entrance examination system” in zhejiang province from june throughout september 2020. convenience sampling was adopted to obtain data of the cee participants between 2017 and 2020 from various cities in zhejiang province. among the returned questionnaires, 1119 were valid. the survey questionnaire had four components: basic personal information of the student; the family social, economic and cultural capital questionnaire; the student’s choice of subjects for the cee; the family-related factors scale. variable description i. the predicted variable in this study is the individual elective subject being chosen or not, intended to examine the impact of family background on academic performance and subject selection in senior secondary school students. ii. student family background is the explanatory variable, indicated by items related to family social, economic, and cultural status and factors listed in the familyrelated factors scale. there were five dimensions in this variable: family economic capital; family cultural capital; family education involvement; family social connections; family perception of the importance of mathematics, physics, and chemistry and investments in them. model design the focus of this study was to examine the relation between student choice of subjects and their family background under the new cee system. for the predicted variable “the individual elective subject being chosen or not,” there were only two options, “yes” zhang & liang. (zhejiang, china). family background and subject selection in high school students. bece, vol.15, no. 1, 2023 1786 and “no.” therefore, it was regarded as a binary variable, and a binary logistic regression model was used to analyze the impact of family background on student subject selection. research findings cross analysis of student family background, subject selection, and academic performance family background-induced differences in subject selection there were significant differences in the choice of physics, geography, and politics, only marginally significant differences in the choice of chemistry, but insignificant differences in the choice of biology, history, and technology among students of differential family origins. students from families of higher ses were more likely to choose physics. family background-induced differences in student academic performance there were appreciable differences in academic performance at the senior secondary level among students of distinct family origins. among low-achieving students, 28.8% and 23.1% of them were from underprivileged families and lower-middle-ses families, respectively, and only 13.5% were from advantaged families. at the same time, among the top 10% and 20%-30% of students, the percentages of students from high ses families were 32.8% and 28%, respectively, indicating a positive correlation between family background and student academic results at the senior secondary level. preliminary conclusions under the new cee system, the election of physics, geography, and politics are substantially influenced by family circumstances. students from higher ses families are more prone to choose physics and geography, but not politics. the higher level of their family ses, the greater the likelihood of the student attaining top-level academic achievements. analysis results of the binary logistic regression model  family economic capital, cultural capital, perception of the importance of mathematics, physics, and chemistry and investments in them significantly impacted student subject selection in the new cee system. zhang & liang. (zhejiang, china). family background and subject selection in high school students. bece, vol.15, no. 1, 2023 1787  family education involvement and social connections had no significant effects on student subject selection in the new cee system.  gender and academic results in the senior secondary period had considerable effects on student subject selection, whereas the year of cee participation had a slight impact on student subject selection. conclusions i. student academic performance is correlated with their family background. there are prominent disparities in academic achievements among student of differential family origins. ii. student subject selection is affected by family economic capital. students from economically advantaged families are more prone to choose physics and geography, while those from disadvantaged ones are more likely to pick history, politics, and technology. iii. student choices between science and liberal arts subjects are remarkably affected by family cultural environment and perception of the importance of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. iv. student choices between science and liberal arts subjects are also related to personal factors. reference du & jin. (2016). issues with subject selection among senior secondary school students in the context of the reform of college entrance examination and countermeasures: an analysis based on a survey of five high schools in zhejiang province. theory and practice of education, 36(8):15-18. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2023 (6):47-58. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 张建珍 & 梁晓雨.(2023).新高考制度下家庭背景对高中生科目选择的影响分析—基于浙江省 2017-2020 届高考毕业生调查数据的实证研究. 华东师范大学学报(教育科学版) 2023; 6:47-58 received: 11 august 2023 revised: 20 august 2023 accepted: 15 september 2023 ar-jianzhenzhang-bece_titlesep_2023 ar-jianzhenzhang-bece_maintextsep2023 growth mindset training and the effect of math-gender stereotype threat on girl students shujuan song, 1 na jiang, 1 lingkai ji 2 1. huanggang normal university, huanggang 438000, hubei, china 2. hubei university, wuhan 430062, hubei, china abstract: to investigate whether growth mindset training can weaken the effect of math-gender stereotype threat on girl students, this study undertook experimental intervention in a group of grade-11 girl students and found that: (i) mindsets can moderate the effect of math-gender stereotype threat. girls with a growth mindset are less likely to be affected by math-gender stereotype threat compared with those with a fixed mindset. (ii) growth mindset training for girls with a fixed mindset can effectively reduce the effect of math-gender stereotype threat on their math performance. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 12(2):1629-1634. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab012 how to cite: song, s., jiang, n., & ji, l. (2022). growth mindset training and the effect of math-gender stereotype threat on girl students. best evidence in chinese education, 12(2):1629-1634. keywords: mindset, growth mindset training, math-gender stereotype, stereotype threat song et al. (hubei). math-gender stereotype threat on girl students. bece, vol.12, no.2, 2022 1630 correspondence to: shujuan song, huanggang normal university, huanggang 438000, hubei, china. e-mail: 9810111@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:9810111@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ song et al. (hubei). math-gender stereotype threat on girl students. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1631 raising questions there have been two contrasting attitudes towards the malleability of individual traits such as intelligence and personalities. one is named the “fixed mindset,” which views personal traits as innate and unchangeable; the other is referred to as the “growth mindset,” which believes that some basic personal qualities are in constant development, and that individual ability improves as the result of persistent efforts. those who hold intellectual ability to be an unchangeable quality are more prone to apprehension about failure, mistake, and criticism, whilst those with the growth mindset tend to see failures as opportunities for learning and personal improvement and are more likely to carry on being positive and resilient in subsequent tasks. the math-gender stereotype is a belief that women have weaker mathematical ability than men. prior research discovered that individuals who are the targets of a devaluing group stereotype experience extra pressure which may depress their performance. such an experience is referred to as the “stereotype threat.” will women with the growth mindset feel less anxiety when facing the math-gender stereotype, thus less susceptible to its threat, as they hold that individual competencies are consistently developing and malleable? since women with the fixed mindset believe that individual abilities are innate and hard to change, are they more severely affected by math-gender stereotype threat? will growth mindset training mitigate the effect of math-gender stereotype threat on girl students? these are the questions to be addressed in this article. study 1: how do mindsets influence the effect of math-gender stereotype threat on girl students? research design subjects this study selected 202 girl students from high achieving classes in three county-level senior secondary schools and investigated their mindsets and math ability. research tools  growth mindset scale (gms) developed by dweck was employed as a measure, which comprised 20 items. the more highly the student scores, the stronger her disposition towards the growth mindset.  the math test paper was prepared by a grade-11 math teacher. it was relatively difficult, containing 15 objective test items. the total score was 20 points, and students had 25 minutes to complete the test. procedure song et al. (hubei). math-gender stereotype threat on girl students. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1632 the investigation on the mindsets of the 202 girls was carried out in their evening selfstudy session. they were divided into the stereotype threat group and the non-threat group. each group consisted of 101 students. the stereotype threat group were asked to read a piece of writing first to activate their awareness of the math-gender stereotype before they started to work on the math test, whereas the control group took the test straightaway without the extra reading. research results the analysis of the effect of math-gender stereotype threat on math performance the math test scores the two groups got showed that the performance of the girls in the stereotype threat condition is lower than that of girls in the control condition (t = 2.46, p < 0.05), indicating that the math-gender stereotype threat has a detrimental effect on girls’ math performance. the moderating effect of student mindsets the study established an interactive regression model, in which the math test score was the dependent variable, and the stereotype condition (the stereotype threat condition was coded as 1; the control condition as 0) and the type of mindset were independent variables. according to the bootstrap analysis results (n= 5000, the confidence coefficient = 95%), the overall effect of the regression model is significant (r 2 adj = 0.097, f(3, 190) = 6.799, p = 0.0002). the stereotype threat group scored lower than the control group; the math-gender stereotype imposed a depressing effect on math test scores of girl students (t = 2. 2584, p < 0. 05; confidence intervals do not contain 0). the growth mindset could positively predict math performance (t = 2.2817, p < 0.01; confidence intervals do not contain 0); girls with stronger disposition towards the growth mindset got higher math test scores. the coefficient of the product of the stereotype threat condition and the mindset is significant (t = 2.3488, p < 0.05; confidence intervals do not contain 0), indicating that the mindset had a moderating effect on the impact of the stereotype threat condition on the math test scores. study 2: the dampening effect of growth mindset training on the math-gender stereotype threat research design subjects this study recruited 671 grade-11 girl students of the science track from two countylevel key high schools who would be measured by the growth mindset scale and song et al. (hubei). math-gender stereotype threat on girl students. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1633 ranked by the scores they got. a total of 181 girls who scored below the 27 th percentiles were selected to participate in the experiment as students with the fixed mindset. research tools the growth mindset scale, the math test paper, and growth mindset training module ppt were used in the experiment. procedure the 181 participants were randomly divided into the mindset training group and the non-training group. each of the two groups was then subdivided into the stereotype threat group and non-threat group, and thereby four subgroups were established: the mindset training* stereotype threat group of 46 students; the mindset training* nonthreat group of 45; non-training* stereotype threat group of 45; non-training* non-threat group of 45. after the test, the numbers of questionnaires retrieved from the four groups were 44, 43, 43, and 42, respectively. in an evening self-study session, growth mindset training was administered to the mindset training group, while the non-training group performed self-study as usual. when the training finished, the stereotype threat group were requested to read a piece of writing to activate their awareness of math-gender stereotype (as in study 1). after that, all students were given 25 minutes to complete the math test. research results to examine the differences in math test scores among the four groups, a 2 × 2 anova was undertaken, using the math test score as dependent variable, and the mindset training condition and the stereotype threat condition as independent variables. the results showed that the overall effect of growth mindset training was significant (f(1.168) = 41.747, p = 0.000), and that the interaction between the mindset training and the stereotype threat conditions was also significant (f(1.168) = 4.075, p = 0.045). the results of simple effects test demonstrated that the difference between the math test scores under the stereotype threat condition and those under the non-threat condition was insignificant (p = 0.725) among girls having received growth mindset training, but significant (p = 0.014) among girls without growth mindset training. the results of the experiment revealed that growth mindset training could effectively weaken the effect of the mathgender stereotype threat on girl students and considerably improve their math performance. discussions the impact of mindsets on the effect of the mathgender stereotype threat song et al. (hubei). math-gender stereotype threat on girl students. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1634 the math-gender stereotype cannot considerably and adversely affect girl students with a growth mindset, even when they are in the situation where the math-gender stereotype is activated. nevertheless, it can impose a significant threatening effect on girls with a fixed mindset especially when they are made sensitive to the stereotype; because they believe that individual competences are inborn, thus unallowable. the role of growth mindset training in mitigating the detrimental effect of the math-gender stereotype threat deliberate, pertinent training can effectively develop students’ growth mindset. the math performance of girls who have received growth mindset training is unexceptionally, significantly better than that of those without such experience, which confirms that growth mindset training is not only effective in reducing the negative effect of the math-gender stereotype threat but can also improve math achievement of every girl. particularly for girls with a fixed mindset, growth mindset training has a significant dampening effect on the math-gender stereotype threat and is extremely beneficial for their math performance progress. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of educational research and experiment, 2022(4):108-112. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 宋淑娟, 姜娜, & 纪凌开. 成长型思维训练对女生数学-性别刻板印象威胁效应的影响. 教育研 究与实验, 2022(4):108-112. received: 06 october 2022 revised: 29 october 2022 accepted: 08 november 2022 1absbract-shujuansong-bece_titlenov_2022 1absbract-shujuansong-bece_maintextnov2022 bece. newsletter vol.12, no.1, 2022 1605 can online learning promote educational equity? an empirical study on the “digital divide” in online learning of primary and secondary students during the epidemic by liu, y. j. & zhang, d. x. correspondence to: yujun liu, dalian university of technology, china. e-mail: 2458797570@qq.com he whole world including china has experienced a large-scale practice of online teaching during the covid-19 pandemic. as a result, “digital divide” induced by online learning has aroused wide concerns of the public. recently, a study published in journal of schooling studies sampled 508 students from 15 primary and secondary schools in henan province to analyze the influence of urban vs rural, school, and social class differences on online learning of primary and secondary students, using binary logistic regression model. the research findings:  in terms of online learning infrastructure, there are significant differences in access to network, network connectivity, and quality of digital facilities between rural and urban students and among students with distinct social status. students from underprivileged families are remarkably disadvantaged in basic resources and equipment for online learning.  regarding online learning implementation, there are significant gaps in the teaching methods among different schools and considerable disparities in home learning environment and network use preference in the spare time among students from different family backgrounds  the school background significantly affects students’ satisfaction of online learning outcomes, but urban vs rural and social class backgrounds do not have a direct and substantial impact on students’ satisfaction of online learning outcomes.  the differences in access to network and the use of physical devices as well as online learning implementation have significant influences on online learning outcomes. according to the above findings, this study made the following suggestions. t mailto:2458797570@qq.com vol.12, no.1, 2022 1606  the government should undertake macro-regulation on the unbalanced distribution of information technology resources between urban and rural areas, offer specialized support to rural schools, and increase the investment in educational technology in rural areas.  schools should vigorously strengthen teachers’ training in online instruction, enhancing their online teaching ability and improving their information technology literacy.  families play a key role in promoting online learning equality. parents should keep the pace of learning with the needs of the information era, provide children with stable and high-quality broadband network connection and reliable learning devices like computers, and create a favorable home learning environment. source: journal of schooling studies, 2022; 2022(2):58-68. can transfer payment reduce the inequality of compulsory education in poor areas? an empirical study based on the data from 18 counties in 6 provinces in china weidong fu, 1 wei zhou 2 1. faculty of artificial intelligence education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china 2. college of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china abstract. transfer payment is of great significance for poverty alleviation and balanced regional development. based on the first-hand survey data from 18 key counties of 6 provinces in china’s national poverty alleviation and development program, this paper uses propensity score matching to calculate the effects of transfer payment funds on the results of compulsory education in impoverished areas and uses shapley value decomposition to decompose correlated factors. it finds that when the characteristics of students, families and schools controlled, transfer payment funds significantly lower student academic achievements in some subjects and aggravate the inequality of educational results, which may be the result of the reduction of local education funds caused by the “crowding out effect” of transfer payment. suggestions are made in this paper to standardize the utilization of transfer payment funds, establish a linkage mechanism between the educational results of poor students and transfer payment funds, implement the assisting plan for teachers and students in poor areas, strengthen the “pertinent support for intelligence development”, and unite multiple agencies to increase input in education, with the purpose of reducing the inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 10(2):1405-1413. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ar030. how to cite: fu, w., & zhou, w. (2022). can transfer payment reduce the inequality of compulsory education in poor areas? an empirical study based on the data from 18 counties in 6 provinces in china. best evidence in chinese education, fu & zhou. transfer payment and inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. bece, vol.10, no.2, 2022 1406 10(2):1405-1413. keywords: transfer payment, poor areas, compulsory education, educational results, propensity score matching (psm), shapley value decomposition about authors: wei zhou, college of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. e-mail: zhouwei19980726@163.com correspondence to: weidong fu, faculty of artificial intelligence education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. e-mail: 604143009@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:zhouwei19980726@163.com mailto:604143009@qq.com fu & zhou. transfer payment and inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1407 martya sen (as cited in xiao & li, 2021) once gave his insights into the relation between poverty and education that measuring poverty by economic standards is only the minimum threshold while the deprivation of the possibility of individual development constitutes the essence of poverty. alleviating poverty through education is critical to addressing the issue of poverty in knowledge, skills, mental strength, culture, and information in one’s disadvantaged times (fu, 2021) and fundamental to interception of intergenerational transmission of poverty (li et al., 2020). registration of impoverished households is a key component in china’s targeted poverty alleviation program, basically funded by transfer payment (chen et al., 2020). to evaluate the effects of transfer payment on student academic achievements in poor areas in china and define its mechanisms is of great significance to sustaining targeted poverty alleviation, improving the efficiency of poverty alleviation through education, reducing relative poverty, and promoting educational equity. literature review transfer payment is a redistribution of incomes by the central government to narrow the gaps among regions of different development levels. it includes general transfer payment and special transfer payment. in previous studies of education-related transfer payment, most researchers focus their investigation on whether it has increased input in education and draw differential conclusions. a common belief is that transfer payment should be able to increase educational expenditure as its primary purpose is to provide public goods and rectify externalities across regions. also, the central government has attempted to secure the educational input standards by legislation. the increase in transfer payment by the central government should stimulate local governments’ willingness to implement the former’s policies and to enhance their investment in education (ma & hou, 2005). some of the studies confirm the above opinion by presenting the fact that china’s general transfer payment has played the role of “helping hand” by making up for the fiscal deficits at local levels and significantly boosting local educational supply (gong & li, 2016), for every 100 million yuan increase in general transfer payment, the provincial financial input in education will rise by 18.4 million yuan (xiao & hou, 2018). other studies find that the existing promotion mechanism for local government officials tend to result in their neglect of investment in education and that transfer payment has little influence on local compulsory education due to the problems inherent in china’s transfer payment system (yang, 2016). in addition, some investigations of the relationship between financial expenditure and equalized development of educational results indicate that general financial expenditure in education has an “inverted u-shaped” impact on educational results. the increase in financial expenditure in education significantly reduces the negative effects of family economic status on student educational results, and thereby, relieves educational inequity to some extent (chen & zhi, 2017). public educational input accounts for 12.6% of the difference in school educational results. transfer payment, especially the special transfer payment, can promote the intergenerational mobility of human capital and expanding transfer payment can stimulate equalized development of human capital (fang, 2020). however, empirical research on the relationship between financial expenditure and educational results is insufficient and some problems remain to be ada fu & zhou. transfer payment and inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1408 dressed: i) few studies have investigated the direct association between transfer payment and student educational outcomes. most of the previous studies ignore the control of selective biases and the difference in sample characteristics between experimental group and control group, thus unable to reach relatively accurate and unbiased evaluation and research results; ii) most researchers use the general sampling data from all over the country and pay little attention to the special situations of poor areas in china. given that china is committed to eliminating “relative poverty” in the future, the present study is to focus its exploration on whether transfer payment aids in alleviating inequality in educational results in undeveloped areas and how to improve the human capital quality of children in impoverished households, with the purpose of providing empirical evidence to educational development in poor areas. research design sources of data to investigate the academic performance and living conditions of compulsory education students in impoverished areas in china, a project team was established in 2018 to conduct a field survey by random sampling on more than 180 primary and secondary schools in 18 key counties listed in the national poverty alleviation and development program in hubei, jiangxi, guizhou, sichuan, yunnan, and shan’xi province. a total of 7894 questionnaires were distributed and 7439 valid ones drawn after screening, with an effective rate of 94.23%. definition of variables this paper defines students with registration cards (to register households which are entitled to transfer payment) as the transfer-payment-entitled group, that is, the treatment group, and students without registration cards as transfer-payment-unentitled group, that is, the control group. to control individual characteristics, factors including student gender, being left-behind or not (when parents leave hometowns for job opportunities as migrant workers), boarding or not, grades, and urban or rural registered residence are incorporated as variables. factors like parental education levels, vocations, and family economic status are integrated to be home economic, social, and cultural status (hereafter referred to as home escs). home escs, together with family structures and family information capital (family’s possession of it devices and access to internet), is treated as variables related to student family backgrounds. as the survey is conducted in public schools, the present study need only to control two properties regarding school type: rural or urban school. to measure student academic achievements, the survey collects students’ scores of the last terminal exams in chinese, mathematics, and english. as test scores from different provinces cannot be compared directly, this study manages to standardize the exam papers for each grade in every school and the resulting scores of the three subjects are treated as dependent variables (chen, zhang, chen, & shi, 2018). methodology fu & zhou. transfer payment and inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1409 propensity score matching since the distribution of transfer payment funds is not completely random, there are remarkable differences in individual and family characteristics between the transfer payment-entitled group and the transfer-payment-unentitled group. a simplified calculation of the effects of transfer payment funds on student educational results is bound to produce biases, and thus, it is necessary to control the selective biases. this paper uses propensity score matching to control individual, family, and school characteristics and then, calculate the effects of transfer payment on compulsory education. to ensure the validity of the results of the model, the study employs different matching methods to verify the results. after computing the propensity value, the nearest neighbor matching is adopted to draw the conclusion, followed by robustness tests by radius matching, kernel matching, and mahalanobis distance matching. shapley value decomposition at the second phase of data analysis, shapley value decomposition is used to decompose the factors affecting the academic achievements of compulsory education students in poor areas, calculate the contribution of transfer payment to the student academic achievements in different subjects, and put forward specific suggestions for them. in addition, the quadratic terms of family socio-economic status and the interaction terms between transfer payment and home escs are included in the model. empirical results descriptive statistics descriptive statistics on the full sample, transfer-payment-entitled sample, and transferpayment-unentitled sample show that there are differences in student characteristics, family characteristics, and student academic achievements between the treatment group and the control group. however, they do not tell whether the differences are of statistical significance. to confirm whether the impact of student overall backgrounds on their access to transfer payment is statistically significant, this study conducts a regression analysis using “access to transfer payment” as dependent variables and student, family, and school characteristics as independent variables. the results indicates that apart from gender, being left behind or not, and school properties, the other variables have significant impact on whether students receive transfer payment or not. urban students’ probability of access to transfer payment is 74.7% lower than that of rural students; boarding students’ probability of access to transfer payment is 73.3% higher than nonboarding students; with the promotion of grade, students’ probability of access to transfer payment decreases slightly; the higher the rating of family escs, the lower the student’s probability of access to transfer payment; the probability of access to transfer payment of students from the normal family structure is significantly lower than that of students from special family structures; students’ probability of access to transfer payment is negatively correlated with the quantity of family information capital; the effect of the gender variable is not significant, indicating that there is no significant relationfu & zhou. transfer payment and inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1410 ship between the gender of children and the family economic status; the absence of parents as migrant workers has a negative effect on their left-behind children during their first year away from home, which is later replaced by a positive effect since incomes from their jobs in distant localities can improve the overall economic condition of the family, (gao et al., 2018). therefore, the access to transfer payment is correlated with individual and family characteristics, and it is necessary to control variables related to student background information. propensity score estimates to effectively reduce the impact of individual, family, and school characteristics on student educational results, this study uses the nearest neighbor matching to match the calculated propensity values and then conducts balance tests on the matching results. the results of t-tests denote that before matching, there exist significant differences between variables (except gender) of treatment group and control group while after matching, sample biases of most variables (except grades and being left behind or not) are reduced by over 90% and the absolute values of standard deviations are all below 20. after matching the sample of the treatment group with that of the control group, the study finds that the calculated results have changed to various degrees and that the overall effect of transfer payment on student educational results decreases, indicating that without the control of the background information of the sample, the results could be overestimated. before matching, there is a significant negative correlation between transfer payment and student academic achievements. when individual, family, and school characteristics controlled, “counterfactual estimation” can be conducted, which assumes that differences in student academic achievements result exclusively from the accessibility of transfer payment. the calculation of the average treatment effect (ate) of the treatment group reveals that after matching, the significance of the impact of transfer payment on student educational results is reduced. transfer payment significantly lowers mathematics results of students in poor areas by 4.2% while its influences on student chinese and english results are insignificant. robustness tests to verify the reliability of the matching results, after analyzing data by the nearest neighbor matching, the study carries out radius matching, kernel matching, and mahalanobis distance matching and confirms the results of the nearest neighbor matching. the pre-matching results indicate that transfer payment significantly lowers students’ chinese and mathematics results yet has no significant impact on english results; the post-matching results show that transfer payment has a significant negative impact on students’ mathematics results yet has no significant impact on chinese and english results. shapley value decomposition to make more detailed analysis of the effects of transfer payment on the student educational results in poor areas in china, shapley value decomposition is applied to decompose the factors influencing students’ chinese, mathematics, and english performance fu & zhou. transfer payment and inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1411 based on the results from propensity value matching. the results of svd indicate that when individual and family characteristics controlled, the access to transfer payment poses significant negative effects on students’ mathematics test scores, confirming the results of propensity score estimates. according to svd results, transfer payment accounts for 11.34% of the disparity in mathematics results among students and has no impact on chinese and english results, which denotes that transfer payment does not aid in alleviating the inequity of educational results in poor areas but rather aggravate the inequality. in addition, there is gender difference in student academic achievements in that boys’ english and chinese results are much lower than those of girls, while their mathematics results significantly higher than those of girls; urban and boarding students’ chinese results are remarkably lower than those of rural and non-boarding students; home escs yields the most significant effect on student academic achievements, accounting for 54.07%, 49.24%, and 47.34% differences in student chinese, mathematics, and english results respectively; students’ family structures significantly impact their mathematics and english results in that academic performance of students from normal families are superior to that of students from single-parent families; the school properties make significant differences to students’ english and chinese results as urban students typically perform better in english and chinese than their rural counterparts; the coefficient of interaction terms between home escs and entitlement to transfer payment is significantly negative, indicating that among students of same home socio-economic level, transfer payment poses negative impacts on their academic achievements. conclusions the present study, based on the survey data from 18 counties in 6 provinces in china, concludes different results from some of the previous studies. it finds that compared to students who are not entitled to transfer payment, those entitled to it perform worse in mathematics and that transfer payment has no significant effects on student english and chinese results. according to the educational production function, the decrease of educational output is caused by the reduction of educational input. the reasons for the results of this study are summarized as follows: the increase in transfer payment funds does not necessarily result in the rise of educational input at local levels. numerous studies of the relationship between transfer payment and local educational input have revealed the existence of “crowding effect” in educational funding, which means that the increase in transfer payment does not necessarily encourage the local government’s investment in education, but rather curtail local educational funds and weaken the local government’s commitment in boosting educational supply (fu & cui, 2010). the follow-up empirical studies further confirm that transfer payment has a significant negative impact on educational input. typically, 1% increase in transfer payment leads to 0.03% decreases in investment in education (yang, 2016). the present study reinforces the point of view of the previous studies by clarifying the negative effects of transfer payment on student academic performance. fu & zhou. transfer payment and inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1412 the most problematic counties included in the national poverty alleviation and development program have had long-standing financial difficulties. when the central government allocates them part of the transfer payment funds for poverty alleviation purpose, it is hard for those counties to prioritize education in decisionmaking of funding. they are inclined to use the funds on more pressing issues and take the economic development and infrastructure construction as top priorities. the continual increase in transfer payment results in shrinkage of educational funding. most transfer payment funds allocated to registered households are typically designated as funds for poverty alleviation through start-up business or employment. such funds are often “earmarked” to encourage poor households to engage in reproduction. meanwhile, funds for poverty alleviation through education are usually distributed by means of school operations, such as exemption from tuition and miscellaneous fees at compulsory education level, yearly subsidies of cash, and free lunch, etc. these measures may lead to parental neglect of family input in education. parents would believe that the state should take charge of their children’s education and it is no longer their responsibility to make investment in child education. as a result, the input in child education is reduced, and the inequality of educational results is further aggravated. differences in the effects of transfer payment on distinct subjects may be caused by their inherent features. for instance, transfer payment impacts student mathematics results most significantly because short-term efforts can make a difference to mathematics learning. the insignificant impact of transfer payment on student english and chinese performance is attributed to the fact that the overall english level of students in poor areas is relatively low and that the learning of chinese subjects requires long-term accumulation. references chen, c.j., & zhi, t.j. (2017). can the financial input in education effectively reduce the inequality of educational results? a study based on the data of china education panel survey. educational research, 38(7):68-78. chen, j., zhu, h. g., & weng, c. (2020). targeted poverty alleviation policy and rural relative poverty: a study of poverty-stricken villages and filing cards. journal of jiangsu university (social science edition), 22(5):39-51. chen, x., zhang, d.j., cheng, g., hu, t.q., & liu, g.z. (2018). the effects of teacher support and psychological suzhi on middle school students' academic achievement. psychological development and education, 34(6):707-714.doi: fu & zhou. transfer payment and inequality of compulsory education in poor areas. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1413 https://doi.org/10.16187/j.cnki.issn10014918.2018.06.09 fan, z. y. (2020). fiscal transfer payment and intergenerational mobility of human capital. chinese social sciences, 2020(9):48-67, 205. fu, w.d. (2021). relative poverty of students and strategies of poverty alleviation through education in the new era-based on the survey of 18 key counties in the national poverty alleviation and development program in 6 provinces in central and western china. journal of hebei normal university, 23(2):64-71. fu, w.d., & cui, m.c. (2010). research on the “crowding out effect” of rural compulsory education funds after the implementation of the “new mechanism”. modern education management, 2010(10):24-27. gao, y.j., bai, y., ma, y., & shi, y.j. (2018). positive and negative effects: a study on the impact of absence of parenthood on the academic performance of left-behind children. studies in labor economics, 6(3):97-113. gong, f. & li, z. (2016). “helping hand” or “incentive trap” -evaluation of the effectiveness of china’s balanced transfer payment. economic review, 2016(5):3-23. doi: https://doi.org/10.19361/j.er.2016.05.01 li, t., wu, z.h., zhou, h.x., & ran, s.l. (2020). the strategy of poverty alleviation through education after china's comprehensive construction of a well-off society under the 14th five year plan. research in educational development, 40(23):30-42. li, x.y., & zhang, j.s. (2018). the impact of public education input on school educational results an empirical study based on the data of 70 primary schools in hubei province. journal of zhongnan university of economics and law, 2018(6):81-88, 160. luo, q., & yu, f.f. (2021). the influence of student academic burden on academic achievement based on the results of survey on academic quality of compulsory education in s city. education measurement and evaluation, 2021(7):30-37. doi: https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2021.07 .004 ma, j., & hou, y.l. (2005). policymaking and budgeting processes in china’s provincial budget: investigation in two provinces. comparison of economic and social systems, 2005(5):64-72. xiao, j.h., & li, y.l. (2021). the effect of financial transfer payment on poverty alleviation of rural families in china. journal of zhongnan university of economics and law, 2021(1):58-66. xiao, p., & hou, s.j. (2018). the effect of special transfer payment on local educational supply-an empirical study based on 31 provincial panel data. jianghuai forum, 291(5):181-186, 193. yang, l.s. (2016). does transfer payment increase local educational expenditure? a study based on data of city levels from 2001 to 2009. educational research of tsinghua university, 37(3):74-84, 117. the chinese version of this article has been published in education & economy, 2021, 37(6):5361. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 付卫东，周威. (2021). 转移支付能否缩小贫困地区义务教育结果的不平等？ 基于 6 省 18 县 的实证分析. 教育与经济, 37(6):53-61. received: 03 february 2022 revised: 22 february 2022 accepted: 06 march 2022 https://doi.org/10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2018.06.09 https://doi.org/10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2018.06.09 https://doi.org/10.19361/j.er.2016.05.01 https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2021.07.004 https://doi.org/10.16518/j.cnki.emae.2021.07.004 article-weidongfu-bece_title_mar2022 article-weidongfu--bece_maintextmar2022 bece. newsletter vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1839 the effects of metacognitive teaching on student academic performance: a meta-analysis of relevant experimental and quasi-experimental studies over the past 20 years by shi, l., cheng, c.k. eric, zheng, x., & liu, d. correspondence to: lan shi, south china normal university, china. e-mail: shilan.shilan@163.com he ability to “learn to how to learn,” by common consent, is one of the key competences that students need to succeed in the 21st century. the concept of metacognition, viewed as central to this ability, was first advanced by flavell, a cognitive psychologist, to denote the individual’s knowledge and understanding of cognitive processes. it is a higher-order thinking ability, involving the learner’s active control of cognitive processes as well use of metacognitive support to plan and adjust learning. metacognitive teaching is a pedagogy that requires the teacher to guide students to contemplate on their learning process and actively solve problems. it is also a practical instructional framework that consists of students, teachers, metacognitive teaching strategies, and the learning environment. this study explores the impact of metacognitive teaching on student academic performance and related moderating variables using the meta-analytic technique. it aims to provide valuable insights to educators for their appropriate and flexible adoption of metacognitive teaching in education and to contribute to the advancement of the key competence-focused curriculum reform. the analysis results show that:  metacognitive teaching has a significantly positive impact on student academic performance. it effectively improves students’ thinking ability and academic achievement by emphasizing their self-reflection in the process of problem solving, thus enhancing the value of the instructional system at large.  the moderating effects of teaching strategies, learning phases, and subjects on the relation between the metacognitive teaching and student academic performance are significant, whereas those of student learning ability and teaching durations are not. the use of teaching assessment that combines pme (plan, monitoring, and evaluation) and metacognitive knowledge can most effectively boost student academic performance. t mailto:shilan.shilan@163.com vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1840 the study proposes recommendations on metacognitive teaching as follows: i. encourage reflective analysis and the development of thinking patterns in students; create teaching scenarios that facilitate knowledge transfer. ii. use multiple metacognitive teaching strategies to support students enhancing planning and metacognitive knowledge and establishing integrated knowledge and skill structure. iii. develop individualized and stratified metacognitive teaching models to heighten the matching of teaching and learning. iv. set legitimate teaching durations and encourage interdisciplinary learning. v. create teaching design from the developmental perspective; assist students in developing into self-directed metacognitive learners. source: research in educational research, 2023; 43(18):45-52. bece. newsletter vol.13, no.2, 2023 1725 family cultural capital and child social skills: the mediating effects of maternal childcare competence and maternal rough parenting by yang, j., zhang, l., li, w., & tao, y. c. correspondence to: yachen tao, university of the west of england, uk. e-mail: 1968191087@qq.com ocial skills are essential to social adaptability and exchanges of the individual and have a significant impact on their academic and professional attainment. individuals with superior social skills can perceive higher self-value while those with underdeveloped ones are more susceptible to mental problems due to their inability to properly interact with the external world. family cultural capital poses direct effects on social skill development of the child, and they can be mediated by maternal childcare competence and the degree of roughness of maternal parenting. this study sampled 750 children aged between three and seven years old from 5 kindergartens in yunnan province to investigate their family cultural capital, the level of their social skill development, childcare competence and parenting style of their mothers. researchers distributed 750 electronic questionnaires and retrieved 705 valid ones, which constituted 94% of the total number of questionnaires. the majority of them were completed by mothers, with a small portion being filled out by other guardians. research findings demonstrated that family cultural capital was positively correlated with social skill development of the child, indicating that the more family cultural capital, the higher the level of social skill development of the child. furthermore, family cultural capital was also positively related to maternal childcare competence, and so was maternal childcare competence to social skill development of the child. the more family cultural capital, the higher the maternal childcare competence; the higher the maternal childcare competence, the higher the level of social skill development of the child. at the same time, the degree of roughness of maternal parenting was negatively correlated with family cultural capital, and so was maternal childcare competence with child social skills. that indicated that in the family with less cultural capital and lower maternal childcare competence, the mother treated the children more roughly and the children generally had less developed social skills. additionally, it was discovered that maternal childcare competence could effectively mediate the relation between family cultural capital and sos mailto:1968191087@qq.com vol.13, no.2, 2023 1726 cial skill development of the child, with a mediating effect constituting 4.6% of the overall effect; that the degree of roughness of maternal parenting could also effectively mediate the relation between family cultural capital and social skill development of the child, with a mediating effect accounting for 18.9% of the overall effect; and that maternal childcare competence and the degree of roughness of maternal parenting had a significant chain mediating effect on the relation between family cultural capital and child social skills, which made up 2.5% of the overall effect. source: studies in preschool education, 2022; 2022(11):75-78. the influence of teacher gender on student human capital development: an empirical study based on data from china education panel survey wenyan liang, 1 tao li, 2 qian he 1 1. faculty of education/capital institute for economics of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. 2. institute of higher education, shanghai university of finance and economics, shanghai 200433, china abstract: based on data from china education panel survey, this article examined the impact of teacher gender on student human capital development at the junior secondary education level. the research findings showed that female teachers were more capable of promoting cognitive and non-cognitive ability development of both girl and boy students than their male counterparts; and that student cognitive and non-cognitive performance was significantly and negatively related to the increase in the percentages of male teachers in the class and school. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 13(2):1703-1707. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar036 how to cite: liang, w., li, t., & he, q. (2023). the influence of teacher gender on student human capital development: an empirical study based on data from china education panel survey. best evidence in chinese education, 13(2):1703-1707. keywords: teacher gender, gender imbalance, cognitive ability, non-cognitive ability, human capital development liang et al. (beijing & shanghai). teacher gender and student human capital development. bece, vol.13, no.2, 2022 1704 correspondence to: wenyan liang, faculty of education/capital institute for economics of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. e-mail: wenyan_liang@163.com conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:wenyan_liang@163.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ liang et al. (beijing & shanghai). teacher gender and student human capital development. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1705 introduction over the past several decades, chinese basic education staff have been increasingly feminized. from 2001 to 2020, the percentages of female full-time teachers in chinese primary and junior secondary schools increased from 49.65% and 40.37% to 74.67% and 86.23%, respectively. it sparked wide concern that teacher gender imbalance may pose an unfavorable impact on basic education students, especially boy students, as they are in the critical stage of human capital development (heckman et al., 2006). as a result, in the teacher training sector, some scholars proposed to encourage male students to apply for universities of teachers by offering preferential conditions such as lowered admission scores and tuition fee reduction to expand the number of male teacher candidates (zhai, 2013). some teachers’ colleges have formulated and implemented special enrollment policies with which male students could be admitted with lower gaokao scores, and some local education departments have launched free pre-service education projects for male students. can teacher gender balance policies successfully promote student human capital development? this study utilized data from china education panel survey (ceps) 2014-2015 to examine the impact of teacher gender and gender composition on student human capital development and paid special attention to indicators of student cognitive and non-cognitive performance which are closely related to male teachers’ advantages. data and variables source of data this study was based on ceps’ baseline data in the academic year of 2013-2014 and follow-up data in the academic year of 2014-2015. the sample was made up of 9075 junior secondary school students from 111 schools across the country who participated in the survey as the seventh and eighth graders as well as 288 class teachers and 244 math teachers of these students. variable selection variables in this study included student human capital (measured by student cognitive and non-cognitive performance); teacher gender; the percentage of male teachers at the organizational level; control variables comprised of student, family, and school characteristics. balance check to ensure that the fixed effects model of schools was less affected by the sample selection bias, balance check was conducted to confirm there were no correlations between teacher gender and student characteristics among different classes. research findings liang et al. (beijing & shanghai). teacher gender and student human capital development. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1706 the influence of teacher gender on student human capital development the benchmark model estimation results showed that in terms of the influence of teacher gender on student cognitive performance, the coefficients of male teachers are significantly negative in the models with student math scores and cognitive ability test scores as dependent variables; regarding the impact of teacher gender on student non-cognitive performance, the coefficient of male teachers is negative but not significant in the model with student creativity as the dependent variable, while in all other models, the coefficients of male teachers are significantly negative. the results indicate that female teachers can generally better promote student human capital development than their male counterparts. the teacher-student gender matching effect in the influence of teacher gender on student human capital development to check the teacher-student gender matching effect is to examine whether female teachers can more effectively enhance human capital of girl students than male teachers and whether male teachers can more successfully increase human capital of boys than female teachers. the coefficient of the variable of teacher gender generated by the random intercept model estimation is almost the same in value and significance as that resulted from the benchmark model estimation. the results of the four robustness checks were consistent with the benchmark model estimates, which showed that the latter were basically reliable and validated that compared with female teachers, male teachers have a negative impact on the improvement of student cognitive and non-cognitive performance. the effect of teacher gender composition on student human capital development with the increase in the percentages of male teachers in the school and class, the growth of human capital among students declined to varying degrees. conclusions it can be concluded that compared with their male counterparts, female teachers can more significantly promote student human capital; that compared with their female counterparts, male teachers are less capable of improving boy students’ cognitive and non-cognitive performance (except for creativity); and that the increase in the proportions of male teachers in the school and class negatively affects student cognitive and non-cognitive performance. liang et al. (beijing & shanghai). teacher gender and student human capital development. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1707 the analysis from the perspective of teacher qualifications and behavioral emotions demonstrated that female teachers are more successful in establishing close teacherstudent relationships, making students perceive teachers’ concern about them, incorporating information technologies into instruction, and delivering praise in proper ways, which all contribute to their outperforming male teachers in promoting student human capital development. references heckman, j. j., stixrud, j., & urzua, s. (2006). the effects of cognitive and noncognitive abilities on labor market outcomes and social behavior. journal of labor economics, 24(3):411 -482. zhai, c. c. (2013) causes of teacher gender imbalance in basic education and countermeasures. journal of the chinese society of education, 2013(3):112-113. the chinese version of this article has been published in education & economy, 2022, 38(6):35-44. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 梁文艳, 李涛 & 何茜. 教师性别对学生人力资本发展的影响—基于中国教育追踪调查数据的实 证研究. 教育与经济, 2022, 38(6):35-44. received: 10 january 2023 revised: 01 february 2023 accepted: 04 march 2023 ar2-wenyanliang-bece_titlemarch_2023 ar2-wenyanliang-bece_maintextmarch2023 bece. newsletter vol.12, no.2, 2022 1658 a longitudinal study on the immediate and long-term effects of television exposure on preschoolers’ executive function by xiong, y. c., yu, h. x., liu, y. p., & li, h. correspondence to: hui li, central china normal university, china. e-mail: huilipsy@mail.ccnu.edu.cn xecutive function comprises a series of higher-order cognitive abilities of individuals that can effectively regulate their behavior and thinking. it has three main components: working memory, inhibition, and set shifting. young children need to use their executive function to make plans, eliminate interference, keep focused, and memorize and retain information, as well as to adapt themselves to different rules and perform self-monitoring. childhood executive function affects children’s development in various aspects, such as psychology, social adaptation, early language ability, etc. it can also predict their later academic achievements and lay a foundation for the development of higher cognitive competences in their adulthood. television is one of the most popular electronic media. existing research on the impact of television exposure on child development found that children’s television viewing time is somewhat correlated with their executive function. this study adopted longitudinal research design and lasted for one year, aiming to examine the immediate and long-term effects of television exposure on preschoolers’ executive function. cluster sampling were conducted in three kindergartens in ningbo city of zhejiang province and a total of 289 subjects included in the study with 29 kids in the 2-year-old group, 74 in the 3-year-old group, 65 in the 4-year-old group, and 121 in the 5-year-old group. the media use questionnaire (parents’ version) and the preschool children’s executive function scale were used to collect children’s data in the first, sixth, and twelfth months through the same process. the cross-lagged regression was applied in data analysis. the research results showed that, over time, children’s executive function scored significantly more points in the 12th month than at the outset and in the 6th month of the study. at all three points of investigation, children spent more time watching tv on weekends than weekdays, and their weekly television viewing time was negatively related to their executive function, demonstrating that has an immediate negative impact on their executive function. however, television exposure could not predict children’s e mailto:huilipsy@mail.ccnu.edu.cn vol.12, no.2, 2022 1659 executive function in a long term, indicating that the longitudinal connection between television viewing time and executive function in young children is not significant. the study makes the following suggestions to parents of preschool children: (i) avoid exposing children to television at too early an age; (ii) set a time limit on children’s television watching; (iii) enrich children’s home activities during weekends and holidays; (iv) engage in high-quality parentchild interaction and reduce dependence on digital games. source: studies in preschool education, 2022; 2022(8):53-63. bece. newsletter vol.13, no.1, 2023 1693 lecturing, discussion, or interaction: the heterogenous effects of teaching methods on academic achievements of junior secondary school students by feng, q. x. & ma, l. p. correspondence to: liping ma, graduate school of education, peking university, china. e-mail: lpma@pku.edu.cn urrently, the traditional teacher lecturing-dominated instruction remains the prevalent teaching method in chinese basic education. in recent years, as a result of the deepening curriculum reform, teachers have increased the use of group discussion in classroom teaching. in this article, teaching methods were classified into three categories: teacher lecturing, group discussion, and teacher-student interaction. based on the baseline survey and follow-up data of china education panel survey (ceps), the study used the difference-in-differences (did) model and the psm (propensity score matching) -did model to examine the respective effects of the three teaching approaches on student academic achievements in chinese, mathematics, and english. the study utilized the baseline survey data of ceps in the academic year of 20132014 and the follow-up data in the academic year of 20142015. the student sample included 7,826 junior secondary school students who were randomly sampled from 438 classes of 112 junior secondary schools in 28 counties (districts) across the country. obtained from the teacher database were the data of 246 chinese teachers, 239 math teachers and 234 english teachers who have been teaching the sampled students since they were in grade seven. mid-term examination results of the student are the dependent variable in this study. the core independent variable is the teaching method of the instructor teacher lecturing, group discussion, and teacher-student interaction. the control variables include students’ individual characteristics, family background, personal effort, and parental discipline; and teachers’ gender, professional title, administrative position and teaching awards. the research findings showed that increasing group discussion in chinese and math classes is beneficial to student performance, but the opposite is true in the english class; and that teacher lecturing and teacher-student interaction also help improve student academic achievement in chinese. furthermore, the teaching method should be adjusted to the academic level of c mailto:lpma@pku.edu.cn vol.13, no.1, 2023 1694 various classes and students. chinese language teachers should lecture more in classes of lower academic level, lecture less and increase teacher-student interaction in classes of medium level, and organize more group discussions in those of higher academic level; in chinese teaching, group discussions are particularly beneficial to above-average students in high achieving classes. math teachers should lecture less and reduce teacher-student interaction in classes of lower academic level, and increase group discussion in those of higher academic level; in math instruction, group discussion also benefits the high achieving students in classes of medium academic level. english teachers should lecture less, reduce group discussion, and increase teacher-student interaction in low achieving classes, restrict the amount of group discussion and teacher-student interaction in classes of medium academic level, and lecture more in those of higher academic level; teacher lecturing is particularly favorable to english performance of below-average students in high achieving classes. source: journal of educational science of hunan normal university, 2022; 2022(5):90-100. exploration of the research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye weijie meng, fengqi ning nanjing yutong experimental school, nanjing 211100, china abstract. “new basic education” as a localized strategy in china was produced during the social transformation. it aims to stimulate the internal development motivation of schools, principals, and teachers and promote the upgrading and transformation of classrooms and schools. to get through theory and practice connection, taking root in schools, doing “ground-based” research, and exploring a new path for the ecological growth of regional school groups. starting from the background of the “new basic education” research, this paper elaborates the content, history, ideological system, and influence. it hopes to provide a more comprehensive and objective overview of the “new basic education” research to inspire most educators. help everyone explore the practical way to improve the quality of education. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 8(2):1121-1130. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.re048. how to cite: meng, w., & ning, f. (2021). exploration of the research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. best evidence in chinese education, 8(2):1121-1130. keywords: “new basic education”, research content, research process, research thought, overview about the author: weijie meng, principal of nanjing yutong experimental school, 22 jiangjun avenue, jiangning district, nanjing city, jiangsu, china 211100. e-mail: 13608955415@126.com correspondence to: fengqi ning, nanjing yutong experimental school, 22 jiangjun avenue, jiangning district, nanjing city, jiangsu, china 211100. e-mail: 872225979@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:13608955415@126.com mailto:872225979@qq.com meng & ning. research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1122 background of “new basic education” rom a historical perspective, whenever society underwent a significant transformation, people’s criticism of education often started from value criticism, from a re-recognition of the value and purpose of education, and using this as the basis and starting point then to realistic educational activities. eventually, they made a more specific evaluation and proposed new principles, plans, and methods (ye, 2002). from the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century, china was in a particular period of social development and transformation, and its spirit of the times had the characteristics of “focusing on the future, emphasizing development, and basing on change.” at the same time, genuine reform had brought about the inherent need of “focusing on choice” and “calling people’s subjective spirit (ye, 2006a). in the early 1980s, lan ye was engaged in basic theoretical research on pedagogy, and she felt that our pedagogical thinking was rigid and the conclusions were too simple. what’s more serious was that there were no real people or only “one-sided” people in pedagogy. we only studied how to teach people to understand the outside world and forgot that the most important half is how to make people learn to know and develop themselves. in 1994, professor ye once again went deep into reality and believed that the metaphysical understanding of the existence and development of human life in education should not treat students as things and should not treat students differently. it was necessary to regard the enhancement of people’s consciousness of life as the important provisions of the times on education. she started the research on “new basic education” (li, 2004). her research aimed to create a new type of primary education that conforms to china’s spirit. the study of contemporary development and changes in chinese society made a big impact on school education reforms. at the same time, china launched the eighth basic education curriculum reform. 1 this “curriculum reform” clearly proposed the “new curriculum reform.” it can be said that the “new” in the “new basic education” is a response to this “new curriculum reform,” and it is also a discussion and practice of contemporary chinese social development and educational values reform (ye, 1994). research content of “new basic education” the research content of “new basic education” includes two aspects: theory and practice. these two aspects are intertwined and grow together in the process of research. in the research and exploration stage, a moderately leading theory and close integration of theory and practice were proposed. the research process has evolved into promoting the experimental research results of the “new basic education,” continuously researching the combination of theory and practice. therefore, the main contents of developmental research are as follows: the background and overall research of school’s transformational change f meng & ning. research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1123 the developmental research of “new basic education” is dedicated to revealing the internal relationship between social transformation and school transformation, revealing the fundamental aspects of school transformation and the essential characteristics of new schools, as well as the basic strategies and paths to achieve school transformation, and then forming the theory of “school transformation.” in this sense, it can be said that the “new basic education” theory is a theory of educational change about school transformation (ye, 2004). the basic theory and practice update in the school’s transformational reform in the stage of exploratory research, through a critical analysis of the problems in school education and their causes, the theoretical discussion was focused on the renewal of the educational concept system, the renewal of the school education training target system, and the renewal of the basic activities of school education (ye, 1999). on the one hand, developmental research strengthens the theoretical research on the reform of school management and the academic research on the development of teachers and students in the “dual transformation” of contemporary society and schools to form a relatively complete “new basic education” theory. at the same time, it has strengthened the basic issues of a series of educational theories involved in the “new basic education” and updated research on school training goals, classroom teaching, class construction, teacher development, school management evaluation, and other aspects. systematic and in-depth study of the teaching reform of basic subjects in elementary and middle schools the “new basic education” experiment has researched the teaching reform of three basic chinese, mathematics, and foreign languages in primary and middle schools and has expanded in-depth systematization and application. it enables the theory of classroom teaching reform in the “new basic education” to be embodied in the teaching reform theory of significant disciplines. it also enriches and develops with the help of theoretical research on teaching reform of marked fields. at the same time, it also has a pivotal role in the teaching reform practice of experimental schools (ye & wu, 2004). methodological research on the path and strategy of school transformational change research, educational theory, and educational practice in the research and development process of “new basic education,” on the one hand, breakthroughs have been made in the understanding of the relationship between educational theory and practice. on the other hand, the research also reflects the richness of the relationship between academic theory and educational training. researchers deeply meng & ning. research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1124 feel that the multiple and rich connections between educational theory and educational practice are an essential issue that cannot be avoided in the development of pedagogy and educational practice in contemporary china. it is a reflective issue of academic research itself and belongs to scholarly research. it is also a methodological study of “new basic education” as a research project. “new basic education” research history the “new basic education” reform can be roughly divided into five internally connected development stages. they are the exploratory research stage, the developmental research stage, the shaping research stage, the grounded research stage, and the ecological research stage. exploratory research stage (september 1994september 1999) in the early 1990s, after conducting a series of in-depth reflections and theoretical constructions on basic education, lan ye began to turn his research perspective to the field of basic education practice. at the beginning of the study, professor ye and several other researchers from east china normal university discussed shanghai wai gao qiao free trade zone experimental elementary school guodong chen and vice-principal yu zhang to carry out a voluntary collaborative study. in the pilot research stage, the research team members determined the research plan on the one hand. they proposed the basic theoretical concept system (“three views and ten characteristics”) 2 related to the overall reform of contemporary school education. under the existing conditions, carry out limited basic research (ye, 2006b). at this stage, the breakthrough was to change the original classroom teaching pattern of “teacher speaks for words, and a few good students play the leading role.” the “time,” “space,” “tools,” “right to question,” and “right to comment” were returned to students to form a new classroom space-time structure. structural adjustments were made to the teaching content, and a “teaching structure” was proposed in the classroom so that students could learn to “use the structure,” forming a “long-term two-stage teaching.” in 1997, the “new basic education” research was approved as the national educational science “ninth five-year plan” project of the ministry of education. since then, the “new basic education” experiment began to be studied in a broader range. by 2000, there were 55 core experimental schools in chongming county, shanghai, and more than 200 schools were radiated. in may 1999, shanghai new basic education research institute was established. in the same year, the “developmental and promotional research on new basic education” was officially launched. meng & ning. research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1125 developmental research stage (september 1999-may 2004) when the developmental research on “new basic education” started in september 1999, it did not establish a project in the country. the study was carried out by the east china normal university project team, 17 schools in minhang district, and four schools in chongming county. in the past five years, since inheriting the original experience, the research team members have developed and deepened the systematic research of the school change theory. from the core of research and its impact on practice, the “new basic education” still focuses on classroom teaching (ye, 2004), forming a series of new indicators for teaching evaluation, guiding teachers’ teaching design, teaching process, and teaching reflection. in addition, during this period, the research was extended to many provinces and cities in coastal areas and received support from relevant regional leaders. the east china normal university research team members traveled to pilot schools and regions every semester, and pilot schools were held in an area every semester. in the exchange seminars, the research tradition of the “new basic education” community has been formed. in may 2004, the “new basic education” theory and the promotion and developmental research topic problem-solving conference were held in shanghai, and at the same time, it hosted a nationwide on-site seminar. “developmental research” results were reflected in a series of “new basic education” developmental research books edited by lan ye. shaping research stage (june 2004-june 2009) this stage is where the “new basic education” research begins to reflect and refine the theory and practice. the focus of research has been shifted from “classroom” to “basic education reform and overall school transformational reform.” the research team has done research and practice in the school leadership to improve leadership team reform, such as institutional reform, system reform, leadership concept system update, and overall school reform planning, and deepen the reform of the teaching system based on disciplines. at the same time, the research team has also strengthened the evaluation research and “checking” each experimental school by grade to promote the involvement of more teachers in deepening research (ye, 2020). on this basis, the “guidelines for teaching reform of subjects” such as chinese, mathematics and english are refined to realize the systematic structure of rich, original experience and typical cases in the daily teaching reform research of “new basic education.” in may 2009, the “new basic education” formability research achievement release and on-site seminar were held in shanghai. the “new basic education” shaping research series was launched at the conference. grounded research phase (october 2009-may 2012) meng & ning. research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1126 the notable changes in the research subject, research methods, and research horizons of the research in the formability stage have activated the initiative and creativity of each school in the symbiote. some schools have created typical experiences in different fields and achieved significant development results. grounded research is a test of whether the “new basic education” system theory can bring about the accelerated development and high-quality completion of the school after its formation. therefore, the main research task is to transform the current results into the daily education and teaching research process through “forward and follow-up” discussions, become the conscious change of behavior of principals and teachers, and extend it to all disciplines. model research and quality courses are the carriers to deepen and improve the research results, making this achievement rooted in every teacher, every school, and every regional action. in may 2012, 9 “new basic education” base schools were selected as the first batch of “life-practice” pedagogy cooperative research schools. ecological research stage (2012-present) since 2011, the minhang district of shanghai took the lead in carrying out the “new basic education” ecological zone research; four regions across the country (shanghai, changzhou, huaiyin, and qingdao) have formed 14 ecological groups of varying sizes and numbers. all participating schools are jointly developed to create a “new basic education” ecological national symbiosis. therefore, at this stage, research is no longer taking a school and an area as an environmental area, but with the cultivated cooperative schools as the core, forming a permanent leader school, a rotating leader school, and a backbone school, etc. the echelon development pattern of the ecological zone in china and promote the reform results. at the same time, through ecological activities, local teaching and research forces in experimental schools and regions have been cultivated. in minhang district, shanghai, 256 principals, and teachers have become parttime researchers and formed the district’s evaluation team. in may 2018, at the 10th national symbiosis conference of “new basic education,” professor lan ye reported on the theme of “research on ‘new basic education’ in the new era,” re-establishing the “life-practice” pedagogy the highest goal of education-”naturally.” under its influence, this research has continued to this day. “new basic education” theoretical system construction the construction of new basic education values education has the role of guiding the value of life. it gives students correct life guidance, builds a pillar of the spiritual level of students, and lays a foundation for students’ knowledge, ability, and moral foundation. at the same time, it should also cultivate students’ living abilities, communication skills, etc., and comprehensively improve stumeng & ning. research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1127 dents’ abilities. it teaches students to love life, study, and work and helps students establish a positive and healthy life goal. under the view of life education, education should focus on students’ spiritual growth and then impart knowledge to students. therefore, the value of the new basic education must be reflected in people’s knowledge level and based on people’s life development and promote the comprehensive development of students’ moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, and labor. the comprehensive sublimation from knowledge education to emotional education can cultivate people who meet the needs of modern values (“new educational experiment” research group, & zhang, 2006). the construction of the value of students in new basic education the concept of students constructed in the new basic education is as follows: first, respect for students’ differences in education is the primary criterion, proceed from reality, and teach students by their aptitude. use a unified educational mechanism and model to be applied to students with individual differences in a targeted manner. second, attach importance to the cultivation of students’ initiative and constantly cultivate students’ active learning ability to change from passive to active. at the same time, students must be able to think deeply, be strong, optimistic, and have a positive attitude. third, fully tap the students’ potential and let them realize their unlimited potential (wang, 2018). the construction of the value of teachers in new basic education the concept of teachers constructed in the new basic education is: first, clearly recognize the role of teachers, emphasize the meaning and value of teachers’ lives, respect teachers and their labor. at the same time, we must respect our development, enhance our spiritual needs, and work for education to provide an excellent educational or research environment and academic funding support. second, pay attention to teachers’ differences, point out teachers’ education mistakes, correct them to educate students correctly, mobilize teachers’ educational significance with the most incredible enthusiasm, and respect each life and individual with a broad mind. the construction of curriculum value in new basic education the main goal of education and teaching is curriculum education. the curriculum is the foundation of students’ learning, the key to students’ mastery of skills, and the carrier of students’ knowledge and shaping their character. therefore, the rationality of curriculum design is the key to education. the curriculum concept of the new basic education construction is as follows: first, the content of the curriculum should be expanded with theory, theory combined with practice, academic integration with life, and natural intemeng & ning. research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1128 gration with humanities. it is necessary to teach students professional knowledge and skills and to broaden students’ horizons. second, set up a reasonable curriculum structure, strengthen the comprehensive curriculum, expand students’ thinking ability and thinking ability, deeply tap students’ learning potential, encourage students’ innovative spirit, observe the details of daily life, and integrate life into the curriculum. life is the source of knowledge (ye, 2002). the construction of the teaching value in new basic education compared with the traditional teaching process where the teacher is the instructor, and the student is only the role setting of the learner, the new basic education emphasizes the teacher’s teaching ability, teaching initiative, and teaching advancement. teaching activities, “teaching” and “learning” must be integrated and cannot be carried out independently. teachers and students should incorporate into each other’s roles. teachers should interact with students in the classroom, cultivate mutual understanding, learn from each other, complement each other, enhance and promote each other, teachers and students grow together. the overall teaching process is necessary to strengthen the teacher-student interaction and stimulate teachers’ and students’ creativity. the teaching concept of the new basic education construction is: first, the primary task of education is to “put people first” and change the traditional view of “emphasis on cognition and light of emotion” and “emphasis on education and education.” the new basic education should emphasize emotion and pay attention to experience life, the formation of students’ good morals, and the cultivation of personality. second, change the viewpoint of imparting knowledge from passive to active. transform “teaching knowledge to students” into “guiding students to learn knowledge.” as a result, traditional teaching methods are transformed into valuable teaching methods so that students can experience a meaningful learning state (zhao, 2009). the impact of “new basic education” research from the exploratory research in the 1990s to the extensional and developmental research in the first five years of the twentieth century, to the subsequent shaping research, the “new basic education” has always focused on the social and educational issues in the transitional period of china. from the classroom and class level to the school level, the theory and logic continue to advance, and the research and practice continue to expand. through a comprehensive reflection on traditional school education, the theoretical and practical concept of “new basic education” was put forward, leading the trend of basic education research and practice in china at the turn of the century, and directly spawning china’s first localized education school, namely “life-practical education school,” a feasible way for china’s educational innovation (ji & shen, 2009). the theoretical and practical research on the “new basic education” initiated and led by professor lan ye still attracts most elementary and middle schools. it is remeng & ning. research-based “new basic education” experiment by lan ye. vol.8, no. 2, 2021 1129 ported that the new basic education has been deeply involved in the education and teaching reform of more than 200 schools in 12 provinces and cities, including shanghai, beijing, jiangsu, zhejiang, shandong, and henan, and has driven more than 3,000 teachers and tens of thousands of students to conduct research together. it has had a wide range of influences at home and abroad (wang, 2019). however, we must also see that the “new basic education” research is not strictly rigorous evidence-based research in education. compared with similar foreign studies, such as the “success for all” reform of american schools carried out by american scholar robert slavin and others, the “new basic education” research mainly focuses on observation method, conversation method, and case method. less use of test methods, experimental methods, etc., which is essentially more similar to the promotion and practice of a teaching method and idea, leading to some conclusions of its research is also open to question. notes 1. china’s new round of basic education curriculum reform was officially launched in 1999. from january to june 2000, the development group of curriculum standards for various disciplines was established through the application and review. from july 2000 to february 2001, each development group formed the first draft of the curriculum standard based on unique research. in march 2021, the department of basic education of the ministry of education will solicit opinions from educators, experts, and scholars in 9 regions to revise the curriculum standards of various subjects further. in july, the ministry of education promulgated the “basic education curriculum reform outline (trial).” a few days ago, the national curriculum standards covering 18 subjects of compulsory education in elementary and middle schools had been developed and entered the basic education curriculum reform experimental area on september 1. the new round of basic education curriculum reform will promote the comprehensive implementation of quality education in basic education, objectives, and content. the new curriculum reform has continued to this day. 2. lan ye et al. proposed in 1999 that it refers to the future, vitality, and sociality of basic education in values; the initiative, potential, and difference of students in the view of students; the bilateral synchronicity of educational activities in the opinion of school educational activities flexible structure, dynamic generation, and comprehensive permeability. references ji, l., & shen, z. 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[chinese] https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal -shjz2009z2096.htm received: 07 february 2021 revised: 02 march 2021 accepted: 29 march 2021 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1673-4289.2004.06.026 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1673-4289.2004.06.026 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfd2003-jyky200306002.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfd2003-jyky200306002.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-jaos201835023.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-jaos201835023.htm https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1653356659616456476&wfr=spider&for=pc https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1653356659616456476&wfr=spider&for=pc http://www.cqvip.com/qk/96925x/199410/1003301541.html http://www.cqvip.com/qk/96925x/199410/1003301541.html https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1004-7549.2003.02.005 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1004-7549.2003.02.005 https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-rmjy200607002.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-rmjy200607002.htm http://hyxx.zledu.com/photos/201409/82_20140924092516187.doc http://hyxx.zledu.com/photos/201409/82_20140924092516187.doc http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-lnjy200403022.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-lnjy200403022.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xzrk200603007.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xzrk200603007.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-shjz2009z2096.htm https://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-shjz2009z2096.htm review-fengqining-bece_title_july2021 review-fengqining--bece_maintextjuly2021 bece. newsletter bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1342 mathematics anxiety and its impact on academic achievement: research on the impact mechanism based on a large-scale assessment in province z by he, s. q. & qi, c., x. correspondence to: qi, c. x., beijing normal university, china. e-mail: qichxia@126.com he study (published in educational research and experiment) surveyed 42644 eighth-grade students from 11 prefecture-level cities in province z. it evaluates the eighth graders’ academic performance in mathematics by measuring their cognitive abilities in learning, understanding, and application in the study of algebra, graphics and geometry, and statistics and probability. manifestations of mathematics anxiety and its impact on student academic achievements are examined. the mathematics anxiety questionnaire includes four dimensions, namely, class anxiety, homework anxiety, problemsolving anxiety, and test anxiety. research results:  analysis of students’ propensities in the four dimensions of mathematics anxiety indicates that students have the highest propensity for test anxiety, lower one for class anxiety, and the lowest for homework and problem-solving anxiety.  in terms of gender differences in student mathematics anxiety, girls have higher levels of class anxiety and test anxiety than boys, and boys have higher levels of homework anxiety than girls. in terms of regional differences in student mathematics anxiety, the more backward the economy and education of the region, the higher the level of student mathematics anxiety. from the perspective of different school types, students in public schools experience higher levels of mathematics anxiety than those in private schools. academic levels are closely related to mathematics anxiety levels in that students with lower academic levels tend to report higher levels of homework anxiety and problem-solving anxiety, and those with narrow passes in exams undergo the highest levels of class anxiety and test anxiety.  in this study, class anxiety and problem-solving anxiety are independent variables, homework anxiety and test anxiety intert mailto:qichxia@126.com bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1343 mediary variables, and student academic performance in mathematics the dependent variable for path analysis. the results show that both class anxiety and problem-solving anxiety intensify homework anxiety and test anxiety, resulting in negative impacts on student academic performance in mathematics. nevertheless, test anxiety has a weak positive effect on student academic performance in mathematics. given the negative influence of mathematics anxiety on student academic performance in mathematics, appropriate teaching methods should be adopted to help students alleviate and eliminate this negative academic mood. in addition, parents’ and teachers’ anxiety about mathematics will also aggravate students’ mathematics anxiety. therefore, teachers and parents should avoid influencing students negatively with their own mathematics anxiety. students with low academic levels should be given more help and encouragement. student homework burden should be kept at a proper level so that students can learn in a pleasant atmosphere. source: educational research and experiment, 2020(2):82-89. differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students: individual, family, and social structures yuna hou, fuli li southwest university, chongqing 400715, china abstract. this paper studies the current differences in educational expectations between urban and rural students and explores the mechanism from the individual/family and school/society perspectives. the results show significant differences in expectations between rural and urban junior high school students for going on to higher education. in addition, urban students’ educational expectations are higher than that of rural and migrant students. these differences are caused by the students’ cognitive ability, family background, and school environment, among which the influence of family background is larger than that of cognitive ability, while the effect of the school’s hukou structure is the most important influencing factor. the results suggest that building a desirable school education atmosphere, alleviating hukou segregation in schools, and strengthening the integration of widely diverse school populations are important approaches to promoting educational and social equity in china. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 10(1):1315-1335. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ar003. how to cite: hou, y., & li, f. (2022). differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students: individual, family, and social structures. best evidence in chinese education, 10(1):1315-1335. keywords: educational expectations, rural–urban differences, individual and family factors, socio-structural factors hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no.1, 2022 1316 about authors: fuli li, faculty of education, southwest university, chongqing 400715, china, e-mail: lifuli0630@163.com correspondence to: yuna hou, research institute for education and psychology of southwestern ethnic groups & faculty of education, southwest university, chongqing 400715, china. e-mail: nana860611@swu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:lifuli0630@163.com mailto:nana860611@swu.edu.cn hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1317 introduction ducation is the main channel for social mobility in modern society due to its important role in alleviating social stratification and promoting social fairness and justice. following the promulgation of china’s reform and opening-up policy, many advances have been made in the chinese education system, and the overall education level in china has improved significantly. simultaneously, the imbalance in education development has become increasingly prominent, including the gaps in educational attainment between urban and rural residents, which has attracted much scholarly attention. when measured by objective indicators, such as access to education and total schooling years, rural residents in china have always lagged behind urban residents in their educational achievements (li, 2014a; wu, 2011; wu, 2013). influenced by the increasingly popular ideological trend of “education is useless” in rural society, some rural young people subjectively deny the value of education. their reluctance to pursue higher education may further widen the educational gap between urban and rural areas (li & wu, 2015). the low expectations for education of young people in rural china may have long-term consequences for their individual development. in recent years, the farreaching significance of educational expectations for social equity and justice in china has received little scholarly attention. chinese society has always been more concerned about “who receives education,” than about “who expects to receive education” and “how much education they expect” (ding & wang, 2016). chinese academia has long focused on indicators such as education acquisition and attainment, which measure equity in educational outcomes, but few studies have discussed the indicator of educational expectations, which measures equity in the educational process. fewer studies have explored the differences in educational expectations between different household registration groups from a micro level. as an important indicator, educational expectations can effectively and stably predict educational and status attainment. if we can understand the generation of individuals’ educational expectations, it will be easier for us to explain their educational attainment (sewell & hauser, 1972). therefore, exploring the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural residents provides an ideal breakthrough point to understand the current educational development gap between urban and rural areas, which has important practical significance for chinese society. the report of the 19th national congress of the communist party of china underlined the importance of compulsory education in rural areas and proposed strategies to ensure that every child can equally enjoy high-quality education. important modern social goals include supplying suitable education for all talented people, maximizing the development and use of social human capitals, supporting the welfare of the whole society, giving free rein to individual expertise, and satisfying individual pursuits. individuals and their families must make wise educational choices to achieve these goals, but society must also provide sufficient educational opportunities to facilitate personal educational decisions. e hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1318 we used baseline data from the 2013–2014 china education panel survey (ceps) to discuss the current urban–rural differences in the educational expectations of junior high school students in china. this study explored the influence of students’ personal cognitive ability, family background, and socio-structural factors (mainly school segregation caused by the household registration policy [hukou]) on the educational expectations of young people with household permanent residence in rural areas. in addition, we examined the role of these factors in narrowing the rural–urban gap in educational expectations. hopefully, our findings will trigger an extensive discussion of the severe problem of low educational expectations among young rural residents in china and the potential consequences. theoretical framework and literature review over the past 50 years, western scholars have explored educational expectations from micro and macro perspectives. the micro perspective at the individual and family levels mainly originated from the wisconsin model, while the coleman report initiated a macro-level perspective of social structure. personal and family factors leading to educational expectations since the 1950s, the body of research based on the wisconsin school has accumulated several empirical studies modeling the formation and influencing factors of personal educational and occupational expectations. early studies have mainly focused on the influence of individual and family factors on the formation of students’ individual educational expectations. gender, cognitive ability, and family socioeconomic status (ses) have been shown to be key factors affecting teenagers’ educational expectations (sewell, haller, & straus, 1957). later studies have tried to control for these three variables in the model when exploring individual educational expectations and status acquisition. in 1967, the wisconsin school set up a linear regression model to study the influence of gender, cognitive ability, and family ses on individual educational expectations. the school then explored the influence of these four explanatory variables on individual educational attainment (sewell & shah, 1967). as a mediating path, educational expectations have been shown to explain a large part of the impact of cognitive ability and family ses on individual educational attainment. even after controlling for individual cognitive ability and family ses, educational expectations still have an independent and significant effect on educational attainment. social structures and educational expectations early wisconsin studies discussed the factors influencing educational expectations, focusing on the process of individual self-selection at the micro level with the assumption that individuals’ educational achievements are determined by what they choose to do and how they do it. however, the reality is that individual educational choices are performed within a changing social structure; therefore, individuals’ educational achievements are mainly influenced by what society allows them to do (kerckhoff, 1976). the hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1319 main criticism of the early wisconsin body of research is that the models used are too sociopsychological and ignore the impact of macro-level socio-structural factors on individual educational expectations. in 1959, wilson launched a discussion of the influence of social class segregation on students’ educational expectations. wilson showed that even when personal and family backgrounds were controlled for, the social class composition within schools still had a significant impact on individual educational expectations. for example, students who attended schools with a majority of students from the dominant social class usually had higher educational expectations than students in schools with a majority of students from lower social classes (wilson, 1959). in 1964, the coleman report discussed ethnic segregation in american schools and found that social class segregation based on the ethnic composition of the school was the most important factor affecting students’ academic development besides their family ses. the report found that american schools were ethnically segregated. for example, schools attended by white and ethnic minority groups (mainly black students) had completely different ethnic composition ratios, and that minority students clustered in schools where students of the same ethnicity were concentrated. this kind of school segregation was detrimental to the academic achievements of minority students (coleman, 1966). socio-structural factors affecting individual educational expectations include the students’ living environment, school district and environment, and the institutions and policies in the labor market, which influence the distribution of different social groups in the social stratification system (sewell, 1963). an important socio-structural factor leading to educational inequality is school segregation based on social groups’ residence clusters. students with different social characteristics gather in different school districts or schools, instead of being evenly distributed within the same school district or among schools. this informal school segregation (also known as school isolation) leads to significant differences in student composition between school districts/schools (blau, 1977). on the one hand, this social structure will cause disparities in formal institutional arrangements, such as differences in community library facilities, teacher allocation, curricula, and school teaching arrangements. on the other hand, the social structure may also cause differences in informal social mechanisms, such as the local community’s normative values, levels of aspiration, school value system, majority behavioral norms, and the school atmosphere created by peer groups. all of these differences affect individual educational expectations, especially for young people. these results are independent of individual abilities and family ses (rogoff, 1953). in the late 1960s, the wisconsin body of research began to consider the impact of socio-structural factors, such as residence segregation, on educational expectations. the community, neighborhood, and school district environments (usually measured by urban–rural division, population size, and ses composition) where individuals live and studies have been found to have a significant effect on their educational and career expectations (sewell, 1964; sewell & armer, 1966). however, when factors such as students’ gender, cognitive ability, and family ses are controlled for, the influence of these socio-structural variables decreases greatly, or even disappears. based on this finding, sewell, hauser, springer, and hauser (2003) suggested that studies on educational expectations and attainment should focus on common process factors within school districts and schools, rather than background factors between school district and schools. hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1320 school segregation is the result of residence division and the underlying phenomenon is the local competition of social groups for the resources and social status represented by schools (fiel, 2015). school segregation in the basic education system in china has become a common social phenomenon. the historic policy of “key schools” in china has led to quality differentiation in the public school system, while the “entering school nearby” policy has capitalized on the differentiated educational resources linked to house prices in the school district. local residents select schools for their children by purchasing houses in high-quality school districts, which lead to the social segregation of school districts. as a result, the wealthy social class helps their children to enter high-quality schools by buying “school district housing,” while children from the disadvantaged social class who cannot afford school district housing are forced to enter lower-quality schools. this leads to school segregation based on residence and school district (feng & lu, 2010; zheng & wang, 2014). this segregation based on household permanent residence (hukou) is one of the main forms of school segregation in china. on the one hand, the allocation of students with different hukou status is unbalanced among rural and urban regions. the distribution of students’ hukou status among different regions largely decides the social class composition of these regions. the heterogeneity of social class composition in urban schools is higher than that in rural schools (liang & wu, 2016). on the other hand, with the large-scale migration of china’s rural population to cities and the continuous adjustment of educational policies for the children of migrant workers, the government allows migrant students in compulsory education to study in places of residence other than their registered household permanent residence. however, china’s current educational policy still sets a large threshold for admission and further education for non-local students because of limited urban educational resources. the children of rural migrant workers are often segregated from specific living areas, schools, and school districts because of the high cost of school selection in cities; therefore, they are often concentrated in private schools for migrant children with poor teaching facilities and low-quality teachers. at present, the social classes in china’s rural and urban schools are highly segregated. as a result, rural or urban school students with disadvantaged family backgrounds tend to prematurely lose interest in education because of negative peer group influences caused by school segregation. summary rich empirical data have been accumulated in the mature western research literature on students’ educational expectations and their influencing factors. personal characteristics, family backgrounds, and school structure have been found to be the main factors that jointly determine students’ educational expectations and decisions. the educational stratification literature in china has mainly focused on result-directed indicators, such as educational attainment. the predictive role of educational expectations in educational attainment has not been explored, which ignores its importance as a breakthrough point for understanding the current differences in educational attainment among different groups in china. most studies of educational expectations have not considered rural– urban differences, and those that have compared the educational expectations of social groups with different hukou status at the micro level are even rarer (ding & wang, hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1321 2016). in exploring the factors influencing educational expectations, such as the early wisconsin body of research, most studies have focused on the process of individual self-selection and only examined the effects of individual and family backgrounds at the micro level (liu, zhang, & li, 2015; wang & shi, 2014; yang, yao, & zhang, 2016). few studies have explored the effects of macro-level social factors (liang & wu, 2016; wu, hang & liu, 2017) and even fewer studies have measured macro and micro factors in addition to their interactions simultaneously (huang, 2017). some studies have tended to attribute the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural areas to the uneven distribution of educational resources influenced by educational policies and have not considered the effects of socio-structural factors (e.g., residence and school segregation), which are common concerns in western studies of educational expectations. this study used the wisconsin educational attainment model based on the urban–rural education gap in china in an attempt to close the empirical research gap in chinese educational expectations and explore the differences in educational expectations between rural and urban junior high school students from macro and micro perspectives. research design data this paper used baseline data from the 2013–2014 ceps designed and implemented by the national survey research center (nsrc) at renmin university of china. the project took junior high school students in grades 7 and 9 as the survey objects and applied a stratified multistage sampling design with probability proportional to size (pps), in which four sampling units were selected in turn: i.e., county (school district); school; class; and students, parents, head teachers, main subject teachers, and school administrators. in total, 19,487 junior high school students in 438 classrooms from 112 schools in 28 counties (districts) in mainland china were selected in the baseline survey. this study used the data from student, parent, and school questionnaires, which were matched with student and school ids. research questions and hypotheses this study sought to answer the following questions: are there any significant differences in educational expectations between rural and urban junior high school students? can the students’ personal characteristics, family environment, or socio-structural factors (such as school district/school segregation) explain these differences? based on these research questions, this study proposed the following research hypotheses: hypothesis 1: the educational expectations of rural hukou students are significantly lower than those of urban hukou students. hypothesis 2: individual (such as gender and cognitive ability) and family factors (such as ses) limit the educational expectations of rural hukou students. hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1322 hypothesis 3: socio-structural factors (such as the school district’s environment or school atmosphere) mean that the educational expectations of rural hukou students lag behind those of urban hukou students, even if the students’ individual and family factors are controlled for in the model. research model and variables we established the following linear regression model to answer these research questions and verify the research hypotheses: edu_expijp = β0 + β1stu_typei + β2βi + β3schj + β4ctyp + εijp  dependent variable in this study, the dependent variable was the educational expectations of junior high school students (edu_expijp) 1 . the ceps student questionnaire asked junior high school students about their highest expected level of education using the question: “what is the highest degree of education you expect to receive?” responses to this question had nine options: i.e., drop out, junior high school, technical/vocational senior high school, ordinary senior high school, college degree, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and doctoral degree. we recoded this categorical variable to form a dichotomous variable of “whether students expect a bachelor’s degree or higher,” where yes = 1 and no = 0.  independent variables i. student type by urban or rural hukou (stu_typei) the core explanatory variable of this study was the urban or rural category of students, which was used to examine the effect of registered household permanent residence (hukou) as a socio-structural factor. due to the large population of migrant workers in china, the registered household permanent residence (hukou) 2 of some students differs from their current place of residence. therefore, two dimensions could be observed among the students in this study: i.e., their household permanent residence (rural vs. urban hukou) and their place of residence during the survey. the latter dimension included information about individuals’ rural–urban mobility. based on our research needs, we recoded the original student category variable from the ceps dataset to form a student category variable with three categories: (a) rural students, those with agricultural hukou (registered household permanent residence) from the local county (district); (b) migrant students, those with agricultural hukou from other counties (districts); and (c) urban students, those with nonagricultural hukou in local (district) or other counties (districts). we added dummy variables for the urban and rural student categories to the regression model and used urban students as the reference group to examine the differences in educational expectations between the two types of students. ii. personal and family background factors (βi) based on the wisconsin educational attainment model, we first examined the impact of students’ personal and family factors on their educational expectations, including gender (male = 1; female = 0) and cognitive ability (the ceps designed a set of cognitive hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1323 ability test questions for junior high school students). the test questions did not involve specific memorization of knowledge related to school curricula, but focused on measuring the students’ logical thinking and problem-solving abilities, including three language dimensions (graphics, calculation, and logic) with 11 constructs in total. the original cognitive ability test scores were transformed into standardized scores using item response theory with three parameters, leading to internationally comparable and nationally standardized results. based on the high-to-low value ranking of this variable, we divided the students into three roughly equal groups to form a cognitive ability variable with three categories: low cognitive ability group = 1; medium cognitive ability group = 2; and high cognitive ability group = 3. finally, considering family ses, we used factor analysis to transform the variables of both parents’ education and occupations, in addition to each family’s economic conditions, into common factors to measure family ses. we divided the students into three roughly equal groups based on their high-to-low family ses scores to form a three-category variable to measure family ses: low-ses group = 1; medium-ses group = 2; and high-ses group = 3. iii. socio-structural factors (schj) to more deeply explore the sources of the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students, we chose the following three sociostructural variables at the school district/school level: (a) school location: township and rural areas = 1, marginal urban areas and urban–rural fringe = 2; and cities/counties’ central urban areas = 3; (b) proportion of students in schools with agricultural hukou; and (c) proportion of students in schools with local county (district) hukou. there was a high degree of consistency between residence and school segregation; therefore, the school location variable could be used to examine the influence of the school district environment on students’ educational expectations. the proportion of students in schools with agricultural hukou and the proportion of students in schools with local county (district) hukou measured the influence of peer groups on the students’ educational expectations.  control variables to improve the quality of our model, we also controlled for other factors that may affect students’ educational expectations at different levels: age, ethnicity (1 = ethnic minority, 0 = han nationality), number of siblings at the individual/family level; school properties (1 = public school, 2 = private school), school quality ranking (1 = poor to medium, 2 = upper middle, 3 = the best) at the school level, and district/county fixed effects (ctyp) at the district/county level. the distribution of the main variables used in the study for the urban or rural student category variable is shown in table 1. the proportion of students with low cognitive ability or low family ses was much higher among rural and migrant student groups than among urban students. in contrast, students with high cognitive ability or high ses were clustered in the urban student group. rural junior high school students were mostly clustered in rural schools, while urban junior high school students were mostly clustered in central city schools and migrant junior high school students were distributed among schools in both urban and rural areas. hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1324 table 1. distribution of the main variables for rural and urban students. variable rural students migrant students urban students male 51.57% 53.57% 50.98% cognitive ability: low 39.68% 35.29% 26.73% cognitive ability: medium 34.46% 34.04% 32.07% cognitive ability: high 25.86% 30.67% 41.20% ses: low 49.85% 37.40% 16.38% ses: medium 31.75% 37.22% 33.95% ses: high 18.40% 25.37% 49.67% school location: township/rural area 56.57% 28.33% 19.07% school location: urban–rural fringe 25.06% 35.88% 22.64% school location: central urban area 18.37% 35.79% 58.30% proportion of students in schools with agricultural hukou 0.729 (0.173) 0.538 (0.237) 0.377 (0.259) proportion of students in schools with local county (district) hukou 0.901 (0.132) 0.605 (0.243) 0.798 (0.172) note: the standard deviation of the mean is presented in brackets. ses, socioeconomic status. table 2. descriptive statistics for the educational expectations of urban and rural junior high school students. category male female overall mean (sd) % sample size mean (sd) % sample size mean (sd) % sample size rural 15.746 (3.709) 53.62% 4,129 16.326 (3.260) 64.93% 3,972 16.041 (3.507) 59.17% 8,101 migrant 15.767 (3.678) 55.14% 1,119 16.443 (3.173) 68.45% 1,008 16.077 (3.465) 61.45% 2,127 urban 16.725 (3.523) 68.58% 4,224 17.179 (3.067) 78.78% 4,184 16.951 (3.311) 73.66% 8,408 overall 16.192 (3.654) 60.47% 9,742 16.729 (3.190) 71.64% 9,164 16.456 (3.444) 65.96% 18,636 note: the mean and standard deviation (sd) describe the average level and difference in educational expectations of junior high school students, respectively. the percentage describes junior high school students who expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher. in the schools attended by the rural student group in our study, more than 70% of the students came from rural areas and about 90% were registered in the local county. more than half of the students in the schools attended by the migrant student group in our study had rural household registration. about 60% of these students were registered in the local county/district, while in the schools attended by the urban student group in hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1325 our study, only one third of the students were from rural areas and nearly 80% were registered in the local county/district. results descriptive statistical analysis without adding any control variables to our model, the proportion of junior high school students who expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher showed a monotonically increasing trend among rural and urban students (table 2). that is, rural junior high school students were less likely than migrant junior high school students to expect to obtain a bachelor’s degree, while migrant junior high school students had lower expectations than urban junior high school students. comparable results were obtained from the male and female samples, which is consistent with hypothesis 1. difference test: individual and family factors to verify the influence of individual and family factors on the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students, we tested the significance of the differences in the mean values of their educational expectations. the results are reported by the students’ cognitive ability and family ses.  cognitive ability table 3 presents the pretest (difference-test) results, which took urban junior high school students as the reference group and reported the difference in the proportions of rural and migrant junior high school students and urban junior high school students expecting to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher. the z-test results showed the level of significance. the results for the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students without cognitive ability are shown in the bottom row of table 3 for the full sample. the proportion of rural and migrant junior high school students who expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher were significantly lower than that of urban junior high school students. after grouping the students by cognitive ability, although the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students were somewhat smaller, they did not disappear completely. there were still significant differences in educational expectations between urban and rural areas within each cognitive ability group. specifically, for male students, the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural areas in the low cognitive ability group were reduced greatly, while obvious differences were observed in the educational expectations between urban and rural areas in the medium cognitive ability group. interestingly, the differences in educational expectations between migrant and urban junior high school students in the high cognitive ability group were reduced significantly. these results showed that the experience of urban life and the school environment had a positive effect on the educational expectations of rural young people with high cognitive ability. the results for the female sample showed that the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural students in the medium and hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1326 table 3. effects of individual and family factors on the educational expectations of obtaining a bachelor’s degree or higher among urban and rural junior high school students. variable male female rural migrant rural migrant cognitive ability low percentage 0.407 (0.012) 0.394 (0.024) 0.524 (0.013) 0.543 (0.028) pretest diff. = −0.084 diff. = −0.098 diff. = −0.092 diff. = −0.073 z = −4.436*** z = −3.455*** z = −4.597*** z = −2.333*** sample size 1,591 419 1,572 328 medium percentage 0.546 (0.013) 0.544 (0.026) 0.686 (0.012) 0.712 (0.024) pretest diff. = −0.140 diff. = −0.141 diff. = −0.087 diff. = −0.061 z = −7.478*** z = −5.015*** z = −5.174*** z = −2.396*** sample size 1,422 364 1,391 358 high percentage 0.708 (0.014) 0.756 (0.023) 0.795 (0.013) 0.798 (0.022) pretest diff. = −0.114 diff. = −0.065 diff. = −0.104 diff. = −0.101 z = −7.091*** z = −2.801*** z = −7.644*** z = −5.197*** sample size 1,116 336 1,009 322 ses low percentage 0.512 (0.011) 0.547 (0.025) 0.627 (0.011) 0.669 (0.024) pretest diff. = 0.006 diff. = 0.041 diff. = −0.003 diff. = 0.039 z = 0.250 z = 1.299 z = −0.122 z = 1.303 sample size 1,944 411 2,104 393 medium percentage 0.574 (0.013) 0.550 (0.025) 0.691 (0.013) 0.706 (0.023) pretest diff. = −0.057 diff. = −0.082 diff. = −0.071 diff. = −0.056 z = −3.113*** z = −3.000*** z = −4.096*** z = −2.259** sample size 1,396 404 1,201 388 high percentage 0.527 (0.018) 0.559 (0.028) 0.643 (0.019) 0.674 (0.031) pretest diff. = −0.251 diff. = −0.219 diff. = −0.218 diff. = −0.187 z = −13.266*** z = −8.251*** z = −12.376*** z = −7.334*** sample size 789 304 667 227 full sample percentage 0.536 (0.008) 0.551 (0.015) 0.649 (0.008) 0.685 (0.015) pretest diff. = −0.150 diff. = −0.134 diff. = −0.138 diff. = −0.103 z = −14.031*** z = −8.428*** z = −13.926*** z = −6.968*** sample size 4,129 1,119 3,972 1,008 note: 1. the reference group for the mean difference test in the table includes all urban students; 2. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01. low cognitive ability groups were smaller, but the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural students in the high cognitive ability group showed little change compared with the full sample results. the above results indicated that the observed differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students were not entirely due to hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1327 their differing cognitive abilities. after controlling for cognitive ability, significant differences in educational expectations were still observed among rural and urban junior high school students with high cognitive ability. a possible reason for this finding is that some rural hukou students hope to live and work in rural areas in the future and the educational requirements for positions in the rural labor market are lower than those of the urban labor market, which may affect these students’ judgment of the value and role of education. therefore, we further tested the difference in educational expectations between rural junior high school students in the high cognitive ability group who want to stay in rural areas or small towns and those who want to stay in big cities or abroad to verify our findings. the results showed that the educational expectations of rural students who plan to live in big cities were significantly higher than those of their counterparts who plan to live in rural areas or small towns (diff. = −0.209, z = −9.394), although both student groups were in the high cognitive ability group. another possible reason is that even if they work in cities, most rural hukou residents can only enter the secondary labor market, in which education qualifications have a very limited effect on their social mobility opportunities. this may also affect rural students’ judgment of the value and role of education, and subsequently their educational expectations (li & wu, 2015).  family background the bottom row of table 3 for the full sample presents the results for the test of the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students without grouping the students by family ses. the proportion of rural and migrant junior high school students who expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher were significantly lower than that of urban junior high school students. after grouping the students according to their family background, the differences in educational expectations between rural and migrant junior high school students and urban junior high school students with low ses were no longer significant regardless of gender. in other words, family ses explained the lower educational expectations of rural and migrant junior high school students from disadvantaged families. although the differences in educational expectations between rural and migrant junior high school students and urban junior high school students with medium family ses were still significant, they were smaller than for the low ses group. compared with the above results for cognitive ability, family background factors explained the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students better than cognitive ability factors. however, it should be noted that the differences in educational expectations between rural and migrant junior high school students and urban junior high school students from advantaged family backgrounds increased compared with the results for the full sample. this result showed that the overall differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students were mainly reflected in the advantaged social class, reflecting the heterogeneity of the influence of family ses on the educational expectations of these students. that is, the positive influence of family background on urban students was greater than on rural and migrant students. a possible reason is that as the rural economy in china develops and parents of rural students increase their income and professional status gradually, they may still not know how to use their family capital to create a good educational atmosphere within the family. such hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1328 an atmosphere would help their children to form higher educational expectations compared with children of urban parents. compared with rural families, liu, zhang, and li (2015) found that urban parents’ participation in their children’s education is more helpful in increasing young people’s educational expectations. to verify this result, we selected the “parental involvement” variable to measure the degree of activation of family capital and tested the difference in the degree of parental involvement between urban and rural junior high school students with advantaged family backgrounds. the results showed that the involvement of parents of rural junior high school students was significantly lower than that of parents of urban junior high school students (diff. = −0.521, t = −18.191), despite their similar family ses, while the differences in the degree of parental involvement between urban and rural students with poor family backgrounds were not significant.  linear regression analysis: socio-structural factors the results of the previous difference test showed that students’ personal and family factors, including gender, cognitive ability, and family ses, could explain only part of the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students. therefore, we established a linear regression model to further explore the influence of socio-structural factors, including the type of school district (urban vs. rural) and the household registration structure of school populations, on the level of and differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students. model 1 in table 4 was a baseline model containing the control variables, which was used to test the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students. the results showed that the proportion of rural and migrant junior high school students who expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher was significantly lower than that of urban students. specifically, rural and migrant junior high school students respectively had 4.6% and 5.3% lower educational expectations than did urban junior high school students. models 2–5 controlled for the students’ gender, gender and cognitive ability, gender and family background, and the three variables simultaneously, respectively. after controlling for individual and family factors, the difference in the proportion of students who expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher between rural and migrant junior high students decreased, but did not disappear completely, which further verified the results of the previous difference test. in the next step, we explored the socio-structural factors that influence the difference in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students. based on model 5, model 6 added the first socio-structural factor, that is, the urban/rural properties of the school districts. the proportion of junior high school students who expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher in the urban–rural fringe and the central urban areas was 5.4% and 6.8% higher than that in villages and towns, respectively. however, the addition of this variable to the model did not significantly change the significance of the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students. this indicated that the school district environment had little influence on the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students. this result is similar to early wisconsin studies of the influence of residential segmentation on educational expectations. based on model 5, model 7 added the se hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1329 table 4. regression analysis of the factors influencing whether urban and rural junior high school students expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher. explanatory variable model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 model 5 model 6 model 7 model 8 rural students −0.046 *** (0.009) −0.045 *** (0.009) −0.039 *** (0.008) −0.034 *** (0.009) −0.029 *** (0.008) −0.022 *** (0.008) −0.008 (0.009) −0.032 *** (0.008) migrant students −0.053 *** 0.012) −0.048 *** (0.012) −0.039 *** (0.012) −0.038 *** (0.012) −0.030 ** (0.012) −0.029 ** (0.012) −0.017* (0.012) −0.019 (0.012) male −0.112 *** (0.007) −0.110 *** (0.006) −0.113 *** (0.007) −0.111 *** (0.006) −0.111 *** (0.006) −0.111 *** (0.006) −0.111 *** (0.006) cognitive ability: medium 0.117 *** (0.008) 0.118 *** (0.008) 0.115 *** (0.008) 0.115 *** (0.008) 0.117 *** (0.008) cognitive ability: high 0.249 *** (0.008) 0.248 *** (0.008) 0.245 *** (0.008) 0.243 *** (0.008) 0.246 *** (0.008) ses: medium 0.022 *** (0.009) 0.017 ** (0.008) 0.013 (0.008) 0.012 (0.008) 0.017 ** (0.008) ses: high 0.064 *** (0.009) 0.060 *** (0.009) 0.056 *** (0.009) 0.052 *** (0.009) 0.059 *** (0.009) school location: urban–rural fringe 0.054 *** (0.011) school location: central urban area 0.068 *** (0.012) proportion of students in school with agricultural hukou −0.216 *** (0.025) proportion of students in schools with local county (district) hukou 0.116 *** (0.030) control variables yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes district/county fixed effects yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes r2 0.064 0.076 0.111 0.078 0.113 0.115 0.117 0.114 sample size 18,636 18,636 18,636 18,636 18,636 18,636 18,636 18,636 note: 1. robust standard errors are presented in brackets; 2. * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01; 3. the reference group for the cognitive ability dummy variable is the low ability sample and the reference group for the ses dummy variable is the low-ses sample. the reference group for the school location type dummy variable is township and rural areas. cond socio-structural factor used in this study, i.e., the proportion of students with agricultural household registration in schools. compared with the urban/rural residence category variable, this school structural factor better explained the educational expectations of junior high school students. specifically, for every 1% increase in the proportion of students with agricultural household registration in schools, the proportion of junior high school students who expected to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher decreased by 21.6%. moreover, the addition of this variable made the originally significant differences in educational expectations between rural and urban junior high school students completely disappear and greatly reduced the differences in educational expectations between migrant and urban junior high school students. after controlling for the hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1330 students’ individual and family factors, the proportion of peers with similar experiences of rural life within the schools attended by rural junior high school students largely explained the observed disadvantages in the educational expectations of rural junior high school students. if rural students with similar demographic characteristics and family background to urban students enter schools with a high proportion of urban students, their initial disadvantages in educational expectations will be reduced greatly. based on model 5, model 8 added the third socio-structural factor of this study, i.e., the proportion of students in schools with residence registration in the local county/district. this variable had a strong and significant impact on the educational expectations of junior high school students. specifically, for every 1% increase in the proportion of students in school with local registered household permanent residence, the proportion of students expecting to obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher increased by 11.6%. the addition of this school structural variable in the model eliminated the originally significant differences in educational expectations between migrant and urban junior high school students. after controlling for individual and family factors, the proportion of peers with similar experiences of rural–urban migration in the schools attended by migrant junior high school students largely explained the observed disadvantages in their educational expectations. if migrant students with similar demographic characteristics and family background to urban students enter schools with a high proportion of local students, their initial disadvantages in educational expectations will be greatly reduced. discussion, conclusion, and policy implications based on baseline data from the 2013–2014 ceps, this study explored the current differences in educational expectations between urban and rural high school students and their influencing factors in china. micro-level individual/family factors and macrolevel socio-structural factors jointly determined the educational expectations of junior high school students and the different educational expectations between urban and rural areas. first, the significant differences in educational expectations between rural and migrant junior high school students and their expectations for receiving higher education were significantly lower than those of urban junior high school students. cognitive ability and family background only explained a small part of the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students, with family background being more important than cognitive ability. the household registration structure (hukou composition) of the schools explained most of the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students. the government and all sectors of society should be concerned about the low educational expectations of young people in rural chinese society identified in this study. first, with the rapid development of urbanization in china, young people will increasingly leave the countryside to find jobs in cities. when these young people compete with urban residents for work, their low educational expectations may hinder their career development. opportunities for people with rural household registration status to become urban citizens are extremely limited. indeed, this factor has been shown to have a significantly positive correlation with individuals’ education level (li, 2014b). rural young people with low academic qualifications may become migrant workers in laborhou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1331 intensive industries in the future, such as the manufacturing, construction, and service industries, where they have to take jobs with poor working conditions, low salaries, and low social status. therefore, they may struggle to truly integrate into urban society (china population and family planning commission, 2010). in their future careers, most rural young people with low educational expectations will have to face this obstacle, which is difficult to overcome. second, china is vigorously implementing a national rural revitalization strategy, in which economic developments and infrastructure construction in rural areas lead to increasingly higher requirements for experts in agricultural scientific knowledge and technology. however, the chinese education system must be developed to cultivate the necessary expertise. young people with hukou who do not go to work in cities but continue to live and work in rural areas may also be hindered in their rural career development because of their lower educational expectations. second, the results of this study showed that the difference in cognitive ability based on innate inheritance was not the main reason for the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural junior high school students in china. conversely, a nurturing home environment (such as parental involvement) based on family ses (including parental education, occupation, and income) limited the expectations of rural students to receive higher education. rural students’ family background constraints made it difficult for them to make rational educational choices based on their own abilities. today, science and technology are increasingly becoming decisive forces for socioeconomic development in global market competition. to maintain an advantage in global science and technology competition, china greatly needs well-educated experts in professional fields such as engineering, physics, and biology. however, if talented young people with high cognitive abilities from rural areas do not have correspondingly high educational expectations, it will be difficult for them to obtain the necessary education and training opportunities for desirable social occupations in the future. thus, these young people will be unable to realize their full potential. this potential “talent loss” crisis will lead to wasted human resources in rural areas of china, which will affect the maximization of social welfare (sewell, 1963). third, the environment of the school district where junior high school students live had little influence on their educational expectations. however, school segmentation based on registered household permanent residence, which is typically observed in the characteristics of peer groups within a school, had a major influence on the educational expectations of students with rural hukou. the total proportion of rural students with local registered household permanent residence greatly restricted their educational expectations, while the proportion of students with non-local registered household permanent residence in schools also greatly restricted migrant students’ educational expectations. in china, segregation based on school institutions and policies is an intermediary mechanism in which macro-level socio-structural factors and micro-level family backgrounds work together on individuals’ educational decision-making. students with similar disadvantaged backgrounds tend to cluster in similarly poor schools or even within the same class, which leads to a corresponding segregation in the allocation of teachers, curricula, and teaching arrangements in schools. in addition, the school atmosphere created by most peer groups will differ. these differences may have an impact on the educational expectations of every young person in the school. it is difficult for chinese schools to provide sufficient educational incentives for higher education to hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1332 rural and migrant students because of school segregation caused by household registration institutions, which greatly inhibits their educational expectations. the results of this study have the following implications for solving the problem of differences in educational expectations and attainment between chinese urban and rural areas in the future. first, actively including educational guidance and career planning courses or programs in rural schools will effectively help to reduce the brain drain crisis in rural chinese society. to bridge the gap in educational development between rural and urban areas, the chinese government and policy makers must not only consider the problem of uneven distribution of educational resources (such as school facilities, materials, curricula, teachers, and management) but also pay attention to creating and improving the educational atmosphere of schools, so that schools can cultivate their students’ educational expectations. schools must provide rural students with information about educational opportunities and the value and future returns of higher education. schools must also help their students obtain the required knowledge for their future career development, such as understanding the types of jobs they are suitable for and the educational qualification requirements for these jobs. this would prevent rural students from misjudging the value of education, leading them to think that “education is useless.” any educational and vocational guidance also requires the participation of parents; therefore, rural parents should be helped to obtain more information and knowledge about educational and vocational opportunities to better help their children make rational educational decisions. gradually alleviating and ending school segregation based on household registration will enhance the integration of widely diverse school populations, which will be an important channel for promoting educational and social equity in china. the government influences the educational decisions of individuals and their families through its educational policies. the finding of this study regarding the relationship between household registration segregation in junior high schools and the differences in educational expectations between urban and rural areas in china provides an empirical basis for the re-evaluation of current educational policies and their consequences. the composition and structure of the household registration system in urban schools are helpful to improve their students’ educational expectations, while the household registration structure and composition of schools attended by rural students have a negative impact on their students’ educational expectations (kahlenberg, 2012). therefore, it is important to promote the fairness of educational opportunities by reducing the degree of school segregation caused by the hukou household registration policy and increasing the diversity and heterogeneity of students’ identities and backgrounds within schools to help vulnerable rural students obtain the same opportunities as urban students to enter urban schools with higher ses. in this respect, the reform of the existing household registration system in china must be deepened continually to weaken and gradually eliminate the restriction of household registration on the education of rural and migrant children. however, various forms of school quality differentiation must be eliminated to promote the balance of educational resources between regions, between urban and rural areas, and between schools. hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1333 notes: 1. the subscripts i, j, and p in the model represent the individual/family, school, and district/county levels, respectively. 2. the ceps dataset divided the student sample into eight types based on information about their household permanent residence (hukou type, rural 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(2013). educational opportunities for rural and urban residents in china, 1978– 2008: inequality and evolution. social sciences in china, 34(3):58-75. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02529203.2013.8205 55 wu, y.x., huang, c., & liu, h. (2017). school socioeconomic segregation and educational expectations of students in china’s junior high schools. social sciences in china, 38(3):112-126. yang, x.c., yao, y., & zhang, s. (2016). a study on the influence of family social status on adolescents’ educational expectation: an empirical analysis based on ceps 2014 survey data. china youth study, 13(3):67-73. [chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.19633/j.cnki.11-2579/d. 2016.07.011 zheng, l., & wang, s. (2014). school choice, capitalization of educational services, and residential segmentation: a reflection on the policy of neighborhood schooling. education & economy, (6):25-32. [chinese]. http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtota l-jyji201406004.htm the chinese version of this article has been published in global education view, 2020, 49(3):90105. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 侯玉娜, 李馥丽. (2020).城乡初中生教育期望的差异研究:个人、家庭与社会结构的影响. 全 球教育展望, 49(3):90-105 https://doi.org/10.1086/221171 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.2307/2088767 https://doi.org/10.2307/1239228 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0276-5624(03)20001-9 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0276-5624(03)20001-9 https://doi.org/10.2307/2112184 https://doi.org/10.2307/2088572 https://doi.org/10.1080/02529203.2013.820555 https://doi.org/10.1080/02529203.2013.820555 https://doi.org/10.19633/j.cnki.11-2579/d.%202016.07.011 https://doi.org/10.19633/j.cnki.11-2579/d.%202016.07.011 hou & li. educational expectation between urban and rural junior high school students. bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1335 received: 29 november 2021 revised: 08 december 2021 accepted: 06 january 2022 article-yunahou-bece_title_jan2022 article-yunahou--bece_maintextjan2022 bece. newsletter vol.17, no.1, 2024, bece 1855 does enhanced immersion improve learning outcomes: the impact of immersive experience on learning outcomes and its mechanism by li, w., qian, l., feng, q., & huang, j. correspondence to: huang jing, central china normal university, china. email: 631900910@qq.com mmersive experience can affect the learner’s sense of presence, cognitive load, and emotions, which may facilitate or impede learning. based on the existing literature on the application of immersive technology, this study conducted experimental research on the impact of immersion levels (immersive virtual reality or desk-top vr video) in fire safety education on learning outcomes, cognitive load, emotion valence and arousal, user presence, and learning motivation among college students. these variables were measured by relevant knowledge tests and scales. research findings show that: • immersive vr was more effective in eliciting positive, high-arousal emotions and enhancing presence and learning motivation, whereas there was no significant difference in the effects on cognitive load and instant and long-term knowledge retention between immersive vr and desk-top vr videos. • emotional valence, the sense of presence, and learning motivation mediated the relation between immersive vr experiences and student learning outcomes. implications: • in teaching practice, the choice of vr technologies should be related to the specific learning tasks, since immersive vr contributes to enhancing learning experience, but not necessarily learning outcomes. • in cases where vr head-mounted display is unavailable or vr headsets are inconvenient to wear in classroom teaching, desktop vr videos can serve as an alternative, for they are comparable with immersive vr as facilitators of student mastery of knowledge and skills. • it is important to control cognitive and affective factors in the process of instruction to optimize student learning experience and outcomes. source: e-education research, 2023; 44(12):55-63. i mailto:631900910@qq.com bece. newsletter vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1841 teacher autonomy support and intellectual risk taking in science learning among pupils: the mediating effects of science learning interest and creative self-efficacy by tan, l. & feng, s. correspondence to: shiji feng, guangxi normal university, china. e-mail: fengshiji999@163.com eacher autonomy support is about teachers’ instructional behavior that respects, support, and encourage students’ autonomy in learning, including providing them with behavioral and emotional support, appreciating their ideas, allowing them adequate free space in learning, inquiry, and choice-making, and more. intellectual risk taking refers to the quality of being academically active in experimenting without concern about failure, a quality crucial to students’ science learning and creativity ability development. creative self-efficacy is about the individual’s judgment on their capacities to generate creative ideas and solutions to problems. this article investigates the linkage between teacher autonomy support and student intellectual risk taking in science learning and examines the mediating effects of interest in science learning and creative self-efficacy. research findings indicate that the more teacher autonomy support students perceives, the more daring they are in scientific inquiry; and that teacher autonomy support can enhance students’ level of intellectual risk taking by piquing their interest in science learning and boosting their creative self-efficacy. this also means that students’ interest in science learning and creative self-efficacy will increase when the teacher shows respect to their opinions and allows them the freedom of autonomous inquiry, and that, as a result, they will become bolder in trying new things and experimenting new solutions to problems, less likely to be overwhelmed by setbacks and failures. the study provides several important implications: (i) rigid teaching procedures are not beneficial for motivating students’ active engagement in science learning or enhancing their interest in learning and creative selfefficacy. hence, the teacher should give students more space for autonomous exploration. (ii) learning interest, creative self-efficacy, and intellectual risk taking are positive predictors of student engagement in learning, science achievements, and creative and innovative behaviors. (iii) more autonomysupportive teaching strategies should be adopted to boost student learning int mailto:fengshiji999@163.com vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1842 terest and creative self-efficacy such that students will become more ready to make bold, creative attempts. source: psychological development and education, 2024; 40(3):375-383. bece. newsletter vol.13, no.1, 2023 1689 the impact of psychological abuse and neglect on adolescents’ externalizing problem behaviors: the mediating effect of antisocial attitudes and moderating effect of gender by wang, g. f., chen, y., liu, y., liu, x. q., yu, y., & luo, w. correspondence to: guofang wang, china university of political science and law, china. e-mail: wangguofang@cupl.edu.cn xternalizing problem behaviors mainly refers to behaviors that violate social ethics and harm others, including antisocial, illegal, aggressive, and bullying behaviors. adolescence is a period of high incidence of individual externalizing problem behaviors, which have a negative impact on the physical and mental health, interpersonal communication, and academic performance of adolescents. this study used the psychological abuse and neglect scale, adolescent antisocial attitudes questionnaire, and health risk behaviors questionnaire (externalizing behavior dimension) to investigate 1218 adolescents aged 9 to 20 in a city of sichuan province. among them, 54.19% were from urban areas, 44.66% from rural areas, and 1.15% did not report where they were from. the article attempted to explore the mechanism of the influence of psychological abuse and neglect on adolescents’ externalizing problem behaviors by analyzing descriptive statistics and mediation effects. the research findings showed that there were positive relations between psychological abuse and neglect, antisocial attitudes, and externalizing problem behaviors. psychological abuse and neglect could directly affect the externalizing problem behaviors and could also indirectly influence them through the mediation of antisocial attitudes. the influence of psychological abuse and neglect on antisocial attitudes was moderated by gender. psychological abuse and neglect have a stronger predictive effect on antisocial attitudes of boy students, that is, boy students were more likely to identify with behaviors that violate morality and norms under the influence of psychological abuse and neglect, and as a result, they are more likely to develop antisocial attitudes. source: educational research and experiment, 2022; 2022(3):107-112. e mailto:wangguofang@cupl.edu.cn bece. newsletter vol.15, no.1, 2023, bece 1800 can holistic module teaching improve english performance of junior secondary school students? an experimental exploration based on the reform of english instruction in x city in eastern china by he, p., wei, h., & huang, b. correspondence to: bin huang, nanjing normal university, china. e-mail: huangbin@nju.edu.cn he compulsory education course standards for english 2022 emphasize that teachers must construct module teaching around specific objectives to support the development of academic competence in students. holistic module teaching is an instructional approach which uses a major concept in a subject to organize relevant course materials to deliver structured instruction. in recent years, there has been a widespread application of module teaching design in english classes in china. nevertheless, little research has been carried out on the relations between holistic module teaching and student english competence. this study used the empirical data generated by the teaching reform and the method of difference-in-differences estimation to conduct a systematic evaluation of the efficacy of holistic module teaching in english instruction with the purpose of providing evidence for the further improvement of this teaching design. research findings are as follows. i. holistic module teaching could significantly improve students’ english test results. the average results of comprehensive english of the student were upgraded by a standard score of 0.264 at the school level. ii. the module teaching design could enhance students’ english performance in all aspects, including comprehensive proficiency, writing, listening, and reading, with the most prominent effect being on their comprehensive proficiency of english. iii. due to inter-region differences and the occurrence of omitted variables, the estimated intervention effect of the new approach was presumably smaller that it’s actual efficacy. the study suggested that in implementing holistic module teaching in junior secondary english classes, strategies such as real-world situationbased learning and knowledge transfer should be incorporated into the education of english listening, speaking, reading, and writing to assist teachers in identifying teaching objectives and to help students successfully improve their english proficiency. source: journal of china examinations, 2023; 374(6):49-57. t mailto:huangbin@nju.edu.cn bece. newsletter vol.13, no.2, 2023 1715 who chooses teaching as a career? empirical evidence from a survey of college graduates employment by xing, c. b., cui, x. y., & jiang, c. correspondence to: chunbing xing, renmin university of china, china. e-mail: xingchb@ruc.edu.cn he proportion of teaching staff in china’s labor force as a whole has been steadily rising. it increased from 1.99% in 1990 to 2.3% in 2015 according to estimates based on census data. as a result of the expansion of higher education in china, the education level of the newly employed in the labor market has remarkably improved. in this process, one prominent phenomenon is that young females with college degrees have outnumbered their male counterparts. these changes yield significant effects on teacher labor force supply. consequently, teachers with a university degree or above predominate the teaching staff; the proportion of female teachers with college degrees is also rising. hence, to better understand college graduates employment and the current state of teacher supply in china, it is crucial to study the factors influencing graduates’ decision on their career as a teacher. this study sourced data from chinese college graduates employment sample survey 2019 by peking university’s institute of economics of education. the survey included 14, 8, and 10 higher education institutions in eastern, central, and western china, respectively, covering “double first-class construction” universities, regular undergraduate colleges/universities, junior colleges, and higher vocational colleges. a total of 16571 valid questionnaires were retrieved, with 23% from junior college students, 63% from undergraduates, and 14% from master and doctoral candidates. after eliminating those questionnaires with variable-related information missing, a sample of 5362 subjects was obtained, consisting of 745 teacher candidates and 4617 non-teacher candidates. the research findings showed that students who majored in educationrelated subjects, had higher levels of education, graduated from schools of higher rankings and obtained relevant professional credentials were more likely to choose teaching as their career; that the majority of teacher candidates came from lower-level cities in the central and western china; that the educational background and birth place could more effectively predict female students becoming teacher candidates than their male counterparts while the school type had a greater impact on the male students’ decision on t mailto:xingchb@ruc.edu.cn vol.13, no.2, 2023 1716 their career as a teacher than on that of female students; that graduates who chose to be teachers received lower starting salaries than those took up other professions and had a higher employment rate in central and western china; and that female teacher candidates’ career choice is determined by their personal preferences, consideration of job security, and willingness of serving the public and communities. source: educational research, 2023; 44(1):144-159. can the elite stream improve the academic achievement of senior secondary school students? a study of high school students from x city in western china based on regression discontinuity analysis jing yang, 1, 3 xiaomei ye, 2 yuhong du 1 1. beijing normal university, beijing, china 2. peking university, beijing, china 3. tianquan senior secondary school of sichuan province, ya’an, sichuan, china abstract: the fairness and efficacy of the elite stream in general senior secondary education have long been a contentious issue. based on the longitudinal data of the students who were enrolled in five senior secondary schools in x city in western china in 2017 and 2018, this study examined the effects of elite class streaming in improving student academic performance, using regression discontinuity analysis. the research findings showed that: despite the significant differences in the grade-10 streaming examination results and the grade-12 academic achievement between the elite class and regular class students, the gap was not markedly widened after three years of senior secondary education; the elite stream did not exhibit distinct promotive effects on the advancement of students’ overall performance when the cutoff point of elite class admission was utilized as the exogenous variable to evaluate the effects of the elite stream on student performance; both the parameter estimation and non-parametric estimation results demonstrated that the elite stream had no marked effects in improving student performance and there was no gender difference or urban vs. rural difference in the impact of the elite stream on student academic achievement. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 14(1):1757-1761. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar062 yang et al. (beijing & sichuan, china). elite stream and academic achievement. bece, vol.14, no.1, 2023 1758 how to cite: yang, j., ye, x., & du, y. (2023). can the elite stream improve the academic achievement of senior secondary school students? a study of high school students from x city in western china based on regression discontinuity analysis. best evidence in chinese education, 14(1):1757-1761. keywords: elite class, academic performance, regression discontinuity design about authors: jing yang, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing, china; tianquan senior secondary school of sichuan province, ya’an, sichuan, china. yuhong du, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing, china. correspondence to: xiaomei ye, graduate school of education, peking university, beijing, china. e-mail: 201523010066@mail.bnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:201523010066@mail.bnu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ yang et al. (beijing & sichuan, china). elite stream and academic achievement. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1759 introduction elite classes deployed by general high schools have always been an attraction to parents of students of senior secondary level. with elite classes, schools put high achieving students into the fast stream, equipping them with experienced anchor teachers, and implementing more demanding instruction. under the principle of equitable and efficient education, a scientific evaluation of the impact of the elite stream on student academic advancement is crucial for students and their parents making evidence-based educational decisions and for schools reasonably allotting educational resources. based on the academic achievement status of both elite class and regular class students from five county-level general high schools in a western city of china, this study focuses on examining the effects of the elite stream, an intra-school education resource allocation strategy, on student performance, employing the quasi-experiment design and regression discontinuity analysis. research methodology data sources data in this article are derived from the longitudinal database of science students in x city in western china who were enrolled in senior secondary school in 2017 and 2018. the sample of the study consists of 3,397 students from county-level schools with 1,669 enrolled in 2017 and 1,728 enrolled in 2018. for the convenience of comparison, normalization was administered to the scores of science students in x city. data shows that despite the significant differences in the sources of science students as well as the variations in the number and size of elite classes and the student test results among various schools, the cutoff points for elite classes in all schools are similar, with standard deviations ranging from 0.64 to 0.96. research design the determination of the cutoff point of elite class admission in each school relies on the number and size of this type of classes prescribed before the admission examination and the performance of all students at the school in the uniform grade-10 final examination in x city. neither the school nor students can manipulate who will enter the elite classes. elite class admission can be viewed as an exogenous change administered to sampled students. in principle, students will be accepted by elite classes as long as their examination results reach the cutoff point; otherwise, they will enter regular classes. yet, in the actual streaming, some students may fail to enroll into elite classes despite having scores surpassing the cutoff point while those with scores below it have the chance to enter them. that may result in the discontinuity jump on the two sides of the cutoff point being neither 1 (denoting elite class admission) nor 0 (denoting non elite class admission). therefore, the present study employed the fuzzy discontinuity design in the estimation and used the cutoff point as an instrumental variable to estimate the academic performance differences between students who complied with admission rules. yang et al. (beijing & sichuan, china). elite stream and academic achievement. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1760 both parametric estimation and non-parametric estimation were adopted to identify the influences of the elite stream on student academic achievement. considering the differences in the cutoff point of elite classes between schools and academic years, this study incorporated the fixed effect of school-academic year in the estimation model to control for factors that did not show time difference between schools and academic years but have an impact on student academic performance. research hypotheses based on the relevant conclusions made by previous studies, the following hypotheses were proposed: h0: the elite stream cannot promote student academic progress. h1: the elite stream can significantly enhance student performance. research findings descriptive statistics showed that there was a considerable difference in the grade-10 streaming examination results and the grade-12 academic achievement between elite class and regular class students, yet the gap did not undergo significant alteration after three school years. that indicated that despite the unbalanced distribution of educational resources between elite and regular classes during this period, there was a limited effect of the elite stream in promoting student academic performance. to identify the causal relation between the elite stream and student academic progress, this study utilized the cutoff point of elite class admission as the exogenous variable to construct quasi-experiment design and employed fussy regression discontinuity design to evaluate the effects of the elite stream on students’ disciplinary results and their overall performance. the findings showed that the elite stream had no significant promotive effects on the advancement of students’ overall performance and disciplinary results. the robustness check demonstrated that the driving variable and control variables verified the continuum hypothesis at the cut-point, and the estimation results are not affected by distinct bandwidth values or the make-up of the sample. no significant positive impact of the elite stream on students’ overall performance and disciplinary results were detected. therefore, the research findings showed strong robustness. the results of the heterogeneity test indicated that the elite stream had no significant positive effect on the academic achievement of students of different genders and with different types of registered residence. as a result, it was concluded that the elite stream in general high schools could not serve as an effective strategy for optimizing education resource allocation and encouraging student academic progress. yang et al. (beijing & sichuan, china). elite stream and academic achievement. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1761 the chinese version of this article has been published in china economics of education review, 2022, 7(05):41-61. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 杨 靖, 叶晓梅, 杜育红. (2022). 重点班能否提升高中生的学业成绩?—基于西部某市普通高中的 断点回归设计研究. 教育经济评论, 2022, 7(5):41-61. received: 30 march 2023 revised: 11 april 2023 accepted: 05may 2023 ar3-xiaomeiye-bece_titlemay_2023 ar3-xiaomeiye-bece_maintextmay2023 gain or loss? the internet use among generation z and its impact on their academic achievement youxi jiao, xiulan yu nanjing university, nanjing 210008, jiangsu, china abstract: generation z as digital natives are distinguished by their intense engagement in online activity. this article is an analysis of the impact of the internet use on academic performance in gen z based on data from the china family panel studies (ceps) 2020. research findings show that there exist divides in the internet use among members of gen z with distinct family origins and that the impact of the internet use on students’ academic achievement varied according to their educational phases and prior academic rankings. the multi-categorical ordinal logistic regression model was adopted in the analysis. best evidence in chinese education 2024; 17(2):1861-1863. doi: 10.15354/bece.24.ar121 how to cite: jiao, y., & yu, x. (2024). gain or loss? the internet use among generation z and its impact on their academic achievement. best evidence in chinese education, 17(2):1861-1863. keywords: internet use, digital divide, academic achievement, internet-based learning preference correspondence to: xiulan yu, institute of education, nanjing university, nanjing 210008, jiangsu, china. e-mail: yuxiulan@nju.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2024 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:yuxiulan@nju.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ jiao & yu. (nanjing, china). internet use among generation z and its impact. bece, vol.17, no. 2, 2024 1862 introduction here have been widespread concerns over the educational inequality caused by the digital divide in the internet era. this article aims to explore the differences in the internet use among members of generation z (gen z) with distinct family origins; the impact of internet-based learning behavior on gen z’s academic success; and the disparities in the impact between gen z students at various educational phases. the study has its implications for promoting educational equity by ascertaining the specific effects of information technology in the digital transformation of education. research hypotheses h 1: there are social-status differences in the use of the internet. higher-status gen z students are inclined to use the internet for learning purposes, whereas their lower-status peers are more likely to use it for recreation. h 2: the internet use preference poses significant impacts to student academic achievement. internet-based learning has positive effects on students’ academic ranking; internet-based recreation has negative effects on students’ academic ranking. h 3: there are age differences in the impacts of the internet use preference on academic performance in gen z students. research methodology the source of data the present study sourced data from the china family panel studies (ceps) 2020 published by peking university’s institute of social science survey (isss). members of gen z born between 1995 and 2009 were selected as subjects. a sample of 4827 was established after the process of data sorting and screening. variables student academic performance is the dependent variable in this study, which is indicated by the individual’s academic ranking in their grade among secondary school students or by the individual’s ranking in a certain major among university students. the gen z student’s family background and internet use behavior are the independent variables. the variable of student family background is represented by the parental education level and family social status; student internet use behaviors incorporate internet-based learning, online gaming, online shopping, and short video watching. the control variables are divided into school and personal dimensions. the school-related control variables are “being with a prestigious school or not” and “being in an elite class or not;” the personal-level control variables include gender, age, parental political status, etc. data analysis t jiao & yu. (nanjing, china). internet use among generation z and its impact. bece, vol.17, no. 2, 2024 1863 the dependent variable in this study is a unitary, ordinal categorical variable, the independent variable of student family background is a continuous variable, and student internet use behavior is set as a dichotomous variable. thereby, the software stata 17.0 was used to conduct the multicollinearity test and wald test on independent variables (qu & min, 2019), and the multi-categorical ordinal logistic regression model was adopted for data analysis. research findings the research findings of the study include: (i) there were significant differences in “digital habits” among members of gen z with differential family status. higher-status students showed a stronger preference for internet-based learning, whereas their lowerstatus peers exhibited a stronger preference for online recreation, which represents a new form of digital divide. (ii) there was heterogeneity in the effects of the internet use on student academic achievement, which generally confirmed the hypotheses about the impacts of the “preference for learning” and “preference for recreation” on student performance. (iii) the impacts of the internet use on academic achievement among members of gen z varied according to their individual educational phases and prior academic rankings. internet-based learning considerably contributes to academic success of university students but had no significant positive effect on academic performance of secondary school students. the negative impacts of online recreation are significant and universal, particularly impairing academic achievement of secondary school students. therefore, it is imperative to bridge the digital divide of any form, foster legitimate digital habits in students, and maximize digital dividends to optimize gen z’s educational attainments and advance educational equity in the digital era. references qu, w. & min, s. (2019). digital inequality in the use of the internet: an analysis based on the ordinal logit model. journal of communication university of china (natural science edition), 26(6):50-55. doi: https://doi.org/10.16196/j.cnki.issn.16734793.2019.06.005 the chinese version of this article has been published in chinese journal of distance education, 2024; 44(1):1-14. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 焦佑希, 余秀兰. (2024). 增益还是损抑? z 世代互联网使用及其对学业成就的影响. 中国远程教 育，44(1):1-14. received: july 01, 2024 revised: july 08, 2024 accepted: july 20, 2024 https://doi.org/10.16196/j.cnki.issn.1673-4793.2019.06.005 https://doi.org/10.16196/j.cnki.issn.1673-4793.2019.06.005 ar-xiulanyu-bece_title-july_2024 ar-xiulanyu_bece-maintext-july2024 bece. newsletter vol.8, no.1, 2021 1066 the effects of teacher professional development on student achievement by wei, y. correspondence to: wei, y., china institute for educational finance research, peking university, china. email: ywei@ciefr.pku.edu.cn ost of the previous empirical studies on teacher professional development mainly focused on the impacts of professional development activities on teachers themselves, while fewer analyzed the impacts on students. based on the standardized test scores of more than 40,000 high school students in beijing from 2016 to 2019 and the questionnaire survey data collected from about 2,000 teachers, researchers used a value-added model to examine the value-added effects of teachers on students’ academic achievement, and further analyzed the effects of teachers’ participation in districtlevel and school-based teaching research activities on students’ academic achievement. the results of the study are as follows:  the degree of participation in regular teaching and researching activities district-level on average, feathered teaching and researching activities, and activities related to effective professional development elements have a significant positive relationship with the value-added of students’ achievement.  generally speaking, the average degree of participation in school-based teaching and researching activities, formal and informal exchanges among teachers, and the value-added of students’ performance have a significant positive relationship. this research also has certain limitations. in order to accurately evaluate the impact of teachers’ professional development activities on students’ academic performance, and revealing the mechanism and influence path of which, hence further study should focus on specific teachers’ professional development activities and relevant design considerations. in addition, students’ achievement and teachers’ effectiveness are affected by various factors, therefore, it is also important to combine quantitative and qualitative researches, collecting multi-dimensional teacher data, so as to more objectively evaluate the effects of teachers’ participation in professional development activities on students’ achievement. source: education & economy, 2021; 37(1):74-82+96. m bece. newsletter vol.14, no.1, 2023 1766 urban-rural differences in student decision-making regarding shadow education: an analysis based on the theory of planned behavior by li, j. l. & wu, w. correspondence to: wei wu, beijing institute of technology, china. e-mail: williamwu19@163.com riginally, extracurricular tutoring was meant to help students to improve their academic performance and prospects for further education. yet, shadow education has now become an off-campus arena for the competition for additional educational resources, as it takes place outside formal schools and is a paid service. based on the theory of planned behavior, this study analyzed the decision process in after-school tutoring consumption from the standpoint of demand and explored the main factors in decision-making about students’ participation in shadow education, in an effort to provide urban and rural families with implications for making rational decisions regarding private supplementary tutoring to reduce the burdens it brings on to children and parents. the study recruited 32 secondary school students between the ages of 14 and 16 from beijing, shanghai, guangzhou cities and jiangsu province. they were either senior students of middle schools or junior students of high schools. among the subjects, there were 17 female and 15 male students, with 22 of them from urban schools and 10 from rural ones. data were collected through interviews. research findings showed that the theory of planned behavior is applicable to the decision-making of all students choosing to participate in after-school tutoring. students would deliberate and make decisions based on the following three aspects: attitudes (views on after-school tutoring), subjective norms (social pressure from parents, friends, and peer groups), and perceived behavior control (objective conditions such as traffic distance between home and the off-campus training institution, tutoring fees, tutoring quality, etc.). there were significant differences in decision-making about shadow education between urban and rural students. rural students could not access private tutoring, especially high-quality private tutoring due to economic constraints and/or traffic difficulties, while their urban peers can enjoy the dual educational advantages: better school education and high-quality extracurricular tutoring. rural students played a more passive role in extracurricuo mailto:williamwu19@163.com vol.14, no.1, 2023 1767 lar tutoring participation and their decision-making were often the result of influences from their parents’ social connections, while urban students are more likely to make autonomous decisions based on their own needs. source: journal of capital normal university, 2022; 2022(6):172-180. the influence of class teachers’ leadership behavior and personal characteristics on student academic performance: a study of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis citing h middle school as a case study hongyan zhao, 1 jiacheng zhang 2 1. grain reserves at jilin directly managed storehouse, nanjing 210097, jiangsu, china 2. jiangsu huajie education group, zhangjiagang 215600, jiangsu, china abstract. leadership behavior of classroom teachers has a significant impact on students’ academic success. however, little empirical research on this subject has been undertaken in china. by developing truth tables and doing necessary computations, this study examines the influence of differential combinations of parameters connected to class teachers’ qualities and leadership behavior on student academic performance. it has been discovered that the democratic leadership behavior displayed by class teachers is the most popular among students and is helpful to student academic achievement; the numerous combinations of linked characteristics have varying effects on student academic performance. the study compensates for a dearth of empirical research on the subject and sheds light on the process by which class teacher leadership influences student academic progress. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 10(2):1357-1373. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.or042. how to cite: zhao, h., & zhang, j. (2022). the influence of class teachers’ leadership behavior and personal characteristics on student academic performance: a study of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis citing h middle school as a case study. best evidence in chinese education, 10(2):1357-1373. keywords: leadership behavior, academic performance, class teacher, class management, qualitative comparative analysis zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no.2, 2022 1358 about author: hongyan zhao, central grain reserves, jilin directly managed storehouse, nanjing 210097, jiangsu, china. e-mail: hy15605173005@163.com correspondence to: jiacheng zhang, jiangsu huajie education group, zhangjiagang 215600, jiangsu, china. email: 1983167366@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:hy15605173005@163.com mailto:1983167366@qq.com zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1359 literature review and questions china has been adopting the class teacher system throughout the country since 1949. in china, a class teacher is expected to oversee both the overall management of the class and the teaching of a single subject. each class teacher applies their own distinctive leadership style to student management. teacher leadership behavior has long been a source of contention in western countries, coining the term “teacher leadership” in educational literature in the 1950s (lieberman & miler, 2004). lambert and harris (2003) argue that teacher leadership’s objective is to help and encourage students to acquire self-directed learning skills. wu and dai (2008) assert that teachers provide an example for pupils and influence them through their excellent moral character and knowledge. after reviewing prior research on teacher leadership, this study defines class teacher leadership as the all-encompassing effect a teacher can exert on students through the integration of personal teaching experience, expertise, teaching skills, and class management competence. based on the fundamental variable of “power,” lewin, an american management scientist, divides teacher leadership into three categories: democratic, autocratic, and laissez-faire (lewin, white, & lippitt, 1939). silins and mulfold find that extensive follow-up research indicates that teacher leadership is directly related to student academic progress (mulford & kendall, 2004). according to wu’s research, laissez-faire leadership is detrimental to student academic attainment, but democratic and autocratic leadership are good. however, further analysis reveals that the benefit of autocratic leadership is limited to the current course, whereas democratic leadership contributes to the overall learning of students (wu & chen, 1978). there is a debate regarding whether the personal attributes of teachers have an effect on student academic progress. huang and xin (2007) conducted a study to demonstrate that gender, duration of service, educational level, discipline, and qualifications of teachers have no significant effect on student academic performance. nonetheless, zhang and her colleagues report that student academic achievement varies by class and that teachers’ gender, length of service, commitments, and suitability of their disciplines for their posts all contribute significantly to student academic achievement after conducting a study of the influence of teachers’ personal characteristics on student school results using hierarchical linear modeling and extensive survey data on student academic achievement (zhang, 2012). due to the diversity of class management systems in other countries and in taiwan, the majority of research on this topic focuses on teacher leadership rather than class teacher leadership. while discussions on class teacher leadership are prevalent on the mainland, most of them are theoretical in nature. the scant amount of extant empirical research mostly uses regression analysis to analyze the association between class teacher leadership and student academic achievement, excluding multi-angle examinations of significant elements in various combinations. given that academic achievement is not only a reflection of students’ efforts in learning but also of the effectiveness of class management and teacher leadership behavior (zhu, 2008), investigations into the influencing mechanisms of various combinations of relevant factors are critical for class management and teaching efficiency improvement. to accomplish this, we use fuzzy zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1360 set qualitative comparative analysis (fsqca) to examine the terminal exam results of 24 grade seven classes at lianyungang h middle school and, using truth tables, summarize the influencing mechanisms of various combinations of class teachers’ personal characteristics and leadership behavior. research design investigation subjects and processes the subjects of the research are class teachers and students from 24 seventh-grade classes at lianyungang h middle school. h middle school, a nine-year private boarding school, has long been ranked first in the district in terms of student academic achievement, despite the fact that its tangible and intangible conditions are not up to par with those at other district schools. additionally, students at this school come from typical socioeconomic families and are entitled to more time for sports and recreation than their peers at other schools. thus, the school’s academic advantage cannot be explained solely by resource advantages and students’ time investment in studying. we make the cautious assumption that the lead originates from the school’s distinctive management methods and culture. in april 2019, we performed two four-day investigations into the school life of students and the routine administration of class teachers at h middle school. to confirm the validity of our findings, we used two cameras to capture classroom observations and as many instances of teacher-student interaction as feasible. to ascertain the leadership styles of the 24 class teachers, 1,293 questionnaires were sent to all seventhgrade students, and 1,105 effective ones were extracted after screening. additionally, we interviewed the 24 class teachers to elicit additional demographic characteristics and examples of good classroom management and instruction. the studies enabled us to comprehend the school’s distinctive management practices and culture, as well as to gather data for our subsequent examination of the school’s academic accomplishment advantage. we collect the average scores on each class’s second semester terminal exams and utilize them as a dependent variable in this study. each academic year, the institution reorganizes its classes. to maintain equity, the school makes an effort to balance students’ average academic levels and the overall strength of the teachers assigned to each class. however, each class may have only one class teacher, and they may differ, providing an ideal control situation and enabling us to conduct important studies of the correlations between class teachers’ qualities and student academic attainment using a consistent baseline. research instruments and methodology the teacher leadership behavior questionnaire (hereinafter referred to as the tlbq) was developed by professor wu of taiwan normal university for the purpose of assessing seventh graders’ perceived and expected classroom teacher leadership behavior. this questionnaire is a customized scale of teacher leadership behavior developed by wu in consultation with lewis’ theory of leadership behavior (wu & chen, 1978). the zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1361 scale is a highly reliable and valid instrument that has gained widespread acceptance in academia. this scale has been cited in over 2000 publications as a research instrument. professor wu approved the questionnaire’s use in this study and the investigation’s findings. our questionnaire divides class teacher leadership behavior into three categories: democratic, autocratic, and laissez-faire leadership, each of which is comprised of 20 questions. each question has a score associated with it if the answer is “yes,” but not if the answer is “no.” the total scores for each category include both perceived and expected class teacher leadership behavior. the category that receives the highest scores is the leadership style that the class teacher is supposed to exhibit. as mentioned previously, the predominant methodology used in current empirical studies of teacher leadership is correlation analysis based on regression techniques, which makes it difficult to conduct a detailed analysis of the combinatorial factors and influencing mechanisms affecting the effects of teachers’ personal characteristics and leadership behavior on student academic performance. the current study attempts to compensate for this shortcoming by utilizing qualitative comparative analysis (qca), a method of research pioneered by ragin, a sociologist, in 1980. the purpose of this method is to derive combinations of correlated factors from case studies using truth tables (du, 2017). in comparison to regression analysis, qca is more focused on the sufficient and necessary conditions necessary for the achievement of a research result and is less susceptible to the negative effects of autocorrelation and multicollinearity. additionally, qca places a premium on examining the combinatorial factors underlying a social phenomenon. as a result, it has been applied in a wide variety of fields in china and other countries, including sociology, political science, and managerial economics. however, qca is almost entirely absent from educational research in china. as a result, it should garner increased interest from the chinese educational community. qca is composed of three fundamental techniques: fussy set qca (fsqca), crisp set qca (csqca), and multi-value qca (mvqca). considering the sample size, this study opts for fsqca as the primary technique. by establishing sufficient and necessary relationships between explanatory and outcome variables, researchers can investigate the multifactor combinations influencing a particular case using fsqca (ragin & pennings, 2005). a specific result is believed to be the result of a number of influencing factors, and the purpose of fsqca is to define the causal relationship between the relevant influencing factors and the specific result. in fsqca, a case can be thought of as a collection of conditions and results. by examining the effects of various combinations of conditions on the results, researchers can determine which conditions are sufficient and which are necessary for the outcome variables (ragin, 2009). fsqca examines the relationship between explanatory and outcome variables using consistency and coverage indicators. using consistency indicators, we can determine whether an explanatory variable is a sufficient or necessary condition. typically, when the consistency of the explanatory variable exceeds 0.8, it can be considered a sufficient condition for the outcome variable. when the explanatory variable’s consistency is greater than 0.9, it is considered a necessary condition for the outcome variable. after determining the consistency of the results, the coverage indicator is used to determine the degree of explanation for a combination of causal factors (gao et al., 2018). selection and treatment of variables zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1362 academic achievement is influenced by a variety of factors. based on the analysis of the existing literature and sample, this study selects five condition variables, or independent variables, among which class teachers’ leadership behavior is the most important. the four demographic characteristic variables are class teachers’ gender, subject, length of service, and marital status. the average of each class’s scores is used as the outcome variable, or dependent variable. we collect data on the independent variables via questionnaires and in-depth interviews. the application of wu’s tlbq yields data on the leadership behavior of 24 class teachers in grade seven at h middle school (table 1), indicating that all of them practice democratic leadership, albeit at varying levels of proficiency. this is a completely unexpected result that has never been observed in any of our previous studies. in class, we always encountered a certain number of teachers exhibiting autocratic leadership behavior in the schools we investigated previously. autocratic leadership is even prevalent among class teachers in some schools. according to our interviews, the majority of the 24 class teachers at h middle school is relatively young and has enjoyed harmonious relationships with their students. as a result, we assume that democratic leadership behavior on the part of class teachers results in fruitful teacher-student relationships. additionally, prior research indicates that harmonious teacher-student relationships are critical for increasing student academic achievement (zhou, gu, & yao, 2018). given this, we propose another hypothesis: that class management under democratic leadership contributes to h middle school’s position as the district’s top performer in terms of student academic achievement. the a-e difference refers to the score difference between the actual and expected values for each category of class teacher leadership behavior in table 1. a positive a-e difference indicates that the class teacher’s actual leadership behavior exceeds students’ expectations in this category, whereas a negative a-e difference indicates that the class teacher’s actual leadership behavior falls short of students’ expectations. interestingly, despite the fact that all 24 class teachers receive the highest score for democratic leadership behavior, the majority of classes report a negative a-e difference for this category, indicating that despite democratic leadership behavior’s predominance in class management in grade seven, it has fallen short of students’ expectations. students anticipate that their teachers will conduct class management in a more democratic manner. variables are coded as shown in table 2 for ease of expression in the following discussion. empirical analysis and discussion calibration of variables calibration of variables is a critical step in qualitative comparative analysis, but is not required in regression analysis. calibration of continuous variables is carried out in fsqca in order to convert them to membership scores between 0 and 1 (pan, 2018). calibration anchors should be chosen with regard to the study’s theoretical principles and sample data distribution. typically, the 10% quantile, 20% quantile, and upper quantile serve as candidates for the first anchor, the mean and median values serve as zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1363 table 1. the results of class teacher leadership behavior questionnaire. class types of value autocratic laissez-faire demo-cratic 1 actual value 412 149 783 expectation value 326 208 821 a-e difference 86 -59 -38 2 actual value 289 53 692 expectation value 227 90 727 a-e difference 62 -37 -35 3 actual value 404 83 768 expectation value 240 168 843 a-e difference 164 -85 -75 4 actual value 500 87 737 expectation value 297 192 860 a-e difference 203 -105 -123 5 actual value 310 85 616 expectation value 240 185 742 a-e difference 70 -100 -126 6 actual value 481 201 865 expectation value 405 306 890 a-e difference 76 -105 -25 7 actual value 375 115 914 expectation value 330 135 904 a-e difference 45 -20 10 8 actual value 433 126 972 expectation value 342 199 1004 a-e difference 91 -73 -32 9 actual value 529 230 799 expectation value 429 258 851 a-e difference 100 -28 -52 10 actual value 598 90 758 expectation value 291 202 986 a-e difference 307 -112 -228 11 actual value 640 83 711 expectation value 335 191 972 a-e difference 305 -108 -261 12 actual value 519 125 905 expectation value 348 174 997 a-e difference 171 -49 -92 13 actual value 366 92 902 expectation value 298 129 934 a-e difference 68 -37 -32 14 actual value 436 120 869 expectation value 253 171 1027 a-e difference 183 -51 -158 15 actual value 335 75 875 expectation value 255 147 914 a-e difference 80 -72 -39 zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1364 16 actual value 429 239 857 expectation value 361 280 838 a-e difference 68 -41 19 17 actual value 444 93 838 expectation value 248 165 901 a-e difference 196 -72 -63 18 actual value 431 85 984 expectation value 355 144 1004 a-e difference 76 -59 -20 19 actual value 518 97 916 expectation value 340 200 961 a-e difference 178 -103 -45 20 actual value 365 103 990 expectation value 291 139 984 a-e difference 74 -36 6 21 actual value 378 110 903 expectation value 306 166 926 a-e difference 72 -56 -23 22 actual value 351 137 892 expectation value 313 189 919 a-e difference 38 -52 -27 23 actual value 519 157 657 expectation value 281 225 893 a-e difference 238 -68 -236 24 actual value 457 140 657 expectation value 349 181 824 a-e difference 108 -41 21 table 2. variable coding and descriptions. types of variables variables variable codes meaning and descriptions condition variables leadership behavior democracy level of democracy (low,medium, high) gender gender male/female subject subject key subject/non-key subject length of teaching length length of teaching (short, medium, high) marital status marriage married/unmarried outcome variable average scores of each class score average scores (low, medium, high) zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1365 table 3. quantile analysis of continuous variables. average scores levels of democracy length of teaching n valid 24 24 24 missing 0 0 0 mean values 556.83 0.60 2.38 median values 559.95 0.60 1.00 percentiles 10 541.15 0.55 1.00 20 551.20 0.58 1.00 25 552.20 0.59 1.00 30 553.90 0.59 1.00 50 559.95 0.60 1.00 70 562.30 0.61 2.50 75 563.08 0.61 3.00 80 563.50 0.61 4.00 90 566.35 0.62 6.00 data source: output results by software spss. table 4. calibration anchors for all variables. variable types variables anchors full non-membership median point full membership condition variables democracy 0.5 0.60 0.62 gender 0.00 1.00 subject 0.00 1.00 length 1.00 2.38 6.00 marriage 0.00 1.00 outcome variable score 541.15 556.83 566.35 data source: analysis results by software spss. candidates for the second anchor, and the 90% quantile, 80% quantile, and lower quantile serve as candidates for the third anchor (ragin, 2014). table 3 illustrates the quantiles of variables in the current study. based on the characteristics of the sample data distribution in this study, we chose the 10% quantile, the mean, and the 90% quantile as the first, second, and third anchors, respectively. the calibration anchors for each variable are illustrated in table 4. except for the three dichotomous variables (gender, subject, and marriage), the other three raw variables (democracy, length, and score) must be calibrated and converted to membership scores in the range of 0 to 1. democracyfz, zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1366 lengthfz, and scorefz are the regenerated codes that represent them. the following are the calibration formulas for the three variables: (1) democracyfz = calibrate (demoracy, 0.549792, 0.595870, 0.619352) (2) lengthfz = calibrate (length, 1, 2.38, 6) (3) scorefz = calibrate (score, 541.150, 556.825, 566.350) following calibration, all variables are represented by membership scores ranging from 0 to 1, as illustrated in table 5. truth tables ragin suggests that a consistency threshold of 0.75 is the “minimum requirement” for admission, 0.8 is “acceptable,” and 0.85 is “very acceptable” (ragin, 2005). we define the consistency threshold as 0.8 and the frequency threshold as 1, after consulting ragin’s research and examining the distribution characteristics of the sample cases included in this study (du, 2017). when a case meets the consistency threshold of greater than 0.8, the outcome variable “average score” is coded as 1 (scorefz = 1). otherwise, it is represented by the value 0 (scorefz = 0). “scorefz = 1” indicates academic performance improvement; “scorefz = 0” indicates academic performance decline. the distribution of truth tables for improved and degraded academic performance is shown in tables 6 and 7. analytical results empirical analysis using fsqca generates three types of solutions: complex, intermediate, and parsimonious. in a complex solution, configurations do not undergo simplification, resulting in the greatest number of factor combinations. when a complex solution is incorporated into the path analysis process, the results become extremely intricate. in comparison, the process of simplification inherent in the parsimonious solution tends to include all logical remainders without evaluating their validity, resulting in a simplified solution that is likely to be inconsistent with theories or actualities; another consequence is that it may eliminate numerous indispensable and necessary conditions. whereas the intermediate solution, based on the researcher’s theoretical and practical knowledge, will incorporate the relevant logical remainder into the results. in comparison to complex and parsimonious solutions, the intermediate solution has a significant advantage in that it prevents the elimination of necessary conditions, that is, any superset integral to the result and relevant necessary conditions (du, 2017). fsqca 3.0, designed by ragin et al., was used to process the data in this article. tables 8 and 9 illustrate the intermediate solutions to the empirical analysis of improved and degraded student academic achievement. according to table 8, teachers can positively influence student academic achievement via three distinct pathways, with an overall consistency of 0.89. the first configuration (~lengthfz * marriage * subject) indicates that a married class teacher in charge of a key subject (in the context of china’s basic education, dominant subjects such as mathematics, chinese, english, physics, and chemistry are referred to as “key subjects,” while others are referred to as “non-key subjects”) and with a short zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1367 table 5. membership scores of the set after variable calibration. classes average scores levels of democracy gender subjects lengths of teaching marital status caseid scorefz democracyfz gender subject lengthfz marriage class1 0.81 0.38 0.00 1.00 0.30 0.00 class2 0.96 0.47 0.00 1.00 0.05 0.00 class3 0.87 0.91 0.00 1.00 0.30 1.00 class4 0.77 0.72 1.00 0.00 0.79 1.00 class5 0.68 0.69 1.00 1.00 0.79 1.00 class6 0.89 0.63 0.00 1.00 0.05 0.00 class7 0.44 0.79 1.00 0.00 0.99 1.00 class8 0.50 0.89 0.00 1.00 0.05 0.00 class9 0.88 0.95 0.00 0.00 0.63 0.00 class10 0.35 0.95 0.00 1.00 0.63 0.00 class11 0.82 0.96 1.00 1.00 0.05 1.00 class12 0.98 0.94 0.00 1.00 0.05 0.00 class13 0.78 0.90 0.00 1.00 0.05 0.00 class14 0.64 0.79 0.00 1.00 0.05 1.00 class15 0.13 0.64 0.00 0.00 0.05 0.00 class16 0.12 0.53 1.00 0.00 0.79 1.00 class17 0.01 0.73 0.00 1.00 0.05 0.00 class18 0.37 0.53 1.00 0.00 1.00 1.00 class19 0.02 0.45 0.00 1.00 0.05 0.00 class20 0.77 0.27 1.00 1.00 0.05 1.00 class21 0.95 0.22 0.00 1.00 0.05 1.00 class22 0.93 0.05 0.00 1.00 0.05 0.00 class23 0.27 0.04 0.00 0.00 0.05 0.00 class24 0.25 0.02 1.00 0.00 0.30 0.00 data source: results processed by software fsqca. table 6. the truth table for improved academic results when scorefz = 1. ideal cases level of democracy length of teaching marital status subject gender number of cases with membership score > 0.5 consistency class 9 1 1 0 0 0 1 1.00 class 21 0 0 1 1 0 1 1.00 class 20 0 0 1 1 1 1 1.00 class 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 0.99 class 3 & 14 1 0 1 1 0 2 0.91 class 11 1 0 1 1 1 1 0.91 data source: results processed by software fsqca. zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1368 table 7. the truth table for degraded academic results when scorefz = 0. ideal cases level of democracy length of teaching marital status subject gender number of cases with membership score > 0.5 consisten cy class 1, 2, 19, & 22 0 0 0 1 0 4 0.78 class 10 1 0 0 1 0 1 0.74 class 6, 8, 12,13 & 17 1 0 0 1 0 5 0.71 class 4, 7, 16, & 18 1 1 1 0 1 4 0.64 class 15 1 0 0 0 0 1 0.51 class 24 0 0 0 0 1 1 0.36 class 23 0 0 0 0 0 1 0.33 data source: results processed by software fsqca. table 8. empirical analysis of improved student academic achievement when scorefz = 1. configuration raw coverage unique coverage consistency ~lengthfz*marriage*subject 0.29 0.20 0.87 democracyfz*lengthfz* ~marriage*~subject*~gender 0.05 0.05 1.00 democracyfz*marriage*subject*gender 0.12 0.03 0.92 solution coverage: 0.37 solution consistency: 0.89 data source: results processed by software fsqca. table 9. empirical analysis of degraded student academic achievement when scorefz = 0. configuration raw coverage unique coverage consistency ~lengthfz*~marriage*~gender 0.48 0.16 0.67 ~democracyfz*~lengthfz*~marriage*~subject 0.05 0.02 0.34 democracyfz*lengthfz*marriage*gender 0.29 0.00 0.64 democracyfz*lengthfz*marriage* ~subject*gender 0.12 0.12 0.64 solution coverage:0.62 solution consistency: 0.59 data source: results processed by software fsqca. zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1369 tenure is beneficial for improving student academic performance. the second configuration (democracyfz * lengthfz * ~marriage * ~subject * ~gender) implies that an unmarried female class teacher who has taught a non-core subject for many years and possesses supreme democratic leadership capability can help raise student academic achievement. configuration three (democracyfz * marriage * subject * gender) demonstrates that a married male class teacher in charge of a critical subject and possessing a high capacity for democratic leadership has a beneficial effect on student academic attainment. as per table 9, teachers can have a negative effect on students’ academic achievement in four ways, with an overall consistency of 0.59. the first configuration (~lengthfz * ~marriage * ~gender) indicates that an unmarried female class teacher with a short tenure has a detrimental effect on student academic performance. configuration two (~democracyfz * ~lengthfz * ~marriage * ~subject) indicates that an unmarried class teacher with a low capacity for democratic leadership, a short tenure, and responsibility for a non-core subject can have a detrimental effect on student academic achievement. configuration three (democracyfz * lengthfz * marriage * gender) implies that a married male class teacher with a high capacity for democratic leadership and oversight of a critical subject may be detrimental to student academic achievement. configuration four (democracyfz * lengthfz * marriage * ~subject * gender) suggests that a married male class teacher with a strong capacity for democratic leadership and extensive experience teaching a non-core subject may have a negative impact on student academic achievement. discussions the empirical findings in tables 8 and 9 indicate that seven distinct combinations of factors are associated with student academic performance. we discover that the variable “democracy level” is included in every combination, regardless of whether it is associated with increased or decreased academic achievement. as a result, we can conclude that the influence of classroom teachers’ democratic leadership behavior on student academic performance is contingent upon additional factors. it varies depending on the unique combination of conditions. in terms of other variables, the marital status and length of service of class teachers have a significant effect on student academic performance. unmarried class teachers with relatively short tenures exhibit insufficient maturity and consistency in their leadership behavior. as a result, they are unable to communicate with students as effectively as married class teachers with extensive teaching experience. this may have a detrimental effect on students’ academic performance. additionally, different combinations of gender and leadership behavior have varying effects on student academic performance. related configurations indicate that female class teachers with a high capacity for democratic leadership have a greater positive effect on student academic performance than their male counterparts, which may be explained by gender characteristics such as caution and rigor. fsqca is the primary methodology used in this study. it circumvents the sample size constraints inherent in quantitative and qualitative analysis and compensates for the shortcomings of traditional causality analysis. in traditional qualitative research, zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1370 findings are derived solely from questionnaires and superficial interviews conducted following observations and are almost certainly influenced by the researchers’ subjectivity, making it difficult to conduct in-depth analysis of the issue’s inherent mechanisms. on the other hand, in qca, sample selection is more flexible in response to the uniqueness of the cases, and scientific deduction can also be used to ensure the objectivity and robustness of the conclusions. in comparison to statistical product and service solutions (spss) as a quantitative analysis tool, qca can enquire more objectively and comprehensively into the complexity of causal relationships, thereby ensuring the validity of investigation results. moreover, we would like to point out a weakness in our study, namely the relatively low consistency in our empirical analysis of degraded student academic achievement, which impairs the validity and robustness of our conclusion in this area. we intend to expand our research on this aspect of the subject in the future in order to provide school administrators with additional resources for selecting appropriate class teachers. conclusions and suggestions conclusions the following major conclusions are drawn as a result of sample and data collection: variable selection and calibration; the creation of truth tables; and empirical analysis of the results. 1. democratic teacher leadership is a successful and popular mode of classroom management. the results of the questionnaire and subsequent analysis indicate that democratic leadership behavior ranks highest, while laissez-faire teacher leadership ranks lowest. the majority of students at h middle school anticipate their class teachers exercising democratic leadership. in regular class management, teachers here use a democratic leadership style to interact with students and allow students to exercise discretion, which helps develop students’ ability to learn independently and self-directedly. democratic leadership behavior on the part of classroom teachers has been shown to be an effective means of fostering an excellent school and class climate and increasing students’ self-motivation to learn. 2. overall, class instructors with insufficient service time are detrimental to student academic performance. however, when key-subject teachers serve as class teachers concurrently, the element of service time has little effect on student academic performance. according to research on classroom teacher development, classroom teachers often go through stages of adaptation, exploration, creation, and sustained development during their careers (qi, 2013). when young class teachers are still in the discovery period, their leadership conduct is insufficiently consistent to have a good effect on student academic performance. additionally, we discover disparities in the focus of work and expectations for students between key-subject instructors and non-key-subject teachers through interviews with class teachers. the former places a higher premium on classroom discipline and academic accomplishment, whereas the latter places a higher premium on students’ mental and physical wellness. this may account for why key-subject teachers can have a greater impact on students’ academic progress. zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1371 3. except for male teachers with extended tenures, only class teachers with a high level of democracy can contribute positively to student academic performance. teachers with a high level of democracy are more willing to disrupt the typical teacher-dominated classroom structure and urge pupils to participate more actively in classroom activities. they are frequently excellent listeners and cultivators of optimal teacher-student connections, which are crucial for improving student academic success (ning, 2016). additionally, our findings indicate that classes taught by female teachers have higher average test scores than classes taught by male teachers. this could be because female instructors are better at managing the degree of democracy and being more severe with pupils when necessary, whereas male instructors tend to allow themselves too much leeway when exercising democratic leadership. this explains why a high degree of democracy in class management by male teachers with long tenure is detrimental to student academic performance advancement. 4. the effect of marital status and gender on academic achievement varies according to how they interact with other factors. in general, married female teachers can have a greater impact on students’ academic performance. suggestions based on the multifactor combinations identified through empirical analysis and the difficulties expressed during interviews, this paper makes numerous recommendations for maximizing the influence of class teacher leadership behavior in enhancing student academic achievement. 1 it is strongly suggested that experienced teachers be appointed as class teachers. class teachers with extensive teaching experience are capable of managing democratic leadership effectively in order to optimize class management and so contribute to the improvement of student school results. 2 a mentoring program or a pattern of double-class teachers might be created to assist those new and inexperienced class teachers in swiftly growing. not only does the mentorship program or double class teacher pattern relieve class teachers of their responsibilities, but it also provides students with appropriate support to improve their academic level. 3 to promote teacher-student interactions, democratic class teacher leadership should be strongly fostered in schools. according to a previous study, democratic and fair-minded teachers are capable of persuading pupils to exert greater effort in their learning and achieve 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(2018). from “studying hard” to “learning skillfully”: an empirical study of key factors affecting student academic performance based on the survey data of 262245 students’ academic https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1002-980x.2018.04.009 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1002-980x.2018.04.009 https://doi.org/10.7666/d.d338247 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632430120074419 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632430120074419 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1001-4918.2007.04.010 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1001-4918.2007.04.010 https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1939.9713366 https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1939.9713366 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09578230410517486 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09578230410517486 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0013383 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0049124105274499 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0049124105274499 https://doi.org/10.6251/bep.19781201.7 zhao & zhang. class teachers’ leadership behavior and student academic performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1373 quality in jiangsu province. school administration, 336 (11):41-45. received: 30 january 2022 revised: 16 february 2022 accepted: 10 march 2022 originalarticle-hongyanzhao-bece_title_mar2022 originalarticle-hongyanzhao--bece_maintextmar2022 bece. newsletter vol.14, no.1, 2023 1764 the relation between academic performance and academic self-efficacy in primary school students: the mediating role of academic stress and self-esteem and gender differences by li, w. h. & jiang, f. correspondence to: wenhui li, shenyang normal university, china. e-mail: llwwhh1984@126.com cademic self-efficacy includes the individual’s confidence in their capacity for learning, self-assessment of their competence in utilizing their acquired skills to complete learning tasks, and subjective evaluation of their ability to control learning behavior and results. primary school students are at a crucial stage in the development of academic self-efficacy. successful cultivation of academic self-efficacy at this phase has a significant and positive effect on their academic attainment. adopting convenience sampling, this study investigated 145 fourth graders (72 boys), 121 fifth graders (60 boys), and 138 six graders (70 boys) from three randomly selected classes of each grade in a primary school in huanggu district of shenyang city. the academic stress questionnaire, academic self-efficacy questionnaire, self-esteem scale and students’ academic results of the nearest final examination were used to evaluate the impact of academic performance on student academic self-efficacy, the chain mediating effect of academic stress and self-esteem, and the moderating effect of gender. the research findings showed that: (1) academic performance could positively predict academic self-efficacy among primary school students. (2) academic stress and self-esteem posed chain mediating effects on the relationship between academic performance and academic self-efficacy. (3) there were gender differences in the chain mediating effects. among girl students, there was a partial mediating effect and three mediating paths, including the separate mediating effect of academic stress, the separate mediating effect of self-esteem, and the chain mediating effect of academic stress and self-esteem; among boy students, there was a complete mediating effect and two mediating paths, namely the separate mediating effect of self-esteem and the chain mediating effect of academic stress and self-esteem. source: journal of psychological science, 2023;46(2):347-354. a mailto:llwwhh1984@126.com vol.8, no.1, 2021 1017 in memory of professor robert e. slavin alan c. k. cheung obert e. slavin, a world-recognized education researcher, passed away on april 24, 2021. the unfortunate death of professor slavin was a great loss for the global educational research, especially for our journal. holding positions as a research scientist, the first-ever distinguished professor at the johns hopkins school of education, and director of the johns hopkins center for research, and reform in education, dr. slavin sought to translate the science of learning into effective teaching practices (myers, 2021). professor slavin was among the earliest researchers working on cooperative learning, an approach through which small teams of students with different academic abilities work together (roberts, 2021). these are now used throughout the world as the preeminent researcher in the field of education, he always concentrated on the up-to-date education issues, devoting himself to the journey of promoting better education to the students in need. “what most studies show is that mixed-ability grouping doesn’t hurt high-achieving students and in fact helps those of lower achievement levels,” dr. slavin told the new york times in 1990 (smothers, 1990). professor slavin was the chief expert of the school of education at johns hopkins university. he led the college of education and achieved first place in the national education college rankings (2014-2016). professor slavin was the top-ten influential scholar in the field of education research in the united states. he has published more than 300 articles and two dozen books, exploring topics including classroom organization, school desegregation, cooperative learning, and evidence-based reform, and has made outstanding contributions to educational research and public service (smith, 2021). professor slavin is perhaps the world’s most effective advocate for using evidence as a basis for educational policy and practice. he has published dozens of reviews of research on effective practices in elementary and sec © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. r vol.8, no.1, 2021 1018 ondary reading, writing, mathematics, science, and early childhood education (see www.bestevidence.org), and has written widely on methodology for research review. to make evidence on educational effectiveness available to all, he founded two free websites for educators and researchers, the best evidence encyclopedia (www.evidenceforessa.org) (mostly for researchers) and evidence for essa (www.evidenceforessa.org) (mostly for educators). he also wrote weekly blogs on evidence-based reform in education, and distributed a bi-weekly online summary of recent research and policy developments, i.e., best evidence in brief (beib). meanwhile, professor slavin also contributed to the establishment of the corresponding platform supported by the institute for effective education (iee) at the university of york in the u.k. (http://www.beib.org.uk/), and the centre for university & school partnership at the chinese university of hong kong in china (https://cuspbeb.com/). during his visit to china in 2018, he signed cooperation with the school of education of nanjing normal university to establish the simplified chinese version of the education evidence-based research “best evidence in brief” and served as the director of the editorial board (http://www.cnbeb.org.cn:81/en/). in the form of a “newsletter”, it has built a bridge for the exchanges between the world and china in the field of evidence-based research in education (li & yao, 2018). these platforms provide convenient results of the optimum evidence-based research results, so as to help worldwide educational scholars with professional support better improve the current evidence-based education (slavin et al., 2021). the educational research achievements of professor slavin were the valuable fortune of the world educational research, in memory of his remarkable achievements, in order to inherit his research results, and for the further development of the evidence-based research, we hereby published the “professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china” and “success for all: professor slavin and the improvement of evidencebased schools and its enlightenment to china” written by the editorial board members (yao, 2021) and (zhou & gu, 2021), respectively. affected by the limitations such as time, these articles could be insufficient in structure and methods, but it will not have any impact on the memory of professor slavin or lower the quality of the journal. references li, m., & yao, j. (2018). professor r. e. slavin from johns hopkins university visited our school. nanjing normal university. [chinese] retrieved may 19, 2021, from http://www.njnu.edu.cn/info/1038/8578.htm www.bestevidence.org www.evidenceforessa.org www.evidenceforessa.org http://www.beib.org.uk/ https://cuspbeb.com/ http://www.cnbeb.org.cn:81/en/ http://www.njnu.edu.cn/info/1038/8578.htm vol.8, no.1, 2021 1019 myers, a. (2021). robert slavin, global authority on education research and evidence-based school reform, dies at 70. hub at johns hopkins. retrieved may 18, 2021, from https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/04/26/robertslavin-obituary/ roberts, s. (2021). robert slavin, who studied how children learn, dies at 70. the new york times. retrieved may 19, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/education/robert-slavindead.html slavin, r., cheung, a., & zhuang, t. (2021). how does evidence-driven education reform promote education development. journal of east china normal university (education science edition), 2021, 39(3):14-22. [chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.10005560.2021.03.002 smith, h. (2021). robert slavin, whose reading program is used in schools nationwide, dies at 70. the washington post. retrieved may 19, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/robert-slavindead/2021/04/28/275a5792-a7aa-11eb-8c1a-56f0cb4ff3b5_story.html smothers, r. (1990). the nation: in pupil ‘tracks,’ many see a means of resegregation. the new york times. retrieved may 19, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/18/weekinreview/the-nation-inpupil-tracks-many-see-a-means-of-resegregation.html yao, j. (2021). professor slavin and the development of evidence-based education in china. best evidence in chinese education, 8(1):1021-1028. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or30 zhou, l., & gu, h. (2021). success for all: professor slavin and the improvement of evidence-based schools and its enlightenment to china. best evidence in chinese education, 8(1):1029-1040. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or35 correspondence to: alan c. k. cheung, ph.d. department chairperson and professor department of educational administration and policy the chinese university of hong kong hong kong 999077 china email: alancheung@cuhk.edu.hk conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.e008 https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/04/26/robert-slavin-obituary/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/04/26/robert-slavin-obituary/ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/education/robert-slavin-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/education/robert-slavin-dead.html https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.03.002 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.03.002 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/robert-slavin-dead/2021/04/28/275a5792-a7aa-11eb-8c1a-56f0cb4ff3b5_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/robert-slavin-dead/2021/04/28/275a5792-a7aa-11eb-8c1a-56f0cb4ff3b5_story.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/18/weekinreview/the-nation-in-pupil-tracks-many-see-a-means-of-resegregation.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/18/weekinreview/the-nation-in-pupil-tracks-many-see-a-means-of-resegregation.html https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or30 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.or35 the current state and characteristics of parental educational anxiety and contributing factors yadong ding, 1 haiping xue 2 1. china university of mining and technology, xuzhou 211116, jiangsu, china 2. capital normal university, beijing 100089, china abstract: this article employed descriptive statistics, regression analysis, and mediating effect analysis to study the current state and characteristics of parental educational anxiety as well as contributing factors. it was found that there was a 66.8% rate of educational anxiety among parents surveyed; that education policies were the primary factor in parental educational anxiety, with their relation being mainly mediated by school-related variables; that there was a significantly negative correlation between child academic performance and parents’ educational anxiety; and that mothers are more prone to educational anxiety than fathers. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 14(2):1771-1774. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar078 how to cite: ding, y., & xue, h. (2023). the current state and characteristics of parental educational anxiety and contributing factors, best evidence in chinese education, 14(2):1771-1774. keywords: educational anxiety; academic achievement; educational policy; compulsory education about the authors: yadong ding, school of public policy and management, china university of mining and technology, xuzhou 211116, jiangsu, china. haiping xue, school of education, capital normal university, beijing 100089, china. e-mail: xuehaiping_416@163.com correspondence to: haiping xue at capital normal university of china. conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:xuehaiping_416@163.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ding & xue. (beijing, china). parental educational anxiety and contributing factors. bece, vol.14, no. 2, 2023 1772 introduction he study focused on the parents of compulsory education students in shanghai city. through a large-scale survey and subsequent data analysis, it aimed to the status quo and characteristics of educational anxiety among parents of compulsory education students; analyze the factors in parental educational anxiety from the standpoints of educational policies, schools, families, and students; and propose recommendations on improving the education policy system from the perspective of policy design. analytical framework and data analytical framework the government, schools, parents, and students were chosen as the analytical dimensions of the educational setting to explore the causes of parental educational anxiety using variables such as parental understanding of educational policy, school education service quality, parental educational expectations, and student academic performance. the focus of analysis was on the impact of parental knowledge of educational policies, parental satisfaction with the quality of school education services, and student academic performance on parental educational anxiety. data and variables the research was based on the data from the survey on compulsory education students’ needs to participate in off-campus education by east china normal university’s national institute of educational policy research. the survey adopted a convenience sampling method to select primary and middle schools from various administrative districts in shanghai and include all students from the selected schools and their parents in the sample. a total of 68205 valid questionnaires were retrieved with 35,162 from parents and 33043 from students. main variables were established from the aspects of the educational policy, school, parent, and student. data analysis descriptive statistics were employed to analyze the current state and characteristics of parents’ educational anxiety. subsequently, regression analysis was adopted to identify the influences of educational policy-, school-, family-, and student-related factors on parents’ educational anxiety. furthermore, the mediation model was constructed to clarify the paths to the influences of all variables on parents’ educational anxiety and relevant mediating effects. t ding & xue. (beijing, china). parental educational anxiety and contributing factors. bece, vol.14, no. 2, 2023 1773 the status quo of parental educational anxiety and its characteristics high prevalence of parental educational anxiety among parents surveyed, 66.8% felt extremely anxious about child education, with 14.4% feeling “very anxious” and 52.4% feeling “considerably anxious.” the overall parental educational anxiety was above the moderate level. the wide variety of causes of parental educational anxiety the issues that related to parents’ educational anxiety included child academic performance (79.3%), campus safety (54.5%), mobile phone addiction (54.3%), soft skill cultivation (50.7%), educational equity (44.8%), school choice (39.9%), foreign language learning (27.3%), puppy love (25.4%), educational investment (24.4%), off-campus training (24%), sex education (21.6%), school district-focused residence (10.7%), and overseas study (7%), among which, child academic performance remained the greatest source of parental educational anxiety. factors influencing parental educational anxiety (i) parents’ understanding of the policies on the senior secondary education entrance examination and “double first-class” universities posed a salient impact on their educational anxiety. (ii) school service quality had a significant influence on parental educational anxiety, while school ownership was not related to it. (iii) certain aspects of family capital had prominent impacts on parental educational anxiety. parental education levels, parental occupational status, and home economic status were positively related to parents’ educational anxiety. (iv) child academic results exerted a substantial impact on parents’ educational anxiety. parents’ low satisfaction with child school performance was a critical reason for their educational anxiety. mediating effects on the generation of parental educational anxiety educational policies are the primary factor influencing parental educational anxiety. in addition to their direct impact, they also indirectly affect parents’ educational anxiety via school-, family-, and student-related factors. as a result, a multi-channel mediation path arose, consisting of chains “educational policies – parental educational anxiety,” "educational policies – schools – parental educational anxiety,” “educational policies – ding & xue. (beijing, china). parental educational anxiety and contributing factors. bece, vol.14, no. 2, 2023 1774 families – parental educational anxiety”, and “educational policies – schools – students – parental educational anxiety.” conclusions the research concluded that: (i) educational policies posed the strongest impact on parental educational anxiety, and the mediating chain “educational policies – schools – parental educational anxiety” served to be the primary path; (ii) parents’ knowledge of educational policies were closely associated with their educational anxiety; (iii) family capital significantly affected parents’ educational anxiety; (iv) child academic performance was negatively related to parental educational anxiety; (v) the quality of school education service had significant influences on parents’ educational anxiety; (vi) mothers were more prone to educational anxiety than fathers, and parents’ educational anxiety peaked at the junior secondary phase. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of capital normal university (social sciences edition), 2022(5):145-156. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 丁亚东, 薛海平. 家长教育焦虑的现状, 特征及影响因素—基于 35162 名家长的实证研究. 首都师 范大学学报 (社会科学版) 2022(5):145-156. received: 11 june 2023 revised: 29 june 2023 accepted: 8 july 2023 or-haipingxue-bece_titlemay_2023 or-haipingxue-bece_maintextmay2023 the effects of parent educational expectations on the competence development of rural left-behind children: an empirical study based on ceps data tianxue zhang, heng huang college of teacher education, zhejiang normal university, jinhua 321004, zhejiang, china abstract: based on data from the china education panel survey (ceps), this study conducted an empirical analysis of the effect of parent educational expectations on the competence development of rural left-behind children and the underlying mediating mechanism. the research findings reveal that rural left-behind children have far less developed competencies than their non-left-behind counterparts and that parent educational expectations significantly and positively influence the competence development of left-behind children. specifically, parent academic expectations impose the greatest impact on academic results of left-behind children; parent expectations of child education levels have the widest effects on various competencies of left-behind children; parent involvement and teacher support exert a chain mediating effect on the relationship between parent educational expectations and the competence development of rural left-behind children. the mediation effect of teacher support or the concurrence of teacher support and parent involvement remarkably promoted the competence development of rural left-behind children, while parent involvement alone results in masking effects, which impede the improvement of their competencies to some extent. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 12(1):1573-1579. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab007 how to cite: zhang, t., & huang, h. (2022). the effects of parent educational expectations on the competence development of rural left-behind children: an empirical study based on ceps data. best evidence in chinese education, 12(1):1573-1579. zhang & huang. (zhejiang). parent expectations and competence of rural left-behind children. bece, vol.12, no.1, 2022 1574 keywords: rural left-behind children, competence development, parent educational expectations, teacher support, parent involvement correspondence to: heng huang, college of teacher education, zhejiang normal university, jinhua 321004, zhejiang, china. e-mail: saintfreak4hh@zjnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:saintfreak4hh@zjnu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ zhang & huang. (zhejiang). parent expectations and competence of rural left-behind children. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1575 raising the questions against the backdrop of the economic transformation and dualistic structure of urban and rural areas in china, a massive rural labor force has flowed to urban areas. the issue of rural left-behind children induced by the labor migration has become the focus of concerns of the government and the public. the announcement of the opinions on strengthening the protection and service for rural left-behind children by the state council in 2016 signaled that the issue has been incorporated in the state’s policy framework. over the years, as a result of the advancements of rural revitalization and poverty alleviation strategies, the scale of rural left-behind children has been gradually brought under control the present study utilized the data from the china education panel survey (ceps) and adopted the perspectives of the neo human capital theory to address the following questions: are there any significant differences in the competence development among rural children? do parent educational expectations have substantial influences on the competence development of rural left-behind children? if yes, what is the influencing mechanism? research hypotheses in this study, the competence of rural left-behind children is measured by three indicators: student academic results, cognitive ability, and non-cognitive ability. parent educational expectations are classified into four categories: expectations of child academic achievements, education levels, future occupations, and future life, to facilitate the discussion on the relationship between “the great ambitions of lower class for their offspring” and the competence development of their left-behind children. we assume that there may be a chain mediation relationship between parent involvement and teacher support, which jointly work on the impact of parent educational expectations on the competence development of rural left-behind children. hypotheses are proposed as follows: h1: rural left-behind children have lower levels of competence, parent educational expectations, parent involvement, and teacher support than their non-left-behind counterparts. h2: the four dimensions of parent educational expectations (expectations of child academic achievements, education levels, future occupations, and future life) can positively predict the competence development of rural left-behind children. h3: parent involvement mediates the relationship between parent educational expectations and the competence development of rural left-behind children. h4: teacher support mediates the relationship between parent educational expectations and the competence development of rural left-behind children. h5: parent involvement and teacher support have chain mediating effects on the relationship between parent educational expectations and the competence development of rural left-behind children. zhang & huang. (zhejiang). parent expectations and competence of rural left-behind children. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1576 research design data sources this study drew on data from the ceps conducted by the national survey research center at renmin university of china. follow-up data was employed as the main body of sources whilst baseline survey data as supplements. a left-behind child was defined as the kid who cannot live with their parents because the parents (or one of them) are migrant workers but has to stay at their rural registered residence (huji). 954 rural leftbehind children and 2796 non-left-behind children were included in this study according to the types of huji, locations of huji, and living with parents or not. variables  predicted variables children’s competence was examined in three dimensions: academic achievements, cognitive ability, and non-cognitive ability. student academic achievements were represented by the results of standardized chinese, mathematics, and english mid-term exams in 2013 (averaged by this study). student cognitive ability was measured by a specialized test designed by the ceps, which focused on student logical thinking and problem-solving ability rather than specific disciplinary knowledge taught by school curriculum. the ceps’s database could provide cognitive ability test scores of each student. considering the data availability and qualities of rural left-behind children, this study measured their non-cognitive ability in four dimensions: self-regulation, selfefficacy, communication and interaction, emotional regulation. the scores from all question items under each dimension were aggregated and then averaged to obtain a composite value, which was converted into a dummy continuous variable. the higher the student scored for the four dimensions, the stronger their non-cognitive ability.  explanatory variables parent expectations of child academic achievements, education levels, future occupations, and future life, the four major components of parent educational expectations, were explanatory variables in this study. partial coding adjustments were made to these variables. the higher the scores of each variable, the greater parent educational expectations.  mediating variables taking specific circumstances of migrant worker parents into consideration, this study looked at parent involvement from two aspects: instructions for child learning and concerns for child daily life. teacher support was divided into academic, emotional, and social support.  control variables zhang & huang. (zhejiang). parent expectations and competence of rural left-behind children. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1577 demographic characteristics and family backgrounds are control variables in this study. demographic variables include “gender” (0= male, 1= female) and “being the onlychild or not” (0= yes, 1= no); family background-related variables include the parent education level and family economic status. analysis paths descriptive statistics were utilized to identify the differences in the competence development and parent educational expectations between rural left-behind children and their non-left-behind peers via software stata15.0. additionally, the ols multi-variable regression model was adopted to analyze the relationship between parent educational expectations and the competence development of rural left-behind children. empirical analysis results the results of descriptive statistics there were significant gaps in competencies between rural left-behind children and their non-left-behind peers; the latter outperform the former in academic achievements, cognitive ability, self-regulation, self-efficacy, communication and interaction, emotional regulation, etc. in addition, there were considerable disparities in most factors influencing student competence development between the two groups. rural left-behind children experienced lower parent expectations of child education levels and future occupations than non-left-behind kids; they also scored less in variables such as parent involvement, teacher support, and family backgrounds. thus, h1 was verified. the influence of parent educational expectations on the competence development of left-behind children model 1 demonstrated that all the four dimensions of parent educational expectations significantly and positively affected academic results of left-behind children. in other words, the rise in parent educational expectations help improve academic performance of left-behind children. judging by regression coefficients, parent academic expectations had the greatest impact on left-behind children’s academic results (10.723), followed by parent expectations of child future occupations (1.284) and life (0.194). parent involvement negatively affected academic results of left-behind children, whereas teacher support positively influenced them. model 2 illustrated that both parent expectations of child academic achievements and education levels had significant positive effects on cognitive ability of left-behind children; comparatively, the influence of parent expectations of child academic achievements (0.204) is greater. parent involvement imposed considerable unfavorable impact on cognitive ability of left-behind children, while home economic status and parental education levels were positively correlated with child cognitive ability. model 3 revealed that parent expectations of child academic achievements, education levels, and future occupations were significantly and positively correlated with left-behind children’s self-regulation, with parent expectations of zhang & huang. (zhejiang). parent expectations and competence of rural left-behind children. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1578 child academic achievements having the greatest influence (0.233), while the effect of parent expectations of child future life was of no statistical significance. moreover, parent involvement and teacher support had remarkable positive impact on left-behind children’s self-regulation. left-behind children from impoverished families displayed stronger self-regulation in adversity. as per model 4, parent expectations of child academic achievements and future life posed positive effects on left-behind children’s selfefficacy, significant at 5% and 1% levels, respectively; comparatively, parent expectations of child future life had a greater effect (0.182). teacher support was favorable for the cultivation of left-behind children’s self-efficacy. model 5 demonstrated that parent expectations of child education levels and future occupations positively influenced leftbehind children’s ability in communication and interaction, with a greater effect from parent expectations of child education levels (0.025). according to model 6, parent expectations of child education levels and future life had positive impact on emotional regulation of left-behind children, effectively reducing the occurrence of their negative emotions and enhancing their self-regulatory ability in response to unfavorable emotions. in light of the analytical results, h2 was partially validated. mediating effects of parent involvement and teacher support the proved relations between parent educational expectations, parent involvement, teacher support, left-behind children’s competence, and other variables provided prerequisites for testing mediating effects. based on the foregoing empirical results and research hypotheses, a chain mediation model was established with parent educational expectations as the exogenous variable and parent involvement, teacher support and left-behind children’s competence as the endogenous variables, to test the mediating effects on the relationship between parent educational expectations and left-behind children’s competence. the test of mediating effects of parent involvement showed that in this path, the indirect effect value of the influence of parent educational expectations on leftbehind children’s competence was -0.127, and the 95% confidence interval did not contain 0, which denoted a significant mediating effect of parent involvement on the relationship between parent educational expectations and the competence development of left-behind children. hence, h3 was corroborated. the test of mediating effects of teacher support demonstrated that in this path, the indirect effect value of the influence of parent educational expectations on leftbehind children’s competence was 0.012, and the 95% confidence interval did not contain 0, which marked a significant mediating effect of teacher support on the relationship between parent educational expectations and the competence development of leftbehind children. thus, h4 was confirmed. in the path of the joint mediating effect of parent involvement and teacher support, the indirect effect value of the influence of parent educational expectations on leftbehind children’s competence was 0.027, and the 95% confidence interval did not contain 0, indicating that there existed the chain mediating effects of parent involvement and teacher support and that h5 was supported. zhang & huang. (zhejiang). parent expectations and competence of rural left-behind children. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1579 a comparison of the effect sizes of the three paths revealed that parent involvement had the greatest mediating effect on the relation between parent educational expectations and left-behind children’s competence and generated a certain level of masking effects. the chain mediating effects of parent involvement and teacher support turned out to be stronger than the mediating effect of teacher support alone. conclusions first off, rural left-behind children display a lower level of competence in all dimensions than their non-left-behind peers. second, parent expectations of child academic achievements, education levels, future occupations, and future life are prominently and positively related to academic achievements, cognitive ability, and non-cognitive ability of left-behind children. third, via the mediation of parent involvement and teacher support, parent educational expectations yield indirect effects on the competence development of left-behind children, aside from their direct influences. lastly, previous research investigated the effects of parent involvement and teacher support on academic achievements, cognitive ability, and non-cognitive ability separately, whereas the current study found that there is a chain relation between the two variables, which jointly work on the competence development of rural left-behind children. the chinese version of this article has been published in education economy review,2022, 38(3):14. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 张天雪, 黄恒. 父母教育期望对农村留守儿童能力发展的影响-基于 ceps 数据的实证研究. 教 育经济评论, 2022, 7(04):75-92. received: 20 august 2022 revised: 06 september 2022 accepted: 12 september 2022 ar1-henghuang-bece_titlesep_2022 ar1-henghuang-bece_maintextsep2022 bece. newsletter vol.15, no.1, 2023, bece 1796 technology-supported teaching interventions and student computational thinking: a meta-analysis based on 37 empirical studies by zhou, q. & deng, y. correspondence to: qin zhou, southwest university, china. e-mail: zhqjojo@126.com omputational thinking, which integrates a wide variety of thinking activities such as problem-solving, system design, and comprehending human behavior, has become a critical thinking ability in the context of accelerated digital transformation. numerous studies from various counties posited that technology-supported teaching interventions (tsti) had the potential to foster the development of computational thinking skills in students, whereas some suggested that the potential was insignificant. this article employed the meta-analytical technique to research into 37 domestic and foreign empirical studies published between january 2006 and october 2022, with a focus on examining the impact of tstis on student computational thinking. research findings are as follows. i. tstis had positive effects on the development of students’ computational thinking skills. ii. the effectiveness of computational thinking training differed in various disciplines; there were prominent inter-group differences in the efficacy of teaching interventions. the outcomes of computational thinking training were insignificant in english and information science courses, but significant in spanish and dance classes. iii. the intervention effects of graphical/ modular programming languages and game-based programming contexts were significant, indicating that these two types of tools were substantially beneficial for cultivating students’ computational thinking skills. that means the ideal match between the tool and the learning agent can result in desirable teaching outcomes. iv. among evaluation tools of student computational thinking, formative assessment based on the programming environment were timelier and more authentic, though posing higher requirements for technical development compared to other forms of assessment. furthermore, there was no one single evaluation tool that suited all teaching settings. v. teaching interventions for small-size class, junior secondary school students, and lasting 6-11 weeks had better effects, and there were no c mailto:zhqjojo@126.com vol.15, no.1, 2023, bece 1797 significant gender differences in their impact on computational thinking development of students. recommendations were made based on the foregoing findings. (i) place high premiums on computational thinking development of students and design teaching intervention strategies corresponding to differential categories of computational thinking skills. (ii) contextualize teaching inventions in real-world situations and give students opportunities to showcase their computational thinking skills, which can potentially increase students’ ability to transfer and apply computational thinking skills in a variety of disciplines. (iii) employ intervention tools that can train multidimensional computational thinking skills in students as well as meeting their problem-solving and advanced learning needs. (iv) introduce foreign evaluation tools for computational thinking that pertain in china’s education settings and strengthen developing localized ones. (v) adopt small-size class teaching with special focus on junior secondary school students; place emphasis on the development of computational thinking skills in both male and female students to forego the stereotype of computer science-related disciplines being dominated by male students. source: journal of southwest university (natural science edition), 2023; 45(6):44-56. bece. newsletter vol.13, no.2, 2023 1717 can virtual reality elicit more empathy: a meta-analysis based on 19 randomized controlled trials by wang, h. & tang, a. m. correspondence to: aimin tang, qufu normal university, china. e-mail: tam6706@126.com mpathy is an individual’s objective and insightful awareness of the feelings and behavior of others. there are mainly two types of empathy: cognitive and affective. empathy plays a crucial role in improving student academic performance as well as in promoting social interaction of the individual. virtual reality is generally defined as a medium technology which can provide simulative experiences in a computer-created environment and has the capacity to enhance human empathy by offering immersive learning experiences. this study conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the effects of virtual reality-assisted instruction on eliciting empathy in students and to discern the influences of various variables on student empathetic behavior. the following two questions were proposed: is virtual reality-assisted instruction more effective in enhancing student empathy than traditional teaching methods? how are research design, subject matter and process features related to the promotive effects of virtual reality on student empathetic competence? literature inclusion criteria were established according to the principles of picos, including (1) students as subjects; (2) virtual reality-based instruction as the intervention measure; (3) traditional teaching modes (such as classroom instruction, internship, and screen videos) as control measures; (4) scores from the empathy scale serving as outcome indicators (data to be presented as mean values and standard deviations or convertible into mean values and standard deviations); (5) valid and reliable measurement tools; (6) randomized controlled trials as research design. exclusion criteria included: sample size less than 10; incomplete data or unconvertible data; articles published in languages other than chinese or english; full text inaccessible. this meta-analysis included 19 studies all conducted by randomized controlled trials, with a sample of 1949 subjects consisting of 1066 in the experimental group and 883 in the control group. all articles were published after 2010, and 11 of them were published after 2020, accounting for 57.89%. the analytical results demonstrate that virtual reality-assisted education can more effectively enhance students’ empathy than traditional teaching techniques; that virtual reality-based instruction has a better effect on e mailto:tam6706@126.com vol.13, no.2, 2023 1718 eliciting empathy in students than face-to-face teaching, yet there is no significant difference in teaching outcomes between virtual reality-enabled instruction and 2d/3d video-based teaching; in knowledge learning and public good-related experiences, virtual reality-based education poses significant positive effects on triggering empathy in students, with a stronger effect in the former, whilst it has no prominent empathy-eliciting effect in the teaching of disease diagnoses, compared with traditional teaching methods; 10-20 minutes of virtual reality-assisted instruction is the most effective amount for inducing empathy in students. source: open education research, 2023; 29(1):60-69. factors influencing the turnover intention of rural preschool teachers in the context of rural revitalization: an analysis based on a moderated mediation model tao wang, mengzhuo li, shanhuai liu, xue zhang china institute of rural education development, northeast normal university, changchun 130024, jilin, china abstract: the retention of teachers is critical to the development of rural preschool education in china. we conducted a sample survey of 3790 rural kindergarten teachers from 22 counties (or cities) of 10 provinces and examined the effects of work stress and job apathy on the turnover intention of rural preschool teachers using the work stress, job apathy and turnover intention scales. according to the research findings, work stress can significantly predict rural kindergarten teachers’ turnover intention; job apathy plays a mediating role between job stress and teacher turnover intention, and the indirect effect is greater than the direct effect; bianzhi membership can moderate the direct effect of work stress on teacher turnover intention and the mediating effect of job apathy. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 11(2):1523-1527. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab005. how to cite: wang, t., li, m., liu, s., & zhang, x. (2022). factors influencing the turnover intention of rural preschool teachers in the context of rural revitalization: an analysis based on a moderated mediation model. best evidence in chinese education, 11(2):1523-1527. keywords: rural preschool teacher, turnover intention, work stress, job apathy, bianzhi, membership wang et al. (jilin). turnover intention of rural preschool teachers in china. bece, vol.11, no.2, 2022 1524 correspondence to: shanhuai liu, china institute of rural education development, northeast normal university, changchun 130024, jilin, china. e-mail: liush477@nenu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:liush477@nenu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ wang et al. (jilin). turnover intention of rural preschool teachers in china. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1525 introduction the development of high-quality education is essential to rural revitalization and preschool education has a perennial effect on the overall development of rural students. a stable preschool teacher supply is an essential prerequisite for the progress of rural preschool education. nevertheless, the loss of rural kindergarten teachers has become a prevalent concern of the community, and retaining preschool teachers in rural nursery schools is getting increasingly difficult. numerous studies revealed that the high turnover rate of rural preschool teachers is mainly due to high job pressure and that heavy work burden leads to their negative emotional reactions. in addition, rural kindergartens employ a large number of teachers without bianzhi (a system of officially budgeted posts in china) membership, who feel underpaid compared with their colleagues with the membership. scholars have reached agreement that rural preschool teachers’ turnover intention is affected by work pressure and job apathy as well as the disparity in bianzhi membership among them. to further clarify the relationships among work pressure, job apathy, bianzhi membership, and rural preschool teachers’ turnover intention, this study used job apathy as a mediating variable and bianzhi membership as a moderator variable to examine the effect of work stress on teacher turnover intention, with the objective of offering recommendations to policy makers on how to retain rural kindergarten teachers. research methodology the research team conducted a sample survey on rural kindergarten teachers from 22 counties (or cities) in china’s10 provinces in august 2020, using online questionnaires. a total of 3,790 valid questionnaires were recovered. rural preschool teacher work stress scale, job apathy scale, and turnover intention scale were adopted as measurement tools. spss24.0 and amos20.0 were utilized for data analysis, which followed four steps: first, to use amos20.0 to test the common method biases between various research dimensions; second, to employ spss24.0 to test the reliability and validity of the teacher work stress scale, job apathy scale, and turnover intention scale; third, to construct structural equation modelling to test the direct and mediating effects among the variables of work stress, job apathy, and teacher turnover intention; and fourth, to use process to test the moderated mediation model. research data the common method bias test there were no significant common method biases between the research dimensions, and the coefficient estimation incurs no errors affecting the authenticity of research results. convergent validity, composition reliability and discriminant validity wang et al. (jilin). turnover intention of rural preschool teachers in china. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1526 there was a positive correlation between work stress and rural preschool teachers’ turnover intention (r = 0.568, p < 0.001); work stress was positively related to rural preschool teachers’ job apathy (r = 0.372, p < 0.001); there was a positive correlation between job apathy and teacher turnover intention (r = 0.288, p < 0.001). the direct effect test the non-standardized regression coefficient of the effect of work pressure on rural preschool teachers’ turnover intention was 0.59 (p < 0.001), indicating that the former had a positive influence on the latter. the non-standardized regression coefficient of the effect of work stress on job apathy was 0.39 (p < 0.001), signaling that the former had a positive effect on the latter. the non-standardized regression coefficient of the effect of job apathy on teacher turnover intention was 0.93 (p < 0.001), denoting that the former had a positive effect on the latter. the mediating effect test model fitness χ 2 /df = 25.989, gfi = 0.927, agfi = 0.896, tli = 0.936, cfi = 0.948, rmsea = 0.081, srmr = 0.049 was basically up to the model fitness index standard, indicating that the mediating effect of job apathy on the relationship between work pressure and rural preschool teachers’ turnover intention had a good model fitness. besides, work stress positively predicted job apathy (β = 0.39, p < 0.001), which in turn positively predicted teacher turnover intention (β = 0.43, p < 0.001). the moderated mediating effect test the test of moderating effect of bianzhi membership the product term of work stress and bianzhi membership significantly predicted job apathy and rural preschool teachers’ turnover intention (job apathy: β = −0.085, t = −3.721, boot 95% ci = [−0. 130, −0.040]; turnover intention: β = −0.085, t = −2.712, boot 95%ci = [−0. 146, −0.024]); the product term of job apathy and bianzhi membership significantly predicted teacher turnover intention (β = 0.167, t = 4.259, boot 95% ci = [0.090, 0.244]). thus, it is concluded that bianzhi membership can moderate the effects of work stress on teacher turnover intention, work stress on job apathy, and job apathy on teacher turnover intention. stratified analysis of the effects of bianzhi membership on teacher turnover intention as per the data analysis results, there was a significant difference in turnover intention between teachers with bianzhi membership and those without it (t = 3.026, p < 0.05), and the turnover intention of the former was considerably higher than that of the latter. among teachers without bianzhi membership, the turnover rate of young teachers was relatively higher than that of other age cohorts. among the young kindergarten teachers wang et al. (jilin). turnover intention of rural preschool teachers in china. bece, vol.11, no. 2, 2022 1527 in rural areas, the share of teachers without bianzhi membership was up to 59.11%, and the majority of them (a total of 77.35%) were working in town and village kindergartens. there was no significant difference in turnover intention among young teachers with bianzhi membership working in the county, town and village kindergartens, whereas young teachers without bianzhi membership working in the town kindergarten had remarkably higher turnover intention than their counterparts working in the county and village kindergartens (f = 4.866, p < 0.05), which shows that the difference in school location also affects the resignation intention of young preschool teachers. the principle of “equal pay for equal work” has not been applied to rural kindergarten teachers without bianzhi membership, who had considerably lower satisfaction in incomes, occupational status, workload, and career development potential than their colleagues with bianzhi membership. therefore, they tended to perceive inferiority in social status when comparing themselves to those officially employed teachers (t = − 6.918, p < 0.001). conclusions and suggestions this study comes to the following conclusions: first, work stress are positively related to job apathy and turnover intention of rural preschool teachers, and job apathy has a significantly positive correlation with their turnover intention; second, job apathy plays a mediating role between work stress and teacher turnover intention; third, the direct correlation of work stress with teacher turnover intention and the mediating effect of job apathy are both moderated by teachers’ bianzhi membership; fourth, the gaps in age as well as salaries and other perks contribute to the difference in turnover intention between teachers with and without bianzhi membership. the empirical results confirm that work stress, job apathy, and bianzhi membership are major factors influencing the turnover intention of rural preschool teachers. in order to lower the turnover rate and ensure the supply of rural preschool teachers, local education departments should carry out an array of reforms including restricting the workload of teachers to a reasonable level, increasing salaries and compensation of teachers, creating a teacher-friendly environment, and allocating adequate bianzhi memberships to rural kindergartens. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university (education science), 2022, 40(6):82-96. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 王涛, 李梦琢, 刘善槐, 张雪. 乡村振兴背景下农村幼儿教师离职倾向的影响机制研究—基于 有调节的中介效应分析. 华东师范大学学报 (教育科学版), 2022, 40(6):82-96. received: 30 june 2022 revised: 11 july 2022 accepted: 15 july 2022 absbract2-shanhuailiu-bece_titlejuly_2022 absbract2-shanhuailiu-bece_maintextjuly2022 bece. newsletter vol.12, no.2, 2022 1660 negative parenting styles and preschoolers’ social adaptation difficulties: the mediating effect of parent-child conflicts by liang, z. b., wu, a. l., & zhang, g. z. correspondence to: zongbao liang, southeast university, china. e-mail: lzb@seu.edu.cn hildren’s social adaptation is a manifestation of the level of their socialization. positive social adaptation is represented by qualities such as pro-activeness, sensitivity, cooperation, and popularity among peers in children’s social interaction. social adaptation difficulties include externalizing behavior problems like anger and aggression and internalizing ones such as anxiety and withdrawal. childhood social adaptation problems can impose negative influences on individuals’ future development. the parenting style is an integration of parents’ values, attitudes, and behavior in child rearing, working on children in three dimensions: warmth and caring, behavioral discipline, and phycological control. in early childhood, children learn by simulating the words and actions of their parents. the language, behaviors, and responses delivered by parents in the process of child upbringing directly affect the development of social skills of children in the early years. negative parenting behavior will induce social adaptation difficulties in young children. this study constructed a model of the relationships between negative parenting behavior, child-parent conflicts, and child social adaptation difficulties, to analyze: (i) the father vs. mother differences in the impact of negative parenting behavior on child social adaptation; (ii) the mediating effect of child-parent conflicts on the relation between negative parenting styles and child social adaptation difficulties. through cluster sampling, 446 second-year kindergarteners and their parents were selected as subjects from 6 kindergartens (including one community, one bilingual, two private, and two public kindergartens) in x city. in the first year of the study, the child-rearing practices report q-sort and the child-parent relationship scale were utilized to investigate parents’ rearing behavior and the child-parent relationships among subjects. the social competence and behavior evaluation scale, scbe-30 was employed to assess children’s social adaptation in the following year. c mailto:lzb@seu.edu.cn vol.12, no.2, 2022 1661 the research findings demonstrate that negative parenting behavior of fathers and mothers can both positively predict children’s anger and aggression, and besides, the negative parenting behavior of mothers also positively predicts children’s anxiety and withdrawal, indicating that it has a wider adverse influence than that of fathers; and that father-son conflicts can mediate the relation between the negative parenting behavior of the father and children’s anger and aggression, while mother-son conflicts can mediate the relationship between negative parenting behavior of the mother and children’s anxiety and withdrawal as well as anger and aggression. therefore, to improve children’s social adaptation, parents should be mindful of the impact of their rearing behavior and parent-child relationships on the development of their preschool kids; avoid negative parenting practices such as threatening and coercion, verbal abuse and corporal punishment, overinvolvement and overprotection, etc.; and secure close parent-child relationships. source: studies in preschool education,2022;2022(03):43-52. bece. newsletter vol.13, no.1, 2023 1695 the impact of achievement goal orientations on learning satisfaction of secondary school students: the chain mediating effect of academic self-efficacy and learning engagement by liu, z. h. correspondence to: zaihua liu, national institute of education sciences, beijing, china. e-mail: liuzh8681@sina.com earning satisfaction is the feeling or attitude of learners towards learning activity participation, reflecting the degree of their fondness for learning activities as well as the extent to which their needs for learning are met or learning goals are achieved. achievement goal orientations refer to students’ general tendencies for approaching, engaging in, and evaluating their academic progress and performance in achievement contexts. achievement goal orientations address the reasons and purposes of individuals’ attempt to accomplish certain achievement outcomes. academic self-efficacy has significant influences on students’ persistence, perseverance, and emotion-regulation in the learning process, and is a key factor in heightening their learning motivation and improving their academic performance. this study used the secondary school student learning satisfaction scale, achievement goal orientation scale, secondary school student learning engagement scale, academic self-efficacy questionnaire to conduct a questionnaire survey of 1,041 students in grades 7 12 from two secondary schools in shandong and henan provinces, in attempt to examine the impact of achievement goal orientations on learning satisfaction among secondary school students. the research findings show that: (i) the performance-approach goal positively affect student learning satisfaction not only via the summative effect of learning engagement, but also via the chain mediation of academic self-efficacy and learning engagement; (ii) the mastery-approach goal can positively influence student learning satisfaction in a direct way, or through the mediation of learning engagement as well as through the chain mediation of academic self-efficacy and learning engagement; (iii) the masteryavoidance goal can negatively impact student learning satisfaction not only via the mediation of learning engagement, but also through the chain mediation of academic self-efficacy and learning engagement. therefore, in educational practice, it is necessary to assist secondary school students in establishing l mailto:liuzh8681@sina.com vol.13, no.1, 2023 1696 proper achievement goal orientations, enhancing their academic self-efficacy, and strengthening their learning engagement. source: educational research and experiment, 2022; 2022(5):98-103. bece. newsletter vol.17, no.1, 2024, bece 1856 parity between paternal and maternal involvement and child subjective well-being: a response surface analysis based on polynomial regression by ju, j., zhou, x., liang, l., & bian, y. correspondence to: yufang bian, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: bianyufang66@126.com n a family with both parents working full-time, the father and mother need to assume plural responsibilities at work and home. as a result, interparental coordination and proper division of responsibilities are of particular importance. this article aims to examine the relation between parity between paternal and maternal involvement and child subjective wellbeing, as well as the effect of gender on this relation, based on a longitudinal investigation of two consecutive years sampling grade-four students from 1145 chinese families with both parents working full-time. research findings show that: • overall, parity between paternal and maternal involvement was not directly related to child subjective well-being. compared with two parents of low involvement, one parent of high involvement could generate more positive effects on child development. • the child experienced a higher level of subjective well-being with high paternal and maternal involvement than with low involvement of both parents. this is because high involvement of both parents elicits active parent-child interactions. • the inequality between paternal and maternal involvement had a significant impact on the subjective well-being of boys, whose subjective well-being was increased in both the two years when the involvement of their fathers was higher than that of their mothers. nevertheless, the disparity between paternal and maternal involvement made no difference to girls’ subjective wellbeing. implications: • both parents should be actively involved in their children’ life to increase parent-child interactions and work to enhance kids’ subjective well-being by creating warm home atmospheres and giving them more encouragement, advice on social activities, and directions on emotional expression and regulation. i mailto:bianyufang66@126.com vol.17, no.1, 2024, bece 1857 • the father should pay more attention to the kids’ growth and meet their needs for emotional communication, especially in families having sons. compared with girls, boys are more ready to turn to the father for help. source: journal of psychological science, 2023; 46(6):1478-1485. the relationship between loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students in china: taking binhai county of jiangsu province as an example lei jiang, 1 mingyue liao, 2 ronghua ying 2 1. jiangsu binhai middle school, yancheng 224000, jiangsu, china 2. nanjing normal university, nanjing 210097, jiangsu, china abstract. objective: to explore the relationship between loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life of left-behind middle school students in china. methods: a cluster random sampling method was used to study students from left-behind middle schools in binhai county of jiangsu province. the loneliness scale, general self-efficacy scale, and satisfaction with life scale were used to conduct questionnaire surveys. results: compared with non-left behind middle school students, leftbehind middle school students had higher loneliness, lower self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life. there were significant gender differences in loneliness and satisfaction with life of the two types of students. whether to live in school or not had an insignificant impact on the loneliness and satisfaction with life of left-behind middle school students. loneliness had a significant negative predictive effect on the satisfaction with leftbehind middle school students’ life and self-efficacy. in predicting satisfaction with life by loneliness, self-efficacy generally played a part of the mediating role, which could partially buffer the adverse effects of loneliness on student satisfaction with life. conclusion: the mental health of left-behind middle school students should arouse the common concern of family, school and society. try to do some intervention counseling in reducing the experience of loneliness and enhancing the sense of self-efficacy to improve their satisfaction with life and maintain a positive mental state. jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no.2, 2020 804 best evid chin edu 2020; 6(2):803-824. doi: 10.15354/bece.20.or034. how to cite: jiang, l., liao m.y. & ying, r.h. (2020). the relationship between loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students in china: taking binhai county of jiangsu province as an example. best evidence in chinese education, 6(2):803-824. keywords: left-behind middle school students; loneliness; self-efficacy; satisfaction with life about the authors: lei jiang, psychology teacher, jiangsu binhai middle school, yancheng 224000, jiangsu, china. email: 1986477680@qq.com. mingyue liao, master’s degree candidate, school of psychology, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210097, jiangsu, china. email: liaomingyueyes@163.com. correspondence to: ronghua ying, experimental teacher, school of psychology, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210097, jiangsu, china. email: 13951969343@163.com conflict of interests: none. © 2020 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 805 introduction ith the continuous development of china’s industrialization and urbanization, many rural surplus laborers have poured into cities to look for jobs far away from their hometown, forming a “migrant worker wave” phenomenon. however, because they are restricted by the household registration (hu kou) policy, economic conditions, employment environment, urban enrollment conditions, and other factors, they usually do not bring their children with them into the city and can only leave them at the location of the household registration (jiang, 2016; tang et al., 2018). this makes it difficult for parents who are migrant workers to have the opportunity to accompany and take care of their children, resulting in the phenomenon of long-term separation of children from their parents during their growth (zhao et al., 2017). in other words, the phenomenon of the “migrant worker wave” in contemporary china has formed a particular social group: left-behind children. according to the “opinions on strengthening the care and protection of left-behind children in rural areas” issued by the state council in 2016, when both or one of the parents go out to work, and the other has no guardianship capacity, minors under 16 are left-behind children. the longterm separation of parent and child and the lack of family education have brought many adverse effects on the life, learning, and growth of children left-behind. compared with non-left behind children, left-behind children are more likely to have bad emotional and behavioral problems (cheng & sun, 2015; he, 2012) and lower satisfaction with life (wei, 2015). this has gradually attracted attention from society, schools, and families. left-behind children’s mental health is becoming a critical public health issue in china. according to official statistics, from 2010 to 2014, approximately 61 million children in china were left-behind in rural areas by their migrant parents. it accounts for nearly 22% of the country’s total children (yuan & wang, 2016). as of 2016, the ministry of civil affairs data showed that there were 9.02 million left-behind children in rural areas across the country. this shows that governments at all levels in china have made great efforts to reduce the number of left-behind children. also, scholars have launched a lot of investigation and research. by 2020, searching for the “china national knowledge infrastructure (cnki)” with “left-behind children” as the keyword, a total of 6,752 entries have been retrieved, which has doubled compared to 2017 (fu & ling, 2017). it shows that chinese academic circles have been paying attention to left-behind children. however, in previous studies, more attention has been paid to left-behind children’s negative tendency, such as the adverse effects of left-behind on their academic development and the unhealthy psychological and behavioral phenomena of left-behind children (yu & zhang, 2010). in the past five years, researchers have gradually begun to focus on the positive psychological development of children leftbehind (shao et al., 2018), which has made the research in this field more comprehensive. under the influence of positive psychology, the dual-factor model of mental health (dfm) has broken through the previous psychopathological indicators as the only standard for measuring mental health, incorporating the concept of subjective wellw jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 806 being (greenspoon & saklofske, 2001). this covers life satisfaction, positive and negative emotions (diener, 2000). among which life satisfaction can better reflect the subjective well-being of chinese people (sun et al., 2010) and can replace subjective wellbeing as a positive indicator of middle school students’ mental health (hai et al., 2015). therefore, this study uses life satisfaction as a measure of left-behind middle school students’ mental health. the satisfaction with students’ lives is the subjective evaluation of the individual’s life based on the standard set by themselves (zhong et al., 2007). studies have shown that satisfaction with life is closely related to students’ anxiety, depression, and other harmful emotions, as well as problem behaviors such as dropouts (de vasconcelos, 2020; han & zhang, 2020). therefore, further exploration of the influencing factors and mechanism of satisfaction with chinese life left-behind children is of great value to their physical and mental health and academic education. satisfaction with life is the core indicator of subjective well-being (cowen, 1994). many studies have shown that loneliness negatively predicts subjective wellbeing and is a significant predictor (arslan, 2020; rew, 2002). due to the particularity of left-behind children’s family status, the academic community pays more attention to their unique loneliness. studies have shown that 50% of left-behind children are lonely for a long time, and loneliness is their most common emotional experience (zhou & yao, 2011). the loneliness of left-behind children is significantly higher than that of non-left behind children (fan et al., 2017; ren & shen, 2008). however, another study found that compared with non-left behind children, children’s loneliness experience did not increase significantly (wang et al., 2011; zhang et al., 2012). therefore, there is controversy about the loneliness research of left-behind children, and it is necessary to explore the loneliness of left-behind children further. most studies show that loneliness and life satisfaction are significantly negatively correlated; that is, loneliness significantly negatively predicts life satisfaction (salimi, 2011; su, 2016). however, some studies show that loneliness is positively correlated with life satisfaction (turan, 2020), which may because studies were based on senior people (ye et al., 2016; zou & yang, 2017). however, turan et al. used college students as the research object. so far, the relationship between loneliness and satisfaction with life of different groups may have different results. previous studies have ignored the relationship between loneliness and satisfaction with the life of the select group of left-behind children. therefore, this research explores the relationship between loneliness and satisfaction with life of left-behind children and then provides a theoretical basis for improving life satisfaction. left-behind children are in a disadvantaged situation of being separated from their parents for a long time. they may be more likely to have destructive emotions and problem behaviors. however, not all children will have these bad problems. researchers have gradually realized that unfavorable environments do not necessarily lead to developmental disadvantages; some children develop very well, facing the same pressure. in contrast, others develop poorly (zhang et al., 2012), and then the theory of children’s resilience development (zeng & li, 2003). the theory’s core point is that when an individual is in a disadvantaged situation, the individual’s psychological resilijiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 807 ence can help him cope with pressure or adversity and develop and grow. risk factors hinder the development of children’s psychological resilience, while protective factors can reduce children’s unfavorable environments and ultimately promote psychological resilience. many researchers currently divide protective factors into individual factors, family factors, and non-family factors (zhang, 2015). existing empirical studies have shown that self-efficacy, as an essential protective factor of psychological resilience, can predict psychological resilience development (chu et al., 2013). bandura believes that self-efficacy is a hierarchical structure composed of general self-efficacy and taskrelated self-efficacy. the former is at the top, which refers to the general belief that an individual has in order to deal with challenges from different environments successfully or to deal with new things (ersan et al., 2018; li et al., 2019); the latter is at the bottom, which refers to the individual a specific belief that oneself can engage in specific activities related to a specific field of behavior (li et al., 2019). previous studies on middle school left-behind children’s self-efficacy paid more attention to task-related selfefficacy, such as emotional regulation self-efficacy, learning efficacy (wang et al., 2017; zhao & wang, 2015), to middle school left-behind. there are few studies on the general self-efficacy of children. however, task-related efficacy cannot represent general efficacy. therefore, it is necessary to study the general self-efficacy of left-behind middle school students to distinguish it from task-related self-efficacy. self-efficacy is an essential part of the social cognitive theory. as an external factor affecting mental health, self-efficacy has attracted more and more attention from scholars. its relationship with mental health has been demonstrated in theoretical and empirical studies. at the theoretical level, both health belief model and protection motivation theory regard self-efficacy as a crucial factor affecting individual mental health (babazadeh et al., 2016; holden, 1991), and social cognitive theory also proposes to have high self-efficacy of individuals present a higher level of positive factors for mental health (silva, 2015). at the practical level, many studies have found a close connection between self-efficacy and mental health. the specific manifestation is that individuals with high self-efficacy tend to show higher levels of positive factors of mental health (satisfaction with life, self-esteem, and positive emotions), but low levels of negative factors (loneliness, depression, and negative emotions) (li et al., 2019). specifically, loneliness is negatively correlated with general self-efficacy (dussault & deaudelin, 2001; yang et al., 2011; zhou, 2014), and loneliness predicts self-efficacy (al khatib, 2012). there is a positive correlation between self-efficacy and satisfaction with life (tan, 2008); self-efficacy positively predicts life satisfaction (cikrikci & odaci, 2015; liang et al., 2019). therefore, based on the theory of children’s psychological resilience and previous related studies, this study predicts that general selfefficacy, as a protective factor affecting left-behind children’s loneliness, will mediate between loneliness and satisfaction with life. in sum, there is a close relationship between loneliness, general self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life. however, whether there are differences in the loneliness of left-behind children and non-left behind children is still controversial. research on the relationship between loneliness and self-efficacy varies from group to group. there is jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 808 no research on loneliness and self-efficacy of middle school left-behind children at the same time. based on previous studies, only the primary school was examined, or the sample’s age range was extensive. however, the mechanism of satisfaction with life of left-behind children in adolescence in the middle school was not explored. therefore, we focus our research on the middle school segment, explore the connection and difference between left-behind middle school students and non-left behind middle school students in loneliness, general self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life, and further explore whether general self-efficacy is in loneliness play an intermediary role with satisfaction with life. to deepen and promote the mental health education of left-behind middle school students and promote their satisfaction with life to provide a scientific and practical theoretical basis. this study was reviewed by the academic ethics committee of the school of psychology, nanjing normal university. the questionnaires used in this study are all published results and do not involve any infringement. methodology research object in binhai county, jiangsu province, four middle schools were randomly selected to conduct online questionnaire surveys, and the questionnaires were distributed by random cluster sampling. there were 4,513 people in this survey, and 4,229 valid questionnaires were returned, with an effective response rate of 93.71%. among them, 977 children were left-behind, and 3252 children were non-left behind, with an average age of (13.99±1.1) years old. in all left-behind children, 502 were boys (51.4%) and 475 were girls (48.6%); 559 (57.2%) were live-in-school, 418 (42.8%) were non-schoollivings; 236 (24.2%) were only children, 741 were non-only children (75.8%). research tool 1. the loneliness scale: this study uses the third edition of the “ucla loneliness scale,” which russell compiled in 1978 and was revised in 1995 by the domestic scholar professor dengfeng wang. the scale has 20 items, and the score is divided into four levels: never, rarely, sometimes, and always. scores above 44 points are high loneliness, 39-44 points are generally upper loneliness, 33-38 points are middle loneliness, 28-32 points are generally lower loneliness, and less than 28 points are low loneliness. the cronbach α coefficient of this scale is 0.846. 2. self-efficacy scale: schwarzer compiled the general self-efficacy scale (gses) used in this study in 1981, and it was revised to include ten items. the scale uses the likert four-point method (1 = completely incorrect, 4 = completely correct), with a total score of 10-40 points. the higher the score, the higher the level of self-efficacy. 3. satisfaction with life scale: this study uses the “adolescent student satisfaction with life scale” compiled by domestic scholar xinggui zhang et al. it con jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 809 table 1. comparison of loneliness, general self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life between left-behind and non-left-behind middle school students. left-behind middle school students (n = 977) non-left-behind middle school students (n = 3,252) t cohen’ sd loneliness 41.99 ± 9.47 40.70 ± 9.61 3.69*** 0.14 general self-efficacy 23.68 ± 5.75 24.15 ± 5.70 -2.28* 0.08 satisfaction with life 176.08 ± 29.00 180.11 ± 28.00 -3.91*** 0.14 note: *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. tains 36 items in 6 dimensions: the friendship satisfaction dimension and the family satisfaction dimension each contain seven items, the academic satisfaction dimension and the school satisfaction dimension each have six items, and the freedom satisfaction dimension and the environmental satisfaction dimension each have five items. the scale uses the likert 7-level scoring method (1 point: strongly disagree; 2 points: disagree; 3 points: somewhat disagree; 4 points: neither agree nor disagree; 5 points: somewhat agree; 6 points: agree; 7 points: strongly agree). the dimensional coefficients and test-retest reliability of the scale are all above 0.62. statistical analysis the data were analyzed by spss17.0 statistical software. quantitative data are expressed as mean ± sd, and t-test, analysis of variance, and correlation analysis were performed between variables to clarify the relationship between loneliness, general selfefficacy, and satisfaction with life. according to zhonglin wen’s three-step method, the intermediary effect test procedure is performed to test the relationship between the variables in turn (wen et al., 2004), that is, loneliness is used as the independent variable, self-efficacy is generally the intermediary variable, and satisfaction with life is the dependent variable. moreover, perform sequential regression analysis. p < 0.05 is considered statistically significant. results overall situation the results showed that left-behind middle school students’ loneliness was higher than that of non-left behind middle school students. simultaneously, self-efficacy and satisfaction with life were lower than those of non-left behind middle school students, and both had statistical significance (table 1). jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 810 table 2. demographic variables analysis of loneliness of left-behind and non-left-behind middle school students. loneliness t cohen’ sd left-behind middle school students non-left-behind middle school students gender male 41.27 ± 8.8 39.88 ± 9.11 3.03** 0.16 female 42.75 ± 10.07 41.65 ± 10.07 2.09* 0.11 t -2.46* cohen’ sd 0.16 live in school yes 41.77 ± 9.16 42.01 ± 9.84 -0.42 0.03 no 42.28 ± 9.87 40.42 ± 9.54 3.70** 0.19 t -0.84 cohen’ sd 0.05 only child yes 41.87 ± 9.16 40.55 ± 9.30 1.81 0.14 no 42.03 ± 9.57 40.03 ± 9.57 3.25*** 0. 21 t -0.23 cohen’ sd 0.02 note: *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. analysis of loneliness on various demographic variables survey results showed (table 2): 1. the loneliness of girls left-behind was higher than that of boys, and it was statistically significant. whether it was a boy or a girl, the left-behind’s loneliness was generally higher than that of the non-left behind, and both were statistically significant. 2. the loneliness of non-live-in-school students left-behind middle school students was higher than that of live-in-school, but it was not statistically significant. among live-in-school students, the left-behind’s loneliness was slightly lower than that of the non-left behind, but it was not statistically significant. among non-live-in-school students, the left-behind’s loneliness was higher than that of the non-left behind, and it was statistically significant. 3. the loneliness of non-only children among left-behind middle school students was higher than that of only children, but it was not statistically significant. among only children, the left-behind’s loneliness was slightly higher than that of the non-left behind, but it was not statistically significant. among non-only children, the left-behind’s loneliness was higher than that of the non-left behind, and it was statistically significant. jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 811 table 3. demographic variables analysis of general self-efficacy of leftbehind and non-left-behind middle school students. general self-efficacy t cohen’ sd left-behind middle school students non-left-behind middle school students gender male 23.85 ± 8.53 24.35 ± 5.78 -1.68 0.08 female 23.49 ± 5.66 23.93 ± 5.59 -1.49 0.08 t 0.98 cohen’ sd 0.06 live in school yes 24.04 ± 5.75 23.97 ± 5.60 0.23 0.01 no 23.19 ± 5.72 24.19 ± 5.72 -3.33** 0.18 t 2.29* cohen’ sd 0.15 only child yes 23.99 ± 6.05 24.37 ± 5.83 -0.83 0.06 no 23.58 ± 5.65 24.11 ± 5.67 -2.27* 0.09 t 0.96 cohen’ sd 0.07 note: *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. analysis of general self-efficacy on various demographic variables survey results showed (table 3): 1. the self-efficacy of left-behind boys was slightly higher than that of leftbehind girls, but it was not statistically significant. whether it was a boy or a girl, the self-efficacy of left-behind was generally slightly lower than that of non-left behind, but no statistical significance existed. 2. the self-efficacy of live-in-school students among left-behind middle school students was higher than that of non-live-in-school students, and it was statistically significant. among live-in-school students, the left-behind self-efficacy was slightly higher than that of non-left behind, but it was not statistically significant. among non-live-in-school students, the left-behind’s self-efficacy was lower than that of the non-left behind, and it was statistically significant. 3. the self-efficacy of the only child left-behind middle school students was slightly higher than that of the non-only child, but it was not statistically significant. among the only children, the left-behind’s self-efficacy was slightly lower than that of the left-behind, but it was not statistically significant. among non-only children, the left-behind’s self-efficacy was lower than that of the non-left behind, and it was statistically significant. jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 812 table 4. demographic variables analysis of satisfaction with life of leftbehind and non-left-behind middle school students. satisfaction with life t cohen’ sd left-behind middle school students non-left-behind middle school students gender male 177.60 ± 27.46 181.32 ± 26.80 -2.73** 0.14 female 174.48 ± 30.50 178.70 ± 29.28 -2.71** 0.14 t 1.68 cohen’ sd 0.11 live in school yes 177.39 ± 29.22 180.11 ± 27.41 -1.62 0.10 no 174.33 ± 28.65 180.11 ± 28.14 -3.90*** 0.20 t 1.64 cohen’ sd 0.11 only child yes 176.76 ± 29.64 179.58 ± 28.33 -1.25 0.10 no 175.86 ± 28.81 180.21 ± 27.95 -3.73*** 0.15 t 0.42 cohen’ sd 0.03 note: *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. analysis of satisfaction with life on demographic variables survey results showed (table 4): 1. the satisfaction with boys’ lives was slightly higher than that of girls leftbehind, but it was not statistically significant. whether it was a boy or a girl, the satisfaction with life of the left-behind was lower than that of the non-left behind, and both had statistical significance. 2. the satisfaction with life of live-in-school students among left-behind middle school students was higher than that of non-live-in-school students, but it was not statistically significant. among live-in-school students, the satisfaction with life of the left-behind was lower than that of the non-left behind, but it was not statistically significant. among non-live-in-school students, the satisfaction with life of the left-behind was lower than that of the non-left behind, and it was statistically significant. 3. the satisfaction with the only child left-behind middle school students was higher than that of the non-only child, but it was not statistically significant. among only children, the satisfaction with life of the left-behind was slightly lower than that of the non-left behind, but it was not statistically significant. among the non-only children, the satisfaction with life of the left-behind was lower than that of the non-left behind, and it was statistically significant. jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 813 table 5. correlation analysis of loneliness, general self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life of left-behind middle school students. general self-efficacy loneliness satisfaction with life 0.43** -0.62** friendship satisfaction 0.43** -0.47** family satisfaction 0.31** -0.51** academic satisfaction 0.43** -0.97** free satisfaction 0.34** 0.42** school satisfaction 0.23** -0.53** environmental satisfaction 0 .17** -0.52** loneliness -0.21** 1.00 note: *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. correlation analysis of loneliness, general self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life of left-behind middle school students table 5 shows that left-behind middle school students’ general self-efficacy is positively correlated with satisfaction with life. the same is true for all dimensions of satisfaction with life. generally, self-efficacy is negatively correlated with loneliness. there is a negative correlation between loneliness and satisfaction with life and a negative correlation in specific dimensions. loneliness and satisfaction with life: analysis of the mediation effect of general self-efficacy according to the results of the correlation analysis, it was found that there is a negative correlation between loneliness and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students, a positive correlation between self-efficacy and satisfaction with life, and a negative correlation between loneliness and self-efficacy. however, the causal relationship between the three was not clear. therefore, the procedural test method was used to verify further whether there was a mediating effect (wen et al., 2004). step 1. take loneliness as the independent variable and satisfaction with life as the dependent variable to investigate loneliness’s regression analysis on life satisfaction. the results showed that loneliness could predict life satisfaction, and the net explanation of variance was 37.8%. step 2. take loneliness as the independent variable and general self-efficacy as the dependent variable to investigate loneliness’s regression analysis on general selfefficacy. the results showed that loneliness could predict general self-efficacy, and the net explanation of variance was 5.5%, p < 0.01. jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 814 table 6. the mediating role of left-behind middle school students’ general self-efficacy in loneliness and satisfaction with life (r value). predictor variable outcome variable r 2 f β t 1st step loneliness satisfaction with life 0.38 2,571.93*** -0.62 -50.71*** 2nd step loneliness general self-efficacy 0.06 245.44*** -0.23 -15.67*** 3rd step loneliness satisfaction with life 0.47 1,837.81 *** -0.54 -47.01*** general self-efficacy 0.30 26.20*** note: *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. figure 1. the mediating role of general self-efficacy between loneliness and satisfaction with life. step 3. use loneliness and general self-efficacy as independent variables and satisfaction with life as dependent variables to test the former’s regression analysis. it was found that after introducing the general self-efficacy into the equation, the main effect of loneliness on satisfaction with life increased (from β = -0.62 to β = -0.54), and the net explanatory amount of variance increased to 46.5%. this showed that general self-efficacy plays a mediating effect between loneliness and satisfaction with life. the results are shown in table 6 and figure 1. discussion analysis of the results of the loneliness in left-behind middle school students jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 815 this study shows that the loneliness of left-behind middle school students is significantly higher than that of non-left behind middle school students. this once again verifies that children left-behind will experience more loneliness (ren et al., 2020). leftbehind due to long-term separation from their parents, children significantly lack emotional communication with their parents. their personalities tend to become introverted, withdrawn, and have low gregariousness (liu et al., 2007). they tend to feel lonely. what is more noteworthy is that the loneliness of left-behind girls is significantly higher than that of left-behind boys, which is different from previous studies (ren et al., 2020). due to the unique delicate and sensitive emotional characteristics of girls’ gender, their performance in adolescence becomes more apparent, making them more prone to mood swings when encountering frustration or stress, thus exhibiting symptoms such as anxiety, tension, and depression. the particular living state of leftbehind is more likely to lead to their lonely inner experience. when investigating the impact of live-in-school on the loneliness of leftbehind middle school students, this study showed a phenomenon that was rarely involved in previous studies, that is, the loneliness of left-behind live-in-school students was lower than left-behind non-live-in-school students and non-left behind live-inschool students. this is somewhat inconsistent with previous studies. when surveyed with general rural elementary and middle school students, the loneliness of live-inschool students was significantly higher than that of non-live-in-school students (huang et al., 2009), which may be due to huang et al. did not distinguish between left-behind and non-left behind status. another reason for the low loneliness of students who were left-behind live-in-school may be that their live-in-school experience has increased the interaction with peers and the integration in the group, to some extent, alleviated their loneliness. although the loneliness of left-behind live-in-school students is lower than that of left-behind non-live-in-school students and non-left behind live-in-school students, there is a difference between them. it is not significant. this may be due to the uneven collection of left-behind and non-left behind samples in this study. besides, the difference in the effects of live-in-school and only-child status on the left-behind loneliness was not statistically significant. however, it can be seen from the data that the loneliness of live-in-school left-behind students was lower than non-live-in-school left-behind students, and the loneliness of only-child left-behind students was lower than non-only-child left-behind students. this result may be related to that live-inschool increases the chances of peer interaction; that is, more companions reduce the loneliness experience of live-in-school left-behind students. students with only children left-behind became the only concern of parents. multiple children would weaken parents’ attention to a child, resulting in slightly higher loneliness of students who were not only-child left-behind than those who are only-child left-behind. analysis of general self-efficacy results of left-behind middle school students jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 816 this study also found significant differences in general self-efficacy between leftbehind middle school students and non-left behind middle school students, consistent with previous studies (zhao et al., 2012). specifically, left-behind middle school students’ general self-efficacy was significantly lower than that of non-left behind middle school students. moreover, this study further found that the self-efficacy of live-inschool left-behind students is higher than that of non-live-in-school left-behind students. this shows that live-in-school has a positive effect on the self-efficacy training and development of left-behind middle school students. this is similar to the results of the aforementioned loneliness. live-in-school students study and live with their peers for a long time and spend relatively little time alone. in addition, teachers and live-inschool students get along day and night, to a certain extent, to make up for the lack of parents’ absence, and their care and encouragement will also make left-behind children more confident (qi & yang, 2013). analysis of the results of satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students also, left-behind with previous studies, the satisfaction with life left-behind loneliness above was significantly lower than that of non-left behind ones (su, 2017). we believe that the right family education environment is also an essential impact on children’s satisfaction with life, especially parents’ companionship and care (song et al., 2018). children in the left-behind state lack family support and timely empathy and supervision from their parents, which will undoubtedly increase the emotional distress and various pressures of left-behind children (wen & lin, 2011), thereby reducing the happiness of left-behind students sense. although the parents and the student may not separate around all the year-round, the parents can communicate with the children regularly through the internet media, inquire about the children’s learning and living conditions, partially compensate for the lack of parent-child communication and parental companionship of the left-behind children, and improve their physical and mental development and social adaptation (niu et al., 2019). analysis of the mediating role of general self-efficacy between loneliness and satisfaction with life this study explored the relationship between the loneliness of left-behind middle school students, general self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life through intermediary analysis and found that left-behind middle school students’ loneliness can directly negatively predict satisfaction with life. this is consistent with previous studies on the elderly population (wang & yao, 2020), but it is different from the university student population (turan, 2020). this may be due to the difference between the left-behind children and the elderly passively facing the lack of family intimacy (ye et al., 2016). at the same time, because one or both parents are not around, the interaction between the left-behind child and the parent is reduced, which is not conducive to the formation of a secure attachment relationship, and it will also negatively affect the left-behind jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 817 child to form a favorable and trustworthy relationship with other people such as peers and teachers (ren, 2020). when the left-behind middle school students with higher loneliness are subjectively evaluating their living conditions, they do not get enough support from others and cannot meet their psychological expectations; they are likely to generally show a low level of life satisfaction. secondly, generally, self-efficacy plays a part in the intermediary role between loneliness and satisfaction with life. in other words, the loneliness of left-behind middle school students will affect their satisfaction with life, part of which is generated through general self-efficacy mediation. according to bandura’s self-efficacy theory, other factors that affect self-efficacy include support from others, mental state, and personality. loneliness belongs to the individual’s internal psychological state and is an essential factor affecting self-efficacy (yong & du, 2019). also, multiple studies have found that damaging loneliness may cause depression, low self-esteem, and shyness, and other psychological and behavioral manifestations (dai et al., 2017; li et al., 2013), and tend to withdraw and deny themselves, thereby reducing self-efficacy, which impact on life satisfaction. also, loneliness negatively predicts general self-efficacy, and general self-efficacy positively predicts satisfaction with life, which fully supports the theory of children’s psychological resilience. that is, general self-efficacy, as a protective factor, can help left-behind children actively cope with loneliness caused by disadvantaged situations; at the same time, this also suggests that we can improve children’s satisfaction with life the general selfefficacy of left-behind children. significance and application value of the study the mental health of children left-behind in china has been a hot issue that society has paid close attention to in recent years. this problem’s emergence and response are related to all aspects of family, school, and society. according to the results of this study, the loneliness experience of left-behind middle school students is reduced. at the same time, their self-efficacy is improved, which can effectively improve their satisfaction with life. in order to realize this vision, some work can be done from the following aspects. 1. school level. the emphasis is on creating a harmonious campus and class atmosphere to form a good relationship between peers and teachers. consider carrying out group counseling activities to enhance the self-esteem and selfconfidence of left-behind middle school students. it can also help left-behind middle school students actively cope with bad emotional experiences such as loneliness and anxiety through case consultation and behavior modification. according to this study’s results, choosing boarding schools for left-behind middle school students may be a useful measure because boarding schools generally implement closed management, which has a good supervision effect on left-behind children. moreover, it can reduce the bad behavior problems caused by an unsupervised state. for live-in-school students, the time spent with peers and teachers is significantly longer. the school teacher temporarily assumes the role of “surrogate parent,” supervises students’ learning while takjiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 818 ing care of their lives, and can promptly find out their learning, life, and psychological problems and provide help and guidance, so the support from peers and teachers can significantly reduce the loneliness of the left-behind students. 2. family level. left-behind children’s parents cannot be with them, but they should try their best to contact the child, strengthen communication with the child, and understand their problems and needs. the object of this research is left-behind, middle school students. the physiology and psychology of children of this age are undergoing tremendous changes, and they are prone to deviations in their outlook on life and values. they tend to keep some troubles and confusions in their hearts. on the one hand, parents must understand the physical and mental changes of children during a particular period, and on the other hand, they must spare no effort to provide them with timely help. although the barrier of physical distance, in reality, cannot make parent-child closer contact, with the help of some modern communication tools, it is still possible to maintain close contact with children at a psychological distance. even if just listen to children’s confession is a great relief and support to them. 3. individual level. according to the well-known psychologist erikson’s theory of personality development, children in middle school are in puberty, and their instincts will bring some problems. it is incredibly easy to feel confused when facing new social requirements and social conflicts. the biggest crisis at this stage is self-identity and role confusion. it is even more critical for left-behind middle school students to learn to understand themselves from multiple angles correctly. by participating in some beneficial group activities to expand their friends, they accumulate more positive emotional experience, based on proper attribution to face the negative emotions in their lives. of course, students must also learn to seek all kinds of social support activities and use others’ power to gain personal growth, improving self-efficacy. there are still some shortcomings in this research that need to be improved in future research. first of all, this study adopts a cross-sectional design to reveal the simultaneity relationship between loneliness, general self-efficacy, and life satisfaction. studies have shown that loneliness has a significant upward trend in adolescence. adolescents in grades 7 and 8 spend more time alone than children in grades 5 and 6, and their attitude towards being alone is more favorable (liu et al., 2013). therefore, it is necessary to adopt a tracking design in the future to examine the development and changes of left-behind children’s loneliness, general self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life over a more extended period, as well as possible dynamic connections, in order to fully and deeply clarify the impact of loneliness on satisfaction with life of children of a certain age in the context of left-behind. secondly, this study only reveals the influence of general self-efficacy on satisfaction with life. according to bandura’s self-efficacy theory, self-efficacy is affected by individual success experience, others’ substitution experience, verbal persuasion, and physical and emotional states. in the future, based on existing research, tentative interventions can be made on the general self-efficacy of jiang et al. loneliness, self-efficacy, and satisfaction with life in left-behind middle school students. vol.6, no. 2, 2020 819 left-behind children to clarify the mechanism of general self-efficacy between loneliness and satisfaction with life more clearly and comprehensively. conclusions this study draws the following conclusions: 1. the loneliness experience of left-behind middle school students is significantly higher than that of non-left behind middle school students. the loneliness experience of girls is significantly higher than that of boys. 2. the general self-efficacy of left-behind middle school students is significantly lower than that of non-left behind middle school students. the selfefficacy of live-in-school left-behind students is significantly higher than that of non-live-in-school left-behind students. 3. the level of satisfaction with left-behind middle school students’ life is significantly lower than that of non-left behind middle school students. however, there is no significant difference in factors such as gender, livein-school, an only child. 4. loneliness negatively predicts general self-efficacy and satisfaction with the life of left-behind middle school students. general self-efficacy plays an intermediary role in the relationship of loneliness, predicting satisfaction with life. references al khatib, 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[chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.10059202.2017.23.095 received: 30 september 2020 revised: 08 november 2020 accepted: 27 october 2020 https://doi.org/10.13342/j.cnki.cjhp.2011.09.014 https://doi.org/10.13342/j.cnki.cjhp.2011.09.014 https://doi.org/10.13342/j.cnki.cjhp.2014.02.038 https://doi.org/10.13342/j.cnki.cjhp.2014.02.038 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1005-9202.2017.23.095 https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1005-9202.2017.23.095 originalarticle-ronghuaying-bece_title_23nov2020 originalarticle-ronghuaying-bece_maintex23nov2020 bece. newsletter vol.15, no.1, 2023, bece 1795 the impact of parent-child separation on students’ social and emotional skills: the mediating effect of parent-child interaction and the moderating effect of home-school collaboration by qian, j. & cao, y. correspondence to: jia qian, central china normal university, china. e-mail: qianjia@ccnu.edu.cn ocial and emotional skills are essential to individuals’ goal achievement, collaboration with others, and emotion regulation. developing social and emotional ability in students is a meaningful practice to improve the quality of education and promote student holistic development as well as an active reaction to social changes. the parental “absence” induced by parent-child separation can significantly influence child growth, particularly child social and emotional development. this study utilized the data from the oecd’s survey of social and emotional skills (sses) in china to analyze the mediating effect of parentchild interaction and moderating effect of home-school collaboration on the impact of parent-child separation on students’ social and emotional skills. research findings included: i. parent-child separation significantly and adversely affected child social and emotional development by reducing parent-child interaction, which verified the mediating path of “parent-child separation parent-child interaction children’s social and emotional skills.” ii. high-quality home-school collaboration could positively moderate the above mediating effect, thus mitigating the negative impact of parentchild separation on student social and emotional development to certain extent. the article proposed suggestions as follows:  parent-child separation does not necessarily mean the absence of parental instruction. parents should increase parent-child interaction and home-school collaboration to alleviate its negative effect.  teachers should offer students more emotional support and provide parents with more guidance on home education to offset the negative impact of emotional deficiency caused by parent-child separation.  schools should improve the environment of home-school partnership to support student social and emotional development. source: education & economy, 2023; 39(3):45-52+85. s mailto:qianjia@ccnu.edu.cn how teacher support affects migrant children’s learning satisfaction zaihua liu psychology and special education institute, china national academy of educational sciences, beijing 100088, china abstract: teacher support significantly affects student learning and directly relates to their academic development. learning satisfaction is the subjective perception and evaluation of learning quality on the part of the student, which represents, to certain extent, the quality of education. based on data from a questionnaire survey of 1251 migrant children in grades three throughout six, this study analyzed how teacher support impacted the learning satisfaction of migrant children. research findings indicated that teacher support had a significantly positive effect on migrant children’s learning satisfaction; and that teacher support indirectly and positively affects their learning satisfaction through the separate mediating effect of their learning engagement as well as via the chain mediating effects of their academic adjustment and learning engagement. best evidence in chinese education 2024; 16(1):1817-1821. doi: 10.15354/bece.24.ar105 how to cite: liu, z. (2024). how teacher support affects migrant children’s learning satisfaction. best evidence in chinese education, 16(1):1817-1821. keywords: teacher support, migrant children, learning satisfaction, academic adjustment, learning engagement correspondence to: zaihua liu, psychology and special education institute, china national academy of educational sciences, beijing 100088, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org conflict of interests: none. © 2024 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ liu. (beijing, china). teacher support and migrant children’s learning. bece, vol.16, no. 1, 2024 1818 n china, migrant children, also referred to as “children of migrant workers,” are those who move to urban from rural areas with their migrant worker parents and are under the age of 18. this group emerged amid the accelerated social transformation in china. statistical data show that in 2022, there were a total of 13.6468 million children of migrant workers enrolled in compulsory education schools, including 9.6986 million primary school students and 3.9483 million junior secondary school students. migrant children often find themselves in a relatively underprivileged or marginalized position in schools and have more academic adjustment problems than their non-migrant peers. strengthening migrant children support systems to guarantee their access to public basic education services and improve their learning satisfaction and quality of education concerns educational equity of the nation. it has a direct impact on the achievement of developmental goals of balanced compulsory education and social harmony. according to the ecology of human development theory, the microsystem composed of the family, peers, and school is the primary environmental determinant of the individual’s development. moreover, research has revealed that human factors have a greater impact on student learning satisfaction than physical factors. the in-class learning environment built on teacher-student interactions is an important factor for students’ academic performance. teacher support is the supportive attitude and behavior of a teacher perceived by students in their learning, which directly or indirectly affect their learning engagement and ultimately impact their academic performance. recent studies found that teacher support significantly positively predicts academic adjustment and engagement in secondary school students. based on existing theoretical and empirical research, this study developed a theoretical model for the effects of teacher support on migrant children’s learning satisfaction and analyzes the paths of the impacts. a theoretical model for the effects of teacher support on migrant children’s learning satisfaction teacher support can positively predict student learning engagement, and migrant children’s learning engagement directly affects their learning satisfaction. hence, the present study proposed hypothesis one: teacher support impacts migrant children’s learning satisfaction through the mediation of student learning engagement. student learning satisfaction enhances as their learning needs are met, or their learning goals are achieved. given this, hypothesis two was put forward: student academic adjustment mediates the effect of teacher support on migrant children’s learning satisfaction. the literature indicates that there are interplays between the four variables of teacher support, student academic adjustment, student learning engagement, and student learning satisfaction. thereby, structural equation modeling was adopted to define the structural relationships between teacher support and migrant children’s learning satisfaction. hypothesis three was posed: teacher support affects migrant children’s learning satisfaction via the chain mediating effects of student academic adjustment and learning engagement. i liu. (beijing, china). teacher support and migrant children’s learning. bece, vol.16, no. 1, 2024 1819 research methods research participants using convenient sampling, children of migrant workers were selected as research participants from three schools from beijing, shanghai, and wuhan and questionnaire surveyed. a total of 1,251 (705 males and 546 females) valid participants were included, ranging from grade 3 throughout 6, with 288, 297, 330, and 336 students from the four grades, respectively. research tools the migrant children learning satisfaction scale this is a self-developed four-point scale with 38 items grouped in six dimensions: classroom environment, teaching techniques, teacher-student relationship, peer relationship, family relationship, and academic achievement. the coefficient of internal consistency reliability of the scale is 0.89, and its split-half reliability coefficient is 0.87. items with a less-than-0.3 factor loading were deleted after the first confirmatory factor analysis, and after that, an additional confirmatory factor analysis was conducted. the results show that the factor loading of each item is between 0.33 and 0.76, indicating good construct validity of the scale. the overall goodness-of-fit indicators of the model by confirmatory factor analysis are χ2/df = 4.10, nfi = 0.97, tli = 0.97, cfi = 0.95, rmsea = 0.05, indicating good construct validity of the questionnaire. the teacher support scale the six-point student-perceived teacher supportive behavior scale developed by ouyang (2005) has relatively high reliability and validity, including 19 items in three dimensions: learning support, emotional support, and capability support. the three factors could explain 50.64% of the total variance, indicating that the questionnaire has good construct validity. the reliability of the questionnaire is 0.87. the higher the student scores on the questionnaire, the more teacher support he or she receives. the student academic adjustment scale “school adjustment scales for chinese primary and secondary school students” were developed by jiang et al. (2017), among which the scale for the 3rd-6th graders was used in this study. it adopts a five-point rating method, including 17 items in three dimensions: learning motivation, learning skill, and learning difficulty. the correlation coefficient between each item and its corresponding dimension ranges from 0.39 to 0.61, all above the significance level of 0.01. the correlation coefficients between dimensions are lower than the dimension-total correlation coefficient, indicating the scale has desirable construct validity. the test-retest reliability of the scale is 0.78, and its criteriliu. (beijing, china). teacher support and migrant children’s learning. bece, vol.16, no. 1, 2024 1820 on validity is good. the higher the student scores on the scale, the better the student’s academic adjustment. the migrant children learning engagement scale the self-developed five-point scale for measuring learning engagement of migrant children includes 31 items grouped three dimensions: cognitive engagement, emotional engagement, and behavioral engagement. the scale has an internal consistency coefficient of 0.97 and a split-half reliability coefficient of 0.93. confirmatory factor analysis shows that the factor loading of each item in its respective dimension is between 0.68 and 0.83, indicating good construct validity of the scale, which is also confirmed by the overall goodness-of-fit indicators of the model: χ2/df = 4.46, nfi = 0.91, tli = 0.92, cfi = 0.93, rmsea = 0.06. research findings the direct effects of teacher support on migrant children’s learning satisfaction teacher support could significantly and directly predict migrant children’s learning satisfaction. the academic guidance and emotional care from the teacher made migrant children feel respected and recognized, thus generating a strong sense of identification with and belonging to the school and fueling positive emotional experience of learning in them. teacher support could also positively impact academically struggling migrant children by enhancing their self-confidence, boosting their sense of hope, and encouraging self-motivation in them. the separate mediating effect of learning engagement teacher support could effectively instigate student learning engagement. student learning engagement posed a separate mediating effect on the relation between teacher support and migrant children’s learning satisfaction, which confirmed hypothesis one. teacher support suits the needs of migrant children for a sense of security, promotes the development of harmonious teacher-student relationships, improves their academic resilience, and stimulates their intrinsic motivation, thus enhancing their level of learning engagement. the more teacher support migrant children obtain, the greater their sense of hope for their studies, resulting in their increased investment of time and energy in learning, which can help upgrade their academic performance and consequently, their learning satisfaction. the chain mediating effects of student academic adjustment and learning engagement liu. (beijing, china). teacher support and migrant children’s learning. bece, vol.16, no. 1, 2024 1821 the connection between teacher support and student academic adjustment exists in various student groups. this study expanded the scope of research on the topic by targeting at migrant children, and thus, increased the generalizability of the research results. increased teacher support made the smooth adjustment of migrant children to their studies possible by heightening their interest in learning and boosting their pursuit of selfdevelopment, and thus led to increased learning engagement of this group. better completion of learning tasks contributed to improving their academic performance, generating enhanced learning satisfaction in them. as a result, hypothesis three was verified. conclusion based on the ecology of human development theory, this study conducted a relatively comprehensive analysis of the relations between teacher support and the academic adjustment, learning engagement, and learning satisfaction of migrant children. a construct model for the external and internal factors affecting migrant children’s learning satisfaction was created, which corroborated the hypotheses of the study. references jiang, g., ying, m., lin, x., wei, h., & zhang, h. (2017). the development of school adjustment scales for chinese primary and secondary school students. chinese journal of clinic psychology, 25(3):435-444. ouyang, d. (2005). relationships between teacher expectations, student academic self-concept, student perception of teacher support behavior, and student academic performance (master’s thesis). guangxi normal university. doi: https://doi.org/10.76666/d.y784638 the chinese version of this article has been published in educational research, 2023; 2023(11):149159. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 刘在花. (2023). 教师支持对流动儿童学习满意度的影响机制. 教育研究, 2023(11):149-159. received: 22 november 2023 revised: 01 december 2023 accepted: 15 december 2023 https://doi.org/10.76666/d.y784638 ar-zaihualiu-bece_titlejan_2024 ar-zaihualiu_bece-maintextjan2024 bece. newsletter vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1813 the impact of physical exercise on adolescent academic performance: an empirical analysis based on the china education panel survey 2014-2015 by li, c. correspondence to: chunguang li, beijing youth politics college, china. email: editorial-office@bonoi.org ue to the traditional idea of “academic development outweighing physical activity” and the public misunderstanding of the effect of physical exercise on student academic performance, physical exercise is typically given the lowest priority in chinese educational system. this has substantially restricted the time allotted to physical activity in teenagers, posing a negative impact on adolescent physical and mental health. this article is a systematic analysis of the influence of physical exercise on teenager academic achievement and the potential influence mechanism, based on data from the china education panel survey 2014-2015. the study finds that: i. both standardized test scores and parental evaluation results show that the number of times of physical exercise per week is positively correlated with adolescent academic performance, indicating that physical activity is not only beneficial for their physical fitness but also for their cognitive attainment. ii. socio-psychological factors such as psychological state, education expectations, confidence in the future, and academic resilience act as a robust mediator for the relation between physical exercise and academic performance among adolescents. physical fitness may play a mediating role, though not a stable one. physical stamina does not play a mediating role, likely because chinese basic education overly emphasizes student cognitive ability and is intensely competitive. therefore, in the chinese context, physical exercise helps improve adolescents’ academic performance through its impact on their sociopsychological state rather than their physical stamina and fitness. strengthened academic resilience, alleviated stressful emotions, and improved mental health are the direct results brought on by physical exercise. educational authorities, schools, and families should foster a more balanced view of “acad mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1814 demic development and physical activity” and place more importance on adolescent physical exercise while conducting investment and resource distribution in education which is traditionally centered around student academic achievement. source: education research monthly, 2023; 2023(06):67-74. bece. newsletter vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1845 a longitudinal study of the relationship between preschool readiness and the adjustment to preschool transition in young children by zhang, n., wang, y., xu, j. & dong, s. correspondence to: yifang wang, capital normal university, china. e-mail: wangyifang6275@126.com his majority of young children suffer from separation anxiety to varying degrees in the early stage of preschool attendance, where they first leave home to confront a new environment, experiencing a transition from dependence to self-reliance and from a free and easy home environment to a setting of discipline. early preschool adaptation affects the younger children’ attitudes towards and perceptions of kindergarten life in their entire preschool years and even their future social adjustment. how to help preschoolers ease and circumvent the maladaptation in their early kindergarten life to facilitate a smooth preschool transition deserves in-depth research. this study focuses on analyzing the effects of preschool readiness on young children’s adjustment to preschool transition using latent growth models. research findings show that: i. children adapted to kindergarten at a greater rate in the initial period than later periods. the initial level of preschool adaptation was negatively related to the rate of adjustment. there were significant differences in the initial level and rate of preschool adjustment among individuals. ii. there was no correlation between the initial level and rate of preschool adjustment and the gender, age, and being the only child or not in preschoolers. a healthy daily routine developed before kindergarten attendance could positively predict the initial level and rate of preschool adjustment in them. the toilet habit could positively predict the rate of preschool adjustment among them. iii. negative emotion-regulation methods, particularly the release of negative emotions, inversely predicted the initial level of kindergarten adaptation in preschoolers. based on research findings, the following implications were drawn:  parents of children with a low initial level of preschool adjustment need not worry too much about their coping with kindergarten life in that young children can make big progress in this regard within a short term. t mailto:wangyifang6275@126.com vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1846  necessary are adequate life preparations before kindergarten attendance, including self-care ability and a good daily routine. young children should be well-trained to adapt to preschool life in terms of the daily schedule, mid-day nap, and toilet habit.  in home-school co-education before the kid’s kindergarten attendance, special attention should be paid to increasing their ability to regulate emotions. training on emotion-regulation strategies is not only beneficial for the child’s preschool adjustment but also for their lifelong social adaptation.  pre-kindergarten preparation should be incorporated into preschool education. policies and guidelines for the home-school community ought to extend to the preparation period before the child’s kindergarten attendance. source: education research monthly, 2023; 2023(10):75-81. bece. newsletter vol.12, no.2, 2022 1653 parental phubbing and young children’ problem behavior: a moderated mediation model by zu, j., yang, w. y., zhou, t. f., teng, w. q., & dan, f. correspondence to: fei dan, shenyang normal university, china. e-mail: danfeier_2003@163.com hild problem behaviors refer to those behaviors that are detrimental to physical and mental health of young children, including externalizing problems such as aggression, violence, disobedience to discipline, etc. and internalizing ones like anxiety, depression, withdrawal and so on. problem behaviors impede children’s acquisition of knowledge and skills. the parentchild relationship is considered a key factor affecting children’s growth, and the quality of parent-child interaction can predict child problem behaviors. the popularization of smart phones and other electronic devices today has led to a special human behavior dubbed “phubbing”, which is not beneficial to interpersonal communication and interaction. as a result, it is necessary to undertake a deep investigation into the negative impact of parental phubbing on child development. this study sampled 527 parents (189 fathers and 338 mothers) from14 kindergartens in liaoning, shandong, and shanxi provinces, involving 127 three-year-olds, 157 four-year-olds, and 148 five-year-olds, and 95 six-yearolds. the parental phubbing scale, child-parent relationship scale, conners’ child problem behavior scale, and family social and economic status (ses) measurement were used as research tools; the common method bias test was adopted as the research method. the results of the study show that: the overall severity of phubbing among parents is high, while the severity of problem behavior in young children is of lower-middle level; parental phubbing can not only directly predict child problem behaviors, but also indirectly predict them through the parentchild relationship; young children’s age enhanced the predictive effect of parental phubbing on child problem behaviors, but weakened that of the parentchild relationship on child problem behaviors; when the parent scores between 18.7 and 24.5 points in the parental phubbing scale, the problem behavior of his or her child surpasses the alert threshold. to ensure the healthy growth of young children, parents should be alert to the cumulative risk effect of their phubbing and its threshold, reduce their cell phone dependence, and dedicate quality time to children. c mailto:danfeier_2003@163.com vol.12, no.2, 2022 1654 source: studies in preschool education,2022; 2022(6):34-48 bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1217 communicative competence the fifth report of the social and emotional competence test of chinese adolescents jingzhong huang, qian wang, huanchun chen, & xingyuan gao east china normal university, shanghai 200241, jiangsu, china ommunicative ability is embodied as “extroversion” in the big five personality test. extroversion is an extremely important concept in personality psychology and a more common personality trait. typically, it includes boldness, self-confidence, liveliness, enthusiasm, optimism, and being. in studying adolescents’ social and emotional abilities, the oecd designed a communication competence evaluation framework based on “extroversion” in the “big five personality” model based on the physical and mental development characteristics of 10-year-old and 15-year-old adolescents. in the oecd evaluation framework, there are three sub-dimensions of communicative competence: happy group, courage and vitality. this study is based on the evaluation data of suzhou city in china and presents the evaluation results of the communicative ability dimension of the youth social and emotional ability survey in various ways. the data results are presented in the following three parts. the first part uses descriptive statistics to illustrate the overall score of communicative ability, the correlation coefficient of communicative ability and other sub-abilities, and the differences of each ability in age, gender, urban and rural areas, and school categories. the second part uses factors that affect the ability to communicate through multiple regression analysis, including background variables, student variables, teacher variables, school variables, family variables, and the impact of student happiness, courage and vitality. finally, the third part uses multiple regression analysis of the 10-year-old and 15-year-old groups to determine the influence of happiness, courage and vitality on life outcome variables such as © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. c bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1218 health and well-being. research indicates: the overall status of communication skills from the average and standard deviation of the three sub-abilities of the students in the 10-year-old group and the 15-year-old group in suzhou, the overall score of the students in suzhou is higher than the world average. this indicates the depth of the development of the social and emotional abilities suzhou’s students. the high level also shows that the confidence of suzhou students in themselves is higher than the international average. moreover, compared with the international sample, the three sub-abilities of the suzhou sample’s communicative competence have correlate more among the three sub-competences: music group, courage and vitality. the music group and vitality show a significant middle correlation. among the 10-year-old group of students, the correlation coefficient is 0.55, and the correlation coefficient is 0.61 among the 15-year-old students. although courage also relates to music and vitality, the correlation coefficients are all below 0.5. there is a high degree of correlation between communication ability, emotion regulation, and collaboration ability. in addition, there are significant differences in the ability to communicate among different ages, genders, urban and rural areas, and school types. the 10-year-old group and the 15-year-old group have a large gap in selfevaluation, while the gap in parental evaluation is relatively small, indicating that parents’ evaluations of students in the three dimensions of happiness, courage and vitality tend to be more consistent, and there is a question as to whether parent evaluation can be considered student self-evaluation. the self-evaluation level of the 10-year-old students on their own happiness, courage and vitality is higher than that of the 15-year-old students. in the dimension of music group, girls in the 10-year-old group have significantly higher music group ability than boys. students in the 15-year-old group show the opposite situation, with boys’ music group ability significantly higher than that of girls. regarding the courageous dimension, girls in the 10-yearold group are slightly more courageous than boys, and there is no obvious difference between boys and girls in the 15-year-old group. in terms of vitality, boys exceed girls in the 10-year-old and 15-year-old groups. the difference in performance between male and female students in the group is even greater at the age of 15. whether it is the 10-year-old group or the 15-yearold group, students in central urban schools can communicate much better than students in county and rural areas, but the difference between county and rural is insignificant. influencing factors of communicative ability use multiple regression to analyze the factors that affect the ability of communication, including background variables, student variables, teacher variables, school variables, family variables, and the impact of students’ happiness, courage and vitality. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1219 regarding background variables, among the 10-year-old students, family possessions and family book collection significantly positively affect the three abilities of music group, courage and vitality (p < 0.01), and the positive influence coefficients of family possessions are 0.40 and 0.36, respectively. 0.46, the positive influence coefficients of family collections are 0.07, 0.06, and 0.07, respectively. among 15-year-old students, gender, family possessions, family equipment and family book collection are key factors affecting students’ happiness, courage and vitality (p < 0.01). household possessions and household equipment significantly positively affect the communication ability of 15-year-old students. the positive impact coefficients of household possessions are 0.22, 0.21, and 0.34. the positive impact coefficients of household equipment are 0.07, 0.07, and 0.02, respectively. regarding student variables, whether in the 10-year-old group or the 15year-old group, the sense of security, friend relationship, good habit friends, and outdoor activity time all significantly and positively impact courage and vitality (p < 0.01), while time spent on the internet have a significant effect on the three items. ability has a significant negative impact (except for the courage of the 10-year-old group, p = 0.11). regarding teacher variables, whether for the 10-year-old or 15-yearold students, the teacher-student relationship has a significant impact on their happiness, courage and vitality (p<0.01, β is around 0.10). for the 10-yearold students, the teacher’s teaching age has a significant positive effect on music group and vitality, and the frequency of the teacher’s social and emotional ability training has a significant positive effect on music group and courage (p < 0.01). in contrast, the 15-year-old group’s music group was not significantly affected by the teacher’s teaching age (p=0.37), and courage was not significantly affected by the teacher’s academic qualifications (p = 0.71). the music group, courage, and vitality were affected by the teacher, with an expected positive effect being more significant (p < 0.01, β is 0.04, 0.09, 0.03, respectively). regarding school variables, whether it is a 10-year-old group or a 15year-old group, the school’s sense of belonging, school cooperation atmosphere and extracurricular activities all have a significant impact on their communication ability (p < 0.01). of these, the school’s sense of belonging has the highest degree of positive influence. the directional coefficient can reach about 0.50. in creating a school atmosphere, the younger group is more suitable for cooperation, while the older group can appropriately encourage competition. regarding family variables, for the 10-year-old group of students, understanding fathers and mothers had a significant positive impact on students’ happiness, courage and vitality (p < 0.01), while understanding mothers had positive effects on the students’ three abilities. the impact is greater (β is 0.08, 0.04, 0.06, respectively). punishment parents have different influences on students’ communicative ability. the specific manifestation is that punishment mothers positively influence the three abilities of students, while punishment fathers have no significant influence. for students in the 15-year bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1220 old group, two different parenting styles and parents’ high expectations have a significant positive impact on students’ happiness, courage and vitality, while parent-child relationship problems have a significant negative impact (p < 0.01). communication skills and life results from the perspective of academic performance, for the 10-year-old group of students, happiness, courage and vitality generally have a significant positive effect on the performance of china, mathematics and art (except for vitality for art, p = 0.46), and other p values are less than 0.01. from the perspective of educational expectations variables, only courage significantly impacts educational expectations (p < 0.01, β = 0.16), indicating that more courageous students have higher expectations of their own learning performance. for 15year-old students, vitality has a significant positive impact on chinese performance (p < 0.01, β = 0.14). guogan significantly and positively impacts educational expectations (p < 0.01, β = 0.05). from the perspective of mathematics and art achievements, the influence of communication skills is insignificant. from the perspective of global awareness among both 10-year-old and 15-year-old groups, the communicative abilities of group, courage and vitality all have a significant positive impact on global awareness (p < 0.01). from the perspective of social relations, music group and vitality have a significant positive impact on students’ social relations in both age groups (p < 0.01). from the health point of view, vitality and music group have a significant positive impact on both groups, especially vitality, which has a greater degree of influence than music group; the correlation coefficient can reach 0.27. from the perspective of quality of life, happiness, courage and vitality have a significant positive impact on the subjective well-being and life satisfaction of the 10-year-old students, and they have a significant negative impact on test anxiety (p < 0.01, β = -0.10, -0.16, -0.53, respectively). lequn and vitality have a significant positive impact on the subjective well-being and life satisfaction of 15-year-old students, while courage and vitality have a significant negative impact on test anxiety (p < 0.01, β = -0.08, -0.40, respectively). the results indicate that encouraging young people to develop good peer relationships plays an extremely important role in the formation and development of their happiness, courage and vitality. both teachers and students must understand, trust, and respect each other, as well as form a basis of equal communication. a harmonious relationship between teachers and students is an important guarantee for promoting students’ communication skills. to create a positive school atmosphere, a good school atmosphere is a key to improving students’ communication skills. parents should form a positive family education and create a democratic and harmonious family atmosphere to promote the development of happiness, courage and vitality. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1221 source: journal of east china normal university (education science edition), 2021, 39(9):93-108. correspondence to: jingzhong huang east china normal university shanghai 200241 china email: zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.rp035 mailto:zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn bece, vol.13, no.1, 2023 1663 seeking understanding and cooperation in a world of disputes: new year greetings from bece jijun yao school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, jiangsu, china “if you are depressed, you are living in the past; if you are anxious, you are living in the future; if you are at peace, you are living in the present.” –lao tzu or most of us, the year of 2022 was not a desirable year. the covid-19 epidemic was still affecting the lives of billions of people. the high transmissibility of the new strains and the concern over long covid-19 made them less confident in their expectation of completely getting rid of the adverse impact of the epidemic. in the meantime, war, famine, natural disasters, and economic downturn were also challenging the coping capacities of human society. all evidence indicates that there remains a multitude of issues for mankind to address. to deal with these issues, people from all countries, of all ethnic origins, and with all faiths need to work together. such extensive cooperation necessitates wider and deeper mutual understanding. since its establishment, bece has sought to spread the outcomes of evidence-based research on chinese education and promote communication between chinese educational researchers and their overseas peers. to be frank, it has not been an easy task to carry out this commitment, in the contexts of the regional variances in research preferences, paradigms, and orientations as well as the increasing division of the world. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. f http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ bece, vol.13, no.1, 2023 1664 however, education of all nations shares the same goal of optimizing the growth and development of their children. in light of this, we hold that introducing chin’s educational achievements to global peers and igniting debate and in-depth research in areas of common concern are effective means to enrich global educational research experience and foster deeper understanding and better cooperation. as a journal specializing in evidence-based research on chinese education, bece does not have many counterparts in the world, which means it could encounter extra challenges in its operation due to a lack of reference. despite the difficulties, we still view the journal as valuable existence, especially when people around the world are seeking to understand china today more comprehensively as a result of its increasing influence. at the end of 2022, china lifted covid-19 lockdowns and reopened its borders. in the near future, the exchange between china and foreign countries will return to normality. in the new year, while adhering to the original intention of the journal, that is, to promote evidence-based research on chinese education, the journal will also pay more attention to prompting understanding and cooperation between global researchers. we sincerely hope that chinese scholars will publish high-quality research results in this journal as always and welcome all foreign experts with interest in china’s educational issues to present their insights on this platform. china’s educational reform and development can serve as a large “sample”, which has the potential of providing valuable experience, theory, and scientific evidence for the global education development. the publication of this issue coincides with the chinese lunar new year. this year is the year of the rabbit in china. rabbits are peaceful, gentle, and smart animals. it is hoped that they will bring peace and happiness to us all. correspondence to: jijun yao ph.d. school of educational science nanjing normal university nanjing 210024 jiangsu china e-mail: e-mail: yaojijun_njnu@163.com conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ed032 mailto:yaojijun_njnu@163.com the effect of blended instruction on student performance: a meta-analysis of 106 empirical studies from china and abroad baomin li, 1 qing yu, 1 fenglei yang 2 1. faculty of education, east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china 2. school of computer engineering and science, shanghai university, shanghai 200444, china abstract. blended instruction integrating off-line and on-line teaching has become an important instrument for promoting educational reform and innovation. however, the results of current empirical studies diverge on the effect of blended instruction on student performance, which necessitates further research on the effectiveness of blended instruction and related factors. this study, using an evidence-based meta-analytical approach, conducts a quantitative analysis of 106 experimental and quasiexperimental studies published from january 2000 to september 2021 in china and abroad, and systematically examines the effectiveness of blended instruction. the research finds that: i) the summary effect size (es) of the included sample is 0.669 (n=142), indicating that blended instruction has above-moderate positive effects on student performance, especially on student learning motivation and academic emotions and attitude; ii) in terms of education levels, experimental periods and class sizes, blended instruction has the most significant positive effect on junior and senior secondary school students, on a teaching period from one to three months, and on a class size of 51 to 100 students; iii) regarding the proportion and interactive patterns of online teaching, 50% composition of online teaching and synchronous or synchronous + asynchronous interaction exert the most significant positive effects on student learning. iv) teaching methods including task-driven learning, role-playing, inquiry-based teaching, and case-based teaching have greater positive effects on student performance than other methods. group study yields a greater effect on promoting student learning compared to individual study. based on the findings, the present study also makes suggestions for the effective practice of blended instruction. li et al. effect of blended instruction on student performance. bece, vol.10, no.2, 2022 1396 best evidence in chinese education 2022; 10(1):1395-1403. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ar018. how to cite: li, b., yu, q., & yang, f. (2022). the effect of blended instruction on student performance: a meta-analysis of 106 empirical studies from china and abroad. best evidence in chinese education, 10(2):1395-1403. keywords: blended instruction, blended learning, on-line learning, student performance, meta-analysis about authors: baomin li, faculty of education, east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china. e-mail: lbmlinda@126.com qing yu, faculty of education, east china normal university, shanghai 200062, china. e-mail: 2429560977@qq.com correspondence to: fenglei yang, school of computer engineering and science, shanghai university, shanghai 200444, china. e-mail: flyang@shu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:lbmlinda@126.com mailto:2429560977@qq.com mailto:flyang@shu.edu.cn li et al. effect of blended instruction on student performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1397 introduction lended instruction, a combination of traditional face-to-face and online teaching, has prevailed worldwide since 2020. through effective instructional design and technological application, it integrates the two teaching modes (allen & seaman, 2010; garrison & kanuka, 2004; li & zhao, 2004) and incorporates the advantages of both modes such as flexible learning time and space, easy access to and sharing of resources, and augmented interaction (lock, 2006). it is regarded by some researchers as a critical instruction format in overcoming the limitations of traditional teaching and pure online learning (schlager, fusco, & schank, 2002; feng, wang, & wu, 2018). feng, sun, and cao (2019) believe that blended instruction is an innovation in teaching reform; garrison and kanuka (2004) suggest that it provides educators with opportunities to re-examine and reconstruct teaching practice. to evaluate the effectiveness of blended instruction, scholars have undertaken substantial research. the conclusions of their research vary and can be classified into the following three categories: 1) blended instruction yields significant positive effects on the improvement of student performance; 2) there is no significant difference between blended instruction and traditional teaching; 3) blended instruction is not as effective as traditional teaching. these conflicting results hinder the universalization of blended instruction. in the context of the ongoing development of “internet+” education and new educational requirements in the post-pandemic era, blended instruction tends to become the new normal mode of teaching (porter et al., 2014). given that some educational administrators and teachers cannot understand the role of blended instruction clearly with no idea how to reasonably configurate online learning and face-to-face instruction, and contradictory results exist in the current empirical studies of the effects of blended instruction, it is imperative to conduct a systematic study on this topic. a meta-analysis is a systematic quantitative synthesis of results from a series of independent studies under the same research topic (lipsey & wilson, 2001), which is effective in alleviating ambiguities and uncertainties in the findings of social sciences and prompting new scientific discoveries (li & qu, 2021). given this, the present study adopts evidence-based meta-analysis to examine the effect of blended instruction on student learning and its major moderating factors, such as the ratio of online teaching to face-to-face instruction and the sequence of the two components in blended instruction. it aims to answer the following questions: 1) how effective is blended instruction compared to traditional teaching? what effects does it have on the improvement of student performance in various dimensions? 2) how do the ratio of online teaching and sequence of online and offline teaching in the combination impact student learning? 3) what influences do teaching periods, education levels, and class sizes have on blended instruction? 4) what are the differences among various teaching methods and learning styles in blended instruction? research design b li et al. effect of blended instruction on student performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1398 research methods and instruments the present study extracts sample sizes, means, and standard deviations from related literature and integrates results from studies on the same research topic. the effects of blended instruction on student learning performance are measured by standardized mean differences (smd), denoting effect sizes. research processes literature search in search for relevant studies, the present study uses keywords including blended learning, blended instruction, hybrid learning, hybrid instruction, mixed mode learning, learning outcomes, learning effect, learning achievement, learning gains, learning performance, and academic achievement, and consult english bibliographic databases such as web of science, google scholar, eric, ebsco, science direct and proquest. for literature in chinese, the search is focused on cnki’s core-listed journals and cssciindexed journals and keywords like blended instruction, blended learning, learning effect, learning outcomes, and experimental intervention. the included studies were published from january of 2000 to september of 2021. literature screening and inclusion criteria in the present study, the following criteria are applied to decide whether to include a study in the analysis: 1) aiming to investigate the relationship between blended instruction and student learning performance; 2) using experimental design, quasiexperimental design or any other form of empirical research in the investigation; 3) including experimental group and control group, with the former being intervened by blended instruction while the latter being spared of any interventions including pre-test and posttest; 4) providing complete data such as the sample size, mean, standard deviation, t-value, p-value or relevant coefficients to calculate the effect values. samples in this study are independent. when duplication or overlapping occurs among samples, the more detailed or the larger sample is selected. after screening, there remain 98 articles in english and 8 ones in chinese. smd is adopted in calculating effect value. as there is more than one effect size in some studies, finally 142 effect sizes are drawn. the experimental group consists of 7064 students and the control group 6733 students. literature coding literature coding in this study covers author information, years of publication, sample sizes, education levels, disciplines, experimental periods, proportions of online teaching, teaching methods, online interactive patterns, and other contents. education levels range from basic to higher education levels and disciplines here include most of the subjects in place at all education levels. an experimental period can be less than one week, less than one month, less than six months, or more than six months. the proportion of online teaching can be less than 30%, 31% 49%, 50%, 51% 70%, or 71% 80%. li et al. effect of blended instruction on student performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1399 data analysis to comprehensively examine the effect of blended instruction, we follow cooper’s (2009) analytical procedures and conduct data analysis using the software cma 2.0. through literature review, it is found that the effect of blended instruction on student performance is also correlated with miscellaneous factors such as subjects (students) of the research and learning content. when the results of the meta-analysis are affected by different qualities of literature, the random-effects model can make them more reasonable and scientific. therefore, this study chooses the random-effects model as statistical model and confirms the appropriateness of random-effects model by heterogeneity test. research results the overall effect of blended instruction on student learning performance this study uses the standardized mean difference as effect value and the summary effect of 142 effect sizes is 0.669. cohen (1992) prescribes that an effect size less than 0.2 means a weak effect, an effect size of around 0.5 signifies a moderate effect, and an effect size larger than 0.8 indicates a substantial effect. the results of analysis reveal that blended instruction yields an above-moderate effect on the improvement of student learning outcomes. to further analyze the differences in the effects of blended instruction on student performance in various dimensions, this study investigates its impact on noncognitive elements such as learning satisfaction, emotions and attitude, and learning motivation as well as on cognitive elements such as higher order thinking (like critical thinking and innovation mentality), academic achievements, and practical skills. a more concrete demonstration of the effects of blended instruction on student performance can be reflected in the following sequence (from strong to weak): learning motivation (smd = 0.936) > emotions and attitude (smd = 0.788) > higher order thinking (smd = 0.764) > academic achievements (smd = 0.696) > practical skills (smd = 0.544) > learning satisfaction (smd = 0.516). it shows that blended instruction most significantly improves student learning motivation and emotions and attitude; the positive effect of blended instruction on student critical thinking, innovation mentality and academic achievements is above moderate level; it also has moderate positive effects on student satisfaction and practical skills. the between-group effect value p = 0.240 > 0.05 is not statistically significant, indicating that there are no significant differences in the effect of blended instruction on student performance in different dimensions. the effects of blended instruction at different education levels the effect sizes at all education levels are consistently above 0.5. smds at senior secondary, junior secondary, higher education, primary, and adult education levels are li et al. effect of blended instruction on student performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1400 0.867, 0.758, 0.647, 0.566 and 0.565 respectively. the effect sizes at senior secondary and junior secondary levels are both above 0.75, indicating that blended instruction has significant positive effects on student performance at these two levels; the effect sizes at higher education, primary, and adult education levels are all above 0.5, showing the positive effects of blended instruction at these education levels are above moderate. the between-group effect value p = 0.550 > 0.05 shows no statistical significance and indicates that there are no significant differences in the impact of blended instruction on student performance at different education levels. yet, it is worth noting that it has an exceptionally great positive effect at the senior secondary level. the effects of blended instruction in different class sizes blended instruction can replace partial classroom teaching with online instruction and aids in alleviating the problems typical in teaching with large class sizes, such as low effectiveness and insufficient learning room. smds of class sizes of 51 100 students, 100 + students, 31 50 students and 1 30 students are 0.752, 0.704, 0.663, and 0.562 respectively. the four effect sizes are all above 0.5, indicating that the positive effects of blended instruction in any of the four class sizes are above moderate level. the between-group effect value p = 0.485 > 0.05 shows no statistical significance and indicates that there are no significant differences in the effects of blended instruction in different class sizes. the effects of blended instruction of different teaching periods in this study, the experimental periods are classified into three groups, namely experimental periods of less than one month, one to three months, and more than three months. the effect sizes of blended instruction of the three periods are all above 0.5, indicating moderate positive effects. among them, the experimental period of one to three months yields the most significant effect (smd = 0.845), followed by the periods of less than one month (smd = 0.705) and more than three months (smd = 0.530). the betweengroup effect value p = 0.017 < 0.05 shows significant difference in the effects of blended instruction among different experimental periods, which reveals that teaching periods can moderate the effects of blended instruction. the effects of blended instruction under different teaching methods to investigate the impact of different teaching methods on the effects of blended instruction, this study codes and analyzes ten teaching methods, namely case-based teaching, task-driven learning, project-based learning, lecturing, role-playing, inquiry-based teaching, learning by discussion, peer instruction, q & a teaching, and demonstrative teaching. data analysis results show that the effect sizes of blended instruction under task-driven learning, role-playing, inquiry-based teaching, and case-based teaching are all above 0.8, indicating these four teaching methods have substantial positive effects on student learning performance; the positive effects of project-based learning, peer li et al. effect of blended instruction on student performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1401 instruction, and learning by discussion are above moderate level (smd > 0.6); lecturing and demonstrative teaching have moderate positive effects on student performance; q & a teaching (p > 0.05) shows no significant effect on student performance. the between-group effect value p = 0.121> 0.05 indicates that there are no significant differences in the effects of distinct teaching methods on student learning performance in blended instruction. the effects of blended instruction in different learning organization forms this study codes and analyzes data of two learning organization forms, that is, group learning and independent learning. the effect sizes (smds) of them are 0.678 and 0.584 respectively, indicating that group learning is more effective than independent learning in blended instruction. the positive effect of group learning on student performance is above moderate level and that of independent learning is moderate. the between-group effect value p = 0.433 > 0.05 shows that distinct learning organization forms engender no significant differences in the effects on student learning performance. the effects of blended instruction with different proportions of online teaching this study classifies the proportions of online teaching into five groups, namely lower than 30%, 30% 49%, 50%, 51% 69%, and 70% 80%. the effect sizes of all five groups are above 0.3, basically indicating blended instruction with whatever proportion of online teaching exerts positive effects on student learning performance. smds of proportions of 50%, 30% 49%, 51% 69%, lower than 30%, and 70% 80% are 0.792, 0.525, 0.468, 0.346, and 0.313 respectively. blended instruction with 50% online teaching yields the most significant positive effect on student learning performance. blended instruction with 30% 49% and 51% 69% online teaching has moderate positive effects on student performance. it is worth noticing that both the lowest proportion (lower than 30%) and the highest one (70% 80%) produce the least significant effects. the between-group effect value p = 0.000 < 0.05 indicates that blended instruction with distinct proportions of online teaching has remarkably different effects on student performance. the effects of blended instruction with different sequences of online teaching and face-to-face teaching to investigate the effects of blended instruction with different sequences of online teaching and face-to-face teaching on student learning performance, this study summarizes five categories of sequences including “weekly alternation”, “weekly online + face-to-face teaching”, “online teaching followed by face-to-face teaching”, “face-toface teaching followed by online teaching”, and “face-to-face teaching + online teaching + face-to-face teaching.” “weekly alternation” is a sequence wherein on-line and li et al. effect of blended instruction on student performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1402 face-to-face teaching occur alternately by the week. in “weekly online + face-to-face teaching”, both online and face-to-face teaching happen in every week. “online teaching followed by face-to-face teaching”, “face-to-face teaching followed by online teaching”, and “face-to-face teaching + online teaching + face-to-face teaching” are sequences of the two components in the whole experimental period. smds for “face-to-face teaching + online teaching + face-to-face teaching”, “online teaching followed by faceto-face teaching”, “weekly online + face-to-face teaching”, “face-to-face teaching followed by online teaching”, and “weekly alternation” are 0.757, 0.718, 0.668, 0.649, and 0.363 respectively. with the largest effect size, “face-to-face teaching + online teaching + face-to-face teaching” has the most significant positive effect on student learning performance; the positive effects of “online teaching followed by face-to-face teaching”, “weekly online + face-to-face teaching”, and “face-to-face teaching followed by online teaching” are above moderate. the between-group effect value p = 0.908 > 0.05 indicates there is no significant difference in the effects of blended instructions with different sequences of online and face-to-face teaching. the effects of blended instruction with different teacher-student online interactive patterns to investigate the effects of teacher-student online interactions on student learning performance in blended instruction, this study groups them into four patterns, that is, synchronous interaction, asynchronous interaction, synchronous + asynchronous interaction, absence of interaction. smds for synchronous + asynchronous interaction, synchronous interaction, asynchronous interaction, and absence of interaction are 1.189, 1.134, 0.521, and 0.130 respectively, which means that synchronous + asynchronous interaction and synchronous interaction have the most significant effects in promoting student learning performance while the positive effect of asynchronous interaction is moderate. the between-group effect value p = 0.000 < 0.05 indicates that there is significant difference in the effects of distinct teacher-student online interactive patterns on student learning performance. references allen, i.e. & seaman, j. (2010). class differences: online education in the united states. the slogan consortium. 15-25. cohen, j. (1992). a power primer. psychological bulletin,112(1):155-159.doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.155 cooper, h., valentine, j.c., & hedges, l.v. (2009). handbook of research synthesis and meta-analysis. russell sage foundation. feng, x.y., sun, y.w., & cao, j.t. (2019). blended learning in the era of “internet +”: foundation of learning theories and teaching methods. distance education in china, 2019(2):7 -16 + 92 https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.155 li et al. effect of blended instruction on student performance. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1403 feng, x.y., wang, r.x., & wu, y.j. (2018). review of the status quo of research on hybrid teaching in china and abroad: an analytical framework based on hybrid teaching. journal of distance education, 36(3):13-24. garrison, d.r., & kanuka, h. (2004). blended learning: uncovering its transformative potential in higher education. the internet and higher education, 7(2):95-105. lock, j.v. (2006). a new image: online communities to facilitate teacher professional development. journal of technology and teacher education, 14(4):663-678. lipsey, m.w., & wilson, d.b. (2001). practical meta-analysis. thousand oaks: sage publications, inc: pp1-10. li, k.d., & zhao, j.h. (2004). principles and application models of blended learning. eeducation research, 2004(7):1⁃6. li, x., & qu, j.s. (2021, july 31). a review of the application and progress of meta-analysis in the field of social sciences. data analysis and knowledge discovery: 1-15. retrieved from: http://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/10.1478.g2.2 0210722.0923.002.html porter, w.w., graham, c.r., spring, k.a., & welch, k.r. (2014). blended learning in higher education: institutional adoption and implementation. computers and education, 2014(75):185-195. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.02.0 11 schlager, m., fusco, j., & schank, p. (2002). evolution of an online education community of practice. in k. renninger & w. shumar (eds.), building virtual communities: learning and change in cyberspace (learning in doing: social, cognitive and computational perspectives, pp. 129-158). cambridge: cambridge university press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511606373 .010 the chinese version of this article has been published in open education research, 2022, 28(1):75-78. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 李宝敏, 余青, 杨风雷. (2022). 混合教学对学生学习成效的影响-基于国内外 106 篇实证研究 的元分析. 开放教育研究，28(1):75-78. received: 15 february 2022 revised: 27 february 2022 accepted: 10 march 2022 http://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/10.1478.g2.20210722.0923.002.html http://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/10.1478.g2.20210722.0923.002.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.02.011 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.02.011 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511606373.010 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511606373.010 article-fengleiyang-bece_title_mar2022 article-fengleiyang--bece_maintextmar2022 bece. newsletter vol.14, no.1, 2023 1768 the index of high-quality development of chinese vocational education and the measurement of development levels by zhu, d. q. & peng, h. l. correspondence to: dequan zhu, southwest university, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org longside its rapid economic growth, china has built its vocational education that is of the largest scale in the world. vocational education in china is undergoing a transition from scale-oriented growth to qualityemphasized development. what is the current development level of chinese vocational education? has it accomplished high-quality development? what shortcomings does it have? to answer questions like these, it is necessary to formulate an index for high-quality development of chinese vocational education to measure its development levels. the design of the index is grounded on new development concepts. it includes five dimensions: innovative development, coordinated development, green development, open development, and shared development, and 11 secondary indicators, which together generate 42 parameters. statistical data were sourced from the china statistical yearbook 2021, china education statistical yearbook 2020, and china educational finance statistical yearbook 2021, as well as websites of local statistical bureaus and provincial and municipal education departments and third-party platforms such as shanghai academy of educational sciences, mycos institute, and the think tank on china higher vocational education development. the entropy weight topsis method was adopted to measure the index and sub-indexes of high-quality development of chinese vocational education to discover that: (1) among the 30 provincial administrative regions investigated, only one province takes the lead in the high-quality development of vocational education, a number of them have an index value above the national average level, and the majority of them have a below-average index value; (2) there are significant regional differences in the high-quality development of vocational education, with eastern china having the highest quality of vocational education, followed by the central region, and with western china lagging behind in vocational education; (3) chinese vocational education is characterized by insufficient innovative development, a moderate level of coordinated development, weak green development, impeded open development, and a lack of shared development. a mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.14, no.1, 2023 1769 source: journal of southwest university, 2023; 49(1):138-152. how does job crafting impact on career commitment of rural teachers? ran sun, 1 ping du 2 1. central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china 2. beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract: the purpose of this study is to examine the current state of job crafting and career commitment of rural primary teachers and to analyze the relationship between the two variables as well as the influencing mechanisms through a questionnaire survey of 2,217 primary school teachers in liaoning, yunnan, chongqing, guangxi, and guizhou. the research findings showed that rural primary teachers exhibited a moderate level of capacity for job crafting and career commitment; that job crafting positively predicted career commitment among rural primary teachers; and that teachers’ self-efficacy and organizational support played mediating and moderating roles respectively in the relationship between the two variables. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 14(1):1751-1755. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar055 how to cite: sun, r., & du, p. (2023). how does job crafting impact on career commitment of rural teachers? best evidence in chinese education, 14(1):17511755 keywords: job crafting, career commitment, teachers’ self-efficacy, organizational support, person-job fit sun & du. (hubei & beijing, china). job crafting and career commitment of rural teachers. bece, vol.14, no.1, 2023 1752 about authors: ran sun, school of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. correspondence to: ping du, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. e-mail: duping@bnu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:duping@bnu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ sun & du. (hubei & beijing, china). job crafting and career commitment of rural teachers. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1753 introduction career commitment is about an individual’s identification with the value of their career or occupation and an indicator of the extent to which they engage in their current profession (meyer et al., 1993). job crafting is an individually driven work design process which gives full play to individuals’ agency in workplace, helping them attain meaning at work and personal development. it is viewed as an important means for teachers to autonomously expand their job resources (qi, 2016). in the current context of rural education with limited resources, can teachers actively tap endogenous resources to achieve work goals and improve professional commitment? can job crafting of chinese rural teachers positively predict their career commitment? this study aims to present the current state of job crafting and career commitment among rural teachers and to explore their relations from the perspective of job redesign, utilizing data of rural primary teachers in five provincial administrative regions in china. data sources and selection of variables the data in this article was derived from a survey in 2020 of compulsory education teachers in five provincial administrative regions: liaoning, yunnan, guangxi, and guizhou provinces and chongqing city. adopting stratified random sampling, the research team first selected one economically less developed county from each region, and then picked one moderately developed township and one underdeveloped township from each county. after that, one demonstration primary school and two ordinary primary schools from each county, and one central primary school, one village primary school, and two teaching sites from each of the two townships were included in the investigation; a total of 2217 primary teachers were surveyed. the independent variable in this study was teacher job crafting, measured by the job crafting scale developed by slemp and vella-rodrick (2013). teacher career commitment was the dependent variable, measured by the primary and secondary teachers’ career commitment scale created by li (2001). teacher self-efficacy was the mediator, measured by yu et al.’s (1995) simplified version of the general self-efficacy scale, while teacher organizational support was measured by the primary teachers’ perception of organizational support scale created by the research team according to the actual educational experience of primary teachers. research findings common method biases test the test results showed that there were seven principal factors that have a greater-than-1 characteristic root and that the variance explained by the top factor was 36.4%, which was less than the critical value of 40%. that indicated that the common method biases were not significant. sun & du. (hubei & beijing, china). job crafting and career commitment of rural teachers. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1754 descriptive statistics of variables and relevant analyses (i) the mean value of job crafting of rural teachers was 3.87, with the mean of their cognitive crafting being the highest (4.04) and that of their relationship crafting being the lowest (3.76), both of which were slightly higher than the critical value of 3. the analysis results showed there was no significant difference in job crafting performance between rural and urban primary teachers. (ii) the mean value of career commitment of rural teachers was 3.17, with the mean of their normative commitment being the highest (3.32) and their continuance commitment being the lowest (2.92), both of which were above the critical value of 2, but slightly lower than the level of career commitment among urban teachers. (iii) the self-efficacy of rural teachers was similar to that of urban teachers, and their perception of organizational support was slightly lower than that of the latter, with both being above the critical value of 2. verification of hypotheses this study constructed structural equation models based on samples of urban and rural teachers to verify hypotheses 1 and 2. the structural equation model based on the sample of rural teachers resulted in a satisfactory goodness of fit: rmsea = 0 06, cfi = 0. 90, tli = 0. 90, srmr = 0. 06; job crafting of rural primary teachers could significantly and positively predict their career commitment, and their self-efficacy posed a mediating effect on the relation between the two variables. thus, h1 and h2 were confirmed. the study also constructed latent moderation models based on samples of urban and rural teacher to verify hypothesis 3. the results demonstrated that both teachers’ job crafting and perception of organizational support significantly and positively predict career commitment, with the former having a greater effect than the latter. conclusions the rural primary teachers sampled exhibit a moderate level of capacity for job crafting. job crafting has the potential of enhancing career commitment of rural primary teachers. the effect of teacher job crafting on career commitment is mediated by teacher selfefficacy. organizational support significantly and positively moderates the positive relationship between job crafting and career commitment of rural primary teachers. references li, x. (2001). the development of a primary and secondary teacher career commitment questionnaire (master’s thesis). central china normal university. 2001. meyer, j. p., allen, n. j., & smith, c. a. (1993). commitment to organizations and occupations: extension and test of a threecomponent conceptualization. journal of apsun & du. (hubei & beijing, china). job crafting and career commitment of rural teachers. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1755 plied psychology, 78(4):538-551. doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.78.4.538 qi, y. j., wu, x. c., & wang, x. l. (2016). a cross-lagged regression analysis of job crafting and work engagement of primary and secondary teachers. chinese journal of clinical psychology, 2016(5):5. slemp, g. r., & vella-brodrick, d. a. (2013). the job crafting questionnaire: a new scale to measure the extent to which employees engage in job crafting. international journal of wellbeing, 3(2):126-146. doi: https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v3i2.1 yu, g. l., xin, t., & shen, j. l. (1995). teachers’ instruction efficacy: the structure and influencing factors. journal of psychology, 27(2):159-166. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02006258 the chinese version of this article has been published in educational research and experiment, 2023, 2023(02): 92-101. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 孙冉, 杜屏. (2023). 乡村教师工作重塑对职业承诺的影响及其机制. 教育研究与实验, 2023, 2023(2):92-101. received: 20 april 2023 revised: 03 may 2023 accepted: 15may 2023 https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.78.4.538 https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v3i2.1 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02006258 ar2-pingdu-bece_titlemay_2023 ar2-pingdu-bece_maintextmay2023 bece. newsletter vol.15, no.1, 2023, bece 1798 the relation between teacher gender and student academic achievements: from the perspective of teacher-student gender matches by liu, z., guo, r., & tian, m. correspondence to: zeyun liu, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: zeyun_liu@bnu.edu.cn ccording to existing research findings, there is a significant gender difference in student academic performance at the basic education level, with girls outperforming boys on average. student educational attainments are affected by multiple factors. among all school-related factors, teachers have been viewed as the most impactful in student academic progress. in china, female teachers predominate in the basic education teacher staff. therefore, the investigation of how teacher-student gender matches impact student academic performance is of theoretical and practical significance. this study sourced data from china education panel survey (ceps) to research into the impact of teacher-student gender matches on student academic achievements and the underlying mechanism, based on the random assignment of teachers within the school. research subjects were 8th graders in the ceps, and their grade-seven academic results in the baseline survey were used as the control condition. research findings showed that:  teacher-student gender matches had no impact on male students’ school results but posed positive influences on those of female students, represented by the favorable impact of female teachers on girl students’ academic progress. moreover, as opposed to previous research, this study found that the influence of teacher-student gender matches was restricted to the subject of english.  the positive impact of teacher-student gender matches on girl students’ performance was more remarkable among the disadvantaged group (with lower cognitive competence, rural hukou, and non-key urban schools), likely due to their higher degrees of sensitivity to teacher characteristics such as gender because of less education input from their families.  causal analysis showed that female teachers tended to offer more academic and emotional support to girls than to boys, making themselves a beneficial factor in girls’ academic advancement. the implications of this study include that the rising proportion of female teachers in basic education has no potential adverse impact on boy students’ education attainments; that more attention should be paid to undera mailto:zeyun_liu@bnu.edu.cn vol.15, no.1, 2023, bece 1799 privileged students in the distribution of educational resources; and that teacher in-service training should place an emphasis on the development of supportive teacher-student relationships in order to improve class interaction and student evaluation. source: education & economy, 2023; 9(3):64-74. bece. newsletter vol.13, no.2, 2023 1719 turnover intention in chinese rural teachers: an empirical study based on a survey of 5,342 rural teachers in yunnan province by wang, y. l., wen, z. m., & zhang, h. correspondence to: yanling wang, eastern china normal university, china. email: ylwang@cte.ecnu.edu.cn he shortage of teacher supply and high teacher mobility have long been severe issues in rural china. the state council’s rural teacher support project (2015-2020) set the goal of building a rural teaching force that are professionally competent and willing to teach in rural areas and initiated comprehensive support measures. this article focused on group differences in turnover intention among rural teachers in an effort to discern what kinds of rural teachers are more likely to quit, and which rural teachers are more sensitive to the new policies. in this study, factors influencing rural teacher turnover intention were examined in five dimensions: individual characteristics, job characteristics, location characteristics, salaries, and professional experience. the survey was performed in yunnan province, combining stratified sampling and random cluster-sampling. the electronic questionnaire “rural teacher mobility and turnover intention survey” was distributed to every rural teacher in the survey area with the help of county-level educational research staff, personnel with teacher training institutions, and school principals. teachers could choose to respond or not on a voluntary basis. the survey lasted from april to may 2021. a total of 5,342 valid questionnaires were retrieved. the survey results showed that 26.7% of the polled rural teachers had a strong turnover intention and would quit whenever there was a chance; 51.8% of them had a moderate or above level of turnover intention; 37.8% of them had a weak intention of teaching in rural schools for a long term (over 5 years). rural novice teachers and those who were separated from their spouses or partners had a stronger intention to quit their teaching jobs in rural areas. from the perspective of job characteristics, rural teachers with junior secondary schools, or in special positions, or holding multiple concurrent positions were inclined to quit. regarding school location characteristics, the farther the school was away from the urban area and the teacher’s hometown, the more determined the teacher was to leave. the lower the salary, the stronger turnover intention the teacher had. in terms of professional experience, teachers with higher work pressures and lower levels of professional t mailto:ylwang@cte.ecnu.edu.cn vol.13, no.2, 2023 1720 identity were more ready to leave. the research findings demonstrate that rural teachers’ turnover intention varies according to their gender, length of service, and marital status; teachers in special positions, or with large-scale boarding schools , or holding multiple concurrent positions had stronger inclination to quit; length of service, school location, salaries, and professional experience can effectively predict rural teachers’ turnover intention. source: teacher education research, 2022; 34(5):98-107. bece. newsletter vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1807 how cooperation and competition affect student academic performance and wellbeing by wang, y. & xu, z. correspondence to: zhixing xu, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: xuzhixing@bnu.edu.cn ue to the emergence of positive psychology and education, increasing attention has been paid to student physical and mental development and character building in addition to their academic performance. schools have made efforts to encourage cooperative learning behavior in students. research also shows that students display better academic performance, more positive peer relationships, and stronger senses of belonging to the school in a cooperative learning environment. on the other hand, there are intense competitions among students in a school setting. a reasonable amount of competition is seen as a motivational factor in student learning, with positive effects on student academic achievements. also, competitions with explicit, proper goals may bring excitements and enjoyment to individuals. a scientific view of the relation between cooperation and competition contributes to students’ positive attitudes towards them and the healthy development of their character. this study utilizes data from the pisa to conduct systematic research into the impact of cooperative and competitive behaviors on student academic performance and wellbeing, with the purpose of providing guidelines for fostering appropriate spirit of cooperation and competition in students. research findings reveal that:  in terms of gender differences, boy students perceived more cooperation and competition than girl students, achieving lower in reading but higher in mathematics and science and with higher levels of life satisfaction and self-efficacy as well as stronger senses of purpose in life.  by dividing cooperative and competitive behavior into highand lowranks by their respective mean values, students were classified into four groups lableled: (a) high cooperation/high competition; (b) low cooperation/high competition; (c) high cooperation/low competition; (d) low cooperation/low competition. group a had good academic results, a high level of life satisfaction and self-efficacy, and a strong sense of purpose in life. group b had the highest academic achievement but the lowest level of life satisfaction, along with a weak sense of purpose in life and low self-efficacy. group c had low academic results but a high level of life satisfaction, high self-efficacy, and explicit life purpose. group d achieved the lowest academic performance with a low level of d mailto:xuzhixing@bnu.edu.cn vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1808 life satisfaction, a weak sense of purpose in life, and the lowest selfefficacy.  the more competitive behavior a student perceived at school, the better their reading, mathematics, and science achievements. the more cooperative behavior a student perceived at the school, the higher level of life satisfaction, stronger sense of purpose in life, and higher selfefficacy they had.  the positive effects of competitive behavior on student reading, mathematics, and science literacy would weaken with the increase in cooperative behavior. the positive impacts of cooperative behavior on student life satisfaction, life purpose, and self-efficacy would strengthen with the boost in competitive behavior. hence, the article proposes suggestions as follows. i. recognize the importance of cooperative behavior to student healthy development. the school should encourage teachers to integrate cooperation education into instruction and class management to create more opportunities for interpersonal communication and collaboration for students to foster solidarity and cooperative behaviors in them. ii. properly evaluate the motivational role of competitive behavior. direction and education targeted at specific competitive behavior should be provided to students for cultivating a correct view of competition, to avoid the adverse effect of peer comparison. iii. pay attention to the interaction between cooperative and competitive behavior. both cooperation and benign competition should be encouraged to keep students motivated in learning and to afford them more opportunities for self-development and social and emotional growth. source: educational science research, 2023; 2023(07):68-76. what is the most important source for teachers’ knowledge development? a meta-analysis of 27 empirical studies on the sources of teachers’ knowledge dongchen zhao, 1 lianghuo fan 2 1. school of educational science, harbin normal university, harbin 150025, heilongjiang, china 2. school of mathematical sciences, east china normal university, shanghai 200241, china abstract. studying the sources of teachers’ knowledge and the importance of different sources is of great significance to promote the development of teachers’ knowledge. this paper systematically analyzes 27 empirical studies on the sources of teachers’ knowledge in china and abroad in the past two decades or so in terms of methods and findings. the results show that the in-service experience of teachers contains more important sources than the preservice education and primary and secondary education. teacher’s experience and reflection, and exchanges with colleagues are the most important sources of teachers’ knowledge development. educational internships and practicums are the most important sources of teachers’ knowledge during their preservice education, while other sources have no significant effect. the usefulness of teachers’ knowledge sources is affected by variables such as knowledge category, subject, education stage and shows a certain degree of individual differences. the above results confirm the importance of teachers’ practice, reflection, collaboration and exchange and indicate the necessity of improving preservice education. in terms of methods, it merits recommendation for future researchers in this area to use single-category-focused and topic-focused knowledge frameworks, more specific knowledge source frameworks, multiple ways of data collection, random selection of research subjects, and inferential statistical analysis. in addition, further studies should also look into the psychological and social-cultural mechanisms of teachers’ knowledge development as well as the sources of teachers’ knowledge. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 10(2):1375-1393. zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no.2, 2022 1376 doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ar036. how to cite: zhao, d., & fan, l. (2022). what is the most important source for teachers’ knowledge development? a meta-analysis of 27 empirical studies on the sources of teachers’ knowledge. best evidence in chinese education, 10(2):13751393. keywords: teachers’ knowledge, source of teacher’s knowledge, teachers’ professional development, teacher education, empirical research, metaanalysis about authors: dongchen zhao, associate professor, school of educational science, harbin normal university, harbin 150025, heilongjiang, china. email: dongchenzhao@163.com correspondence to: lianghuo fan, distinguished professor, school of mathematical sciences & director, asian mathematics education center, east china normal university, shanghai 200241, china; visiting professor, southampton education school, university of southampton, uk. email: lhfan@math.ecnu.edu.cn funding: this work was financially supported by a startup research grant for the asian center for mathematics education, east china normal university (project #: 92900-120215-10514), and the humanities and social science research project of the ministry of education "research on multiple measurement instruments of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (pck) based on the same conceptual framework" (project #: 18yja880117). conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:dongchenzhao@163.com mailto:lhfan@math.ecnu.edu.cn zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1377 rofessional knowledge is an integral part of teacher competence. improving the knowledge level of teachers is of great significance to teachers’ professional development and the construction of the teaching force. therefore, teacher knowledge has long been one of the main topics in teacher education. “in general, there exist mainly three major issues in the field of teacher knowledge research: (i) what knowledge do teachers need? (ii) what knowledge do teachers have? (iii) how do teachers develop their knowledge?” (fan, 2003, p. 6). the research on the sources of teachers’ knowledge belongs to the third issue, which began to attract researchers’ attention in the 1970s. however, most of the earlier studies dealt with the sources of teachers’ knowledge indirectly, and their research approaches were mainly philosophical and there was a lack of systematic and empirical research. the empirical research on the sources of teachers’ knowledge aims to explore the actual sources of teachers’ knowledge development and what role various sources play. thereby, it can provide insights for planning and implementing more effective teacher education and professional development activities. an earlier empirical study on the sources of teachers’ knowledge is an investigation by lianghuo fan. he focused his research on the sources of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge. through a survey of high school mathematics teachers in the city of chicago, he found that the most important source of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge was their teaching experience and reflection and their daily exchanges with colleagues; in-service training and professional activities were also relatively important sources; in contrast, their experience as students, preservice training, and reading professional books were the least important sources (fan, 2003).this conclusion is inconsistent with prior assumptions about the importance of pre-service education, which prompted investigation and reflection on the effectiveness of teacher education and teacher professional development. since this seminal research, in recent years, researchers have carried out empirical studies on various sources of teachers’ knowledge in different disciplines and at different education levels, and the research findings have grown year by year. so, how are these studies designed and implemented? what are the similarities and differences among their conclusions? what is the most important source of teachers’ knowledge development? what are less useful sources? what are the implications of these findings for teacher education? the continuous accumulation of studies in this area merits a timely review. this paper systematically analyzes 27 empirical studies on the sources of teachers’ knowledge in china and abroad in the past two decades or so and provides an overview in terms of both methods and findings, with the purpose of providing useful information for teachers’ knowledge development and teacher education, as well as for future research in this area. literature sources and overview of 27 empirical studies literature analyzed in this paper includes studies published either in chinese or in english, including journal articles, degree theses (dissertations), and monographs. the sources of literature are as follows: journal articles from the chinese academic journal database in “cnki” (china national knowledge infrastructure); journal articles from the english academic journal database in the “eric” (education resources information p zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1378 center); degree theses (dissertations) in chinese from the database in cnki for doctoral and master theses, and degree theses (dissertations) in english from the database of “pqdt” (proquest dissertations and theses); research monographs (books) in chinese from the “wenjin” search system of the national library of china, and those in english from the book search system of the british national library website. due to the large number of journal articles and degree theses (dissertations) and their wide variations in quality, we limited chinese academic journals to pku’s corelisted journals and cssci-indexed journals, english academic journals to peer reviewed journals, and chinese and english degree theses (dissertations) to those at the doctoral level. the literature search terms were set to include “teacher” (or “prospective teacher”), “knowledge” (or “pck”, “mpck”, “tpack”) and “source” (or “development”) in the titles. the english search terms were the corresponding english translations of the chinese search terms, and the publication time of the literature was set to on or before march 1, 2020. through the above search, we obtained a preliminary body of literature, and then consulted the abstract or text to further screen for the literature that meet the following criteria: (i) the research topic(s) involves the role of teachers’ knowledge sources; (ii) it collects empirical data through surveys; (iii) based on quantitative statistics and analysis, it ranks or categorizes the importance of various knowledge sources into different levels. according to the above criteria, 31 studies were obtained. also, one chinese monograph that meets the above screening criteria was obtained through the citation retrospective method. the distribution of these 32 pieces of literature in terms of types is as follows: 16 journal articles, four doctoral theses, and nine monographs in chinese; one journal article, one doctoral thesis, and one monograph in english. it should be noted that these 32 documents are all the empirical studies on the sources of teachers’ knowledge obtained according to the above searching methods and screening criteria. in contrast, the amount of english literature is relatively small, which shows that empirical research on teachers’ knowledge sources has not attracted enough attention abroad. this imbalance is probably also related to the fact that the first work in this field was published in chinese in china. through analysis and comparison, it is found that the results reported in two doctoral theses and three journal articles are derived from the same research in five monographs among the above 32 documents. considering that monographs are official publications and their content is more detailed than journal papers, this research preferentially selects the monographs for analysis, thus avoiding the overlap of doctoral theses and journal articles. in addition, if the results of a study are reported in two documents, the document published earlier is included in the analysis, and no repeated statistics will be conducted. finally, 27 pieces of literature are obtained in this study, and their basic information is shown in table 1. as shown in table 1, the number of related studies was on the rise in the past two decades or so, indicating continuous attention from the researchers to the investigation of teachers’ knowledge sources. from the perspective of the content of teachers’ knowledge, some of the 27 studies focused on teachers’ overall knowledge, and some focused on a specific field or a branch of teachers’ knowledge. as far as the participants in these studies were concerned, there were both in-service teachers and pre-service teachers; the participants’ subject backgrounds varied, but in most of the studies they zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1379 table 1. basic information of 27 investigations on the sources of teacher knowledge. author year genre range of knowledge survey object subject educational stage quantity fan, l. 2003 m teaching knowledge mathematics high school 69 zhang, q., et al. 2005 j teaching knowledge multidisciplinary elementary and middle 410 zeng, c., et al. 2006 m mathematics teaching knowledge mathematics elementary and middle school 191 liu, l. 2006 d teaching knowledge geography middle and high school 385 yuan, g. 2006 d teaching knowledge physical education high school 203 liao, d., et al. 2009 j subject teaching knowledge multidisciplinary elementary and middle 79 zhao, d., et al. 2009 j professional knowledge language middle school 113 hua, y. 2010 j subject teaching knowledge multidisciplinary elementary school 200 zhu, x. 2010 m teaching knowledge language high school 129 shao, g. 2011 m professional knowledge multidisciplinary high school 234 li, m., et al. 2011 j subject knowledge mathematics middle school 40 zhang, y., et al. 2011 j professional knowledge information technology high school 92 han, j. et al. 2011 j professional knowledge mathematics middle school 123 li, m., et al. 2012 j mpck mathematics middle school 41 ding, r., et al. 2012 j professional knowledge mathematics normal student 241 zheng, d., et al. 2012 j classroom assessment knowledge multidisciplinary elementary and middle school 1,735 han, s. 2013 d professional knowledge english pre-employment, middle school 1,963, 177 han, j., et al. 2014 j professional knowledge multidisciplinary middle school 430 fan, l. 2014 m teaching knowledge mathematics middle school 73 xu, p. 2014 m chinese teaching knowledge language pre-employment 109 liu, j., et al. 2015 j mpck mathematics high school 77 fu, g., et al. 2015 j professional knowledge multidisciplinary pre-employment 1,531 zhou, f. 2016 m teacher individual knowledge multidisciplinary elementary and middle school 807 li, c. 2016 m local knowledge multidisciplinary elementary and middle school 961 li, y. 2017 m physics teaching knowledge physical middle school 54 liu, l., et al. 2018 m professional knowledge english elementary school 131 wei, b., et al. 2019 j teaching knowledge of scientific practice science middle school 280 note: j in “genre” means journal paper, d means doctoral dissertation, and m means work. the number of survey subjects is the number of observations in parentheses, the number of interviews is in square brackets, and the number of valid questionnaires is shown in brackets. zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1380 were mathematics teachers; the sample size ranged from dozens to more than a thousand. in terms of research methods, most studies adopted questionnaire surveys, though some used a combination of questionnaires, interviews, and classroom observations. the above 27 studies (hereafter referred to as “previous studies”) are used as the object of analysis in the present study. given the importance of research methods to research results, we will first analyze the theoretical framework and specific research methods of the previous studies from the methodological perspective, and then analyze their results. analysis of theoretical frameworks investigating the sources of teachers’ knowledge needs to define the scope of teachers’ knowledge and categories of sources. the following is an analysis of the theoretical framework of teachers’ knowledge and knowledge sources in the previous studies. theoretical frameworks of teachers’ knowledge the analysis indicates that there are four modes in which the scope of teachers’ knowledge is defined in the previous studies. holistic mode this mode considers teachers’ knowledge as a whole, without further division. this does not mean this mode denies the diversity of teachers’ knowledge. the intention of taking teachers’ knowledge as a whole is probably to make the investigation operationally feasible. however, treating teachers’ knowledge as a whole may obscure the peculiarities of various types of knowledge. multi-category mode it divides teachers’ knowledge into several categories and then includes each category into the scope of research. for example, liu (2018) divided teachers’ professional knowledge into knowledge of education theory, curriculum knowledge, subject matter knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge (hereafter referred to as pck) and then investigated the sources of these four types of knowledge separately; han (2013) investigated the sources of knowledge of secondary school english teachers in four aspects: theoretical knowledge of pedagogy, knowledge of english subjects, knowledge of teaching environment, and practical knowledge. single-category-focused mode it only focuses on a specific category of teachers’ knowledge. this mode covers two situations: (1) the single category of knowledge is studied as a whole. for example, liao, zhou and chen (2009) investigated the sources of pck of primary and secondary school teachers and did not further divide pck into sub-categories. (2) divide singlecategory knowledge into several sub-categories and investigate the source of each subcategory. for example, fan (2003) focused on teachers’ pedagogical knowledge, and divided the pedagogical knowledge into pedagogical curricular knowledge, pck, and zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1381 pedagogical instructional knowledge, and then investigated the sources of these three types of pedagogical knowledge. topic-focused mode this mode is more specific than the single-category-focused mode. it focuses on a topic or a particular content in a specific category (or sub-category) of teachers’ knowledge. for example, li, wan, and yang (2011) cited knowledge of pythagorean theorem as a case study to investigate the sources of teachers’ subject knowledge, while zheng and ye (2012) focused on classroom evaluation knowledge of teachers. the analysis finds that in the previous 27 studies, there is one study in the holistic mode, two studies in the topic-focused mode, 10 in the multi-category mode, and 14 in the single-category-focused mode. in general, multi-category and single-categoryfocused studies accounted for the vast majority. theoretical frameworks of teachers’ knowledge sources the “source” of teachers’ knowledge can be understood in two different ways, that is, “means by which they developed their knowledge, and something (often prior knowledge) teachers acted upon within their minds to develop the knowledge.” (fan, 2003, p. 46). the former is a macro source, and the latter is a micro source. all of the previous studies have adopted the macro-source meaning. the reason is that empirical research from this perspective is more useful and practical for exploring how to improve teachers’ knowledge. the macro knowledge source framework is generally divided into three parts according to the teacher’s growth process: first, the teacher’s experience as a learner before receiving professional pre-service training; second, the experience during the pre-service training; third, teacher’s experience after entering the job. when the above three parts are subdivided, the sub-sources proposed by previous studies differ in complexity and in quantity. fan (2003) proposed nine sub-sources and further divided four of the sub-sources into nine specific sources. in the end, seven sources were retained for quantitative investigation from all sources, namely: the experience as a learner; preservice training; in-service training; organized professional activities; informal exchanges with colleagues; reading professional books and journals; teachers’ experience and reflection (fan, 2003). most subsequent studies have used the above framework for reference or made some adjustment on it. the largest number of source categories was found in shao’s (2011) study, which had 17 sources in total. although the classification of knowledge sources in the previous studies shows a trend towards subdivision, none of them attempted to make rigorous and exhaustive classifications, but rather selected sources according to the practical needs of research. specifically, there are three factors affecting the selection of sources: 1) the research focus, related to the research purpose or problems to be addressed. for example, if the purpose of the study is to examine the effectiveness of pre-service education, it will not include the source related to the inservice period; 2) the practical educational environment. for instance, the 17 sources in zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1382 shao’s (2011) study included not only the traditional activities of teacher professional development but also the new activities which have been advocated since the new curriculum reform in china so as to reflect the reality of educational reform and development; 3) the disciplinary backgrounds of the subjects. for example, zhang, dong and jing (2011) added a source of “practice in information technology” to the surveys conducted on the teachers of information technology. analysis of specific research methods methods of data collection the methods used in the previous studies included questionnaire surveys, interviews, and classroom observations. questionnaire surveys were used to investigate teachers’ perceptions of their knowledge development, especially the contribution of various knowledge sources to their knowledge development. classroom observations were used to identify what knowledge teachers actually used in classroom teaching so as to confirm what knowledge teachers had and provide clues of questions for interviews. interviews were aimed to understand how teachers used specific sources to develop their knowledge. in data collection, questionnaires were used to collect quantitative data on a large scale and identify the general patterns of teachers’ knowledge development; class observations and interviews were focused on individual cases and were to collect more specific and in-depth qualitative information. theoretically, the extensive use of the three methods can help present a complete picture of teachers’ knowledge development, but this also would increase difficulties in the implementation at the operational level. as a result, among the previous studies, only five used all the three methods, and most of the other studies used questionnaires as the main or only method. selection of survey subjects among the 27 previous studies, 23 studies were conducted on in-service teachers, with 15 focused on teachers of one particular subject, such as mathematics, chinese, english, physics, sciences, information technology, geography, and physical education and the rest eight on a combination of teachers of different subjects. the in-service teachers were mainly from primary and secondary schools, and there were no surveys conducted on pre-school teachers or college teachers. besides the 23 studies mentioned above, there were three surveys focusing on pre-service teachers, and one study investigated both in-service teachers and pre-service teachers. in terms of the sample sizes of questionnaire surveys, the largest one in the previous studies was in han’s (2013) study, which involved 2,140 english teachers, including both pre-service and in-service teachers. another study with a relatively large sample is zheng and ye’s (2012) investigation, in which 1,735 primary and middle school teachers were surveyed. the number of teachers surveyed in other studies ranged from dozens to hundreds. the generalizability of the conclusion of a study is affected by its sample size, yet it is also related to the sampling strategy employed. only 5 of the previous studies clearly stated that a random sampling strategy was used, by which schools were selectzhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1383 ed in the target city or school district using stratified random sampling, and then the teachers in sample schools are selected using cluster sampling. for example, fan’s (2014) study in chicago and singapore showed that the teacher samples in the two places were 77 and 73, respectively. although it is not a large size, “as stratification may produce a smaller bound on the error of estimation than would be produced by a simple random sample of the same size, coupled with the sample teachers’ multiple backgrounds in major demographic variables, the samples in the two studies could well represent the target population” (zhao & bokhove, 2019). statistical analysis of the data quantitative statistical analysis was applied to the data collected by the questionnaire surveys in the previous studies. some studies also conducted a qualitative descriptive analysis of the data collected from interviews and observations so that qualitative and quantitative data were used to complement each other. the focus of quantitative statistical analysis was on examining the contributions of various sources to the development of teachers’ knowledge, based on the data collected by the likert scale in questionnaires. there were two main statistical techniques used in analyzing the quantitative data in the previous studies: (i) descriptive analysis, measuring the importance of each source by the frequency or percentage of each level selected in the likert scale, or by the mean value of each level selected, and (ii) inferential analysis, including logistic regression analysis (hereafter referred to as regression analysis) and the analysis of variance for repeated measures. regression analysis calculates the wald value and parameter estimates of each source, ranks sources according to the wald value, and then further stratifies them according to the significance of coefficient. the importance of different sources to the development of teachers’ knowledge is generally classified as “the most important,” “secondarily important,” and “the least important.” the importance of the sources at different levels has statistically significant differences. repeated measure analysis of variance makes pairwise comparisons of the means of various sources and distinguishes the importance of different sources according to the mean and significance coefficient. in the study of wei, chen, and chen (2019), the source with the intermediate-ranking of the mean was used as the benchmark source, and other sources were compared with the benchmark source. the significance standard adjusted by the bonferroni method is used to test whether the difference is significant, and finally, various sources are classified as “more important,” “important,” and “less important”, according to their importance. although descriptive analysis is straightforward, the difference in frequency, percentage, and mean may not be statistically significant. the rankings obtained from inferential analysis are more accurate when the data from a sample are used to make inferences about the population. of the previous studies, ten adopted the method of inferential analysis. re-analysis of the results of the included studies in addition to reviewing research methods to provide insights for future research, another purpose of the present study is to quantitatively integrate the results of the previous studies to obtain a more comprehensive picture about the importance of various sources of teachers’ knowledge. the theoretical frameworks and statistical analyses presented in zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1384 the previous studies do not meet the requirements of the quantitative meta-analysis for selecting and calculating effect sizes. thereby, this study re-analyzes the results of the previous studies with an alternative quantitative analysis method. the specific criteria includes: (i) the statistical analysis of the data is based on the research results in the original literature, rather than the generalized research conclusions; (ii) the data are classified by knowledge categories, that is, if a study reported sources of several categories of knowledge, then the data about the source of each category of knowledge are examined; (iii) if the results obtained from the same group of participants were reported in different publications, then only one is included in the statistics to avoid repetition; and (iv) the statistical methods used in each of the previous studies determine the inclusion of the results about the importance levels of the knowledge source. for the research results obtained by inferential analysis, the sources in the first and third levels of importance (i.e., “the most important” and “the least important”) and their ranking of importance are included in the analysis. for the research results obtained by descriptive analysis, the ranking of importance was less straightforward: first, there were more ranking values, and in most cases, there were as many ranking values as there were sources; and second, between two adjacent ranking values there might not be a statistically significant difference. in this case, to distinguish the difference in the importance of each source, this study only includes the top two and bottom two sources in the importance ranking to ensure that the ranking values of the results of the descriptive analysis can be compared with those of the inferential analysis, suitable for combined calculation. for writing convenience, the source(s) in the first level of importance in the results of inferential analysis and the top two sources in the importance ranking in the results of descriptive analysis are collectively referred to as the “most important” sources, and the source(s) in the third level of importance in the results of inferential analysis and the bottom two sources in the importance ranking in the results of descriptive analysis are collectively referred to as the “least important” sources. according to the above methods, 94 pieces of data are obtained, which to a large degree provide sufficient data to reanalyze the results of the previous studies. of the 94 pieces of data, 49 are from the inferential analysis results, and 45 from descriptive analysis results. from 94 pieces of data, 214 items are the “most important” sources, and 235 the “least important” sources. the frequencies of various sources that are rated as the most important and least important is shown in table 2. commonalities in the conclusions of the previous studies  in-service experience contains more important sources than pre-service training experience and the experience as a student at primary and secondary schools. as shown in table 2, according to the summaries of in-service experience, pre-service experience, and the experience as a student at primary and secondary schools, we can see that the cumulative frequencies of the most important sources of the three is 177, 30, and 7, while the cumulative frequencies of the least important sources is 94, 107, and 34. figure 1 presents the overall differences in the importance of various sources at different stages in a more visual way. in general, there are more important sources from in zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1385 table 2. the number of times various sources were rated as the most important or unimportant in previous studies. “most important” “unimportant” ia da grand ia da grand on-the-job employment self-experience and reflection 36 41 77 0 0 0 communication between colleagues 28 11 39 0 0 0 teaching observation activities 14 9 23 2 3 5 read professional books 13 8 21 14 5 19 internet resources or tv media 4 1 5 0 2 2 on-the-job training 2 1 3 14 9 23 post-employment education 0 0 0 25 6 31 organized teaching and research activities 0 5 5 4 2 6 technical practice 1 0 1 0 0 0 educational research project research 0 3 3 0 8 8 subtotal 98 7 9 177 59 35 94 pre-employment education pre-employment training 1 1 2 5 17 22 education internship, internship 8 5 13 2 7 9 teaching method course or textbook analysis course 10 0 10 14 0 14 educational theory courses 1 1 2 20 6 26 subject professional courses 1 1 2 3 2 5 microteaching or teaching skills class 0 0 0 22 2 24 course study during university 0 1 1 0 0 0 social activity 0 0 0 6 0 6 part-time tutor 0 0 0 1 0 1 subtotal 21 9 30 73 34 107 elementary and middle school study experience during elementary and middle school 5 2 7 13 21 34 ia: inferential analysis; da: descriptive analysis. service experience to promote the development of teachers’ knowledge than from the pre-service experience in pre-service training and the experience as a student at primary and secondary education; and more sources from pre-service training experience and the experience as a student at primary and secondary education are considered the least important. it can be seen that teachers believe that their in-service experience has played a more significant role in the development of their knowledge.  in the in-service experience, teaching experience and reflection, and exchanges with colleagues are regarded as the most important sources, while their further education for higher academic qualifications is regarded as the least important source, and for other sources, there exist differences in the conclusions about their importance levels. zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1386 figure 1. comparison of the number of times various sources were rated as most important or unimportant. note: a-j belong to the source during the employment, a = own experience and reflection, b = communication between colleagues, c = teaching and observation activities, d = reading professional books and periodicals, e = network resources or television media, f = on-the-job training, g = post-employment academic training, h = organized teaching and research activities, i = technical practice, j = research on educational research topics. k ~ s belong to the source of pre-service education period, k= pre-employment training, l=education internship and internship, m = teaching method course or textbook analysis course, n = education theory course, o = discipline professional course, p = micro grid teaching or teaching skills class, q = course study during university, r = club activities, s = part-time tutor. t = experience during elementary and middle school. although there are more important sources in the in service experience, differences also exist in this overall impression. specifically, the frequency of teachers’ experience and reflection and exchanges with colleagues being rated as the most important sources by teachers is as high as 116, while the frequency of their being rated as the least important sources is 0. in contrast, the frequency of the in-service training being rated as the most important source is 0, while the frequency of it being rated as the least important one is 31. the evaluation of the importance of the above three sources is highly consistent across the conclusions of the previous studies. there exist differences in the conclusions of the previous studies on the role of other sources. even in evaluating the same source, some studies considered it as the most important, while others considered it the least important. for example, in the previous studies, “organized teaching and research activities” are regarded as the most important source five times but as least important source six times as well. the frequency of classroom observations being considered as the most important source is higher than that as the least important source, while in-service training and engaging in educational research activities are more often regarded as the least important sources. zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1387  the evaluation of the importance of most sources in the pre-service training is rather low, with the only exception that the importance of teaching practicum and internship are more highly recognized. in some of the previous studies, pre-service training experience is considered as a whole, and it has been rated as the least important source 22 times. in the other studies, preservice training experience was classified into more specific sources, such as educational theory courses, mathematics subject courses, teaching method courses, and teaching practicum and internship. however, the overall evaluation is relatively low. only for teaching practicum and internship, the frequency of being rated as the most important source was higher than the other sources, and higher than that of its being rated as the least important source. this suggests that although the overall evaluation about the preservice training experience is low, the role of teaching practicum and internship cannot be ignored.  experience as a student at primary and secondary schools is regarded more as the least important source. teacher’s learning experience at primary and secondary schools are rated as the most important source 7 times and as the least important source 34 times. in comparison, it is considered to have less effect on teacher’s knowledge development. divergencies in the conclusion of the previous studies in addition to the above commonalities, the effects of various sources on teachers’ knowledge development also show some differences due to factors such as knowledge types, subjects, educational stages, and individual teachers.  the importance of the source varies according to the category of knowledge it is related to. teachers’ knowledge is diverse and has many sources. sometimes one source can promote multiple types of knowledge, but its effect on each type differs. for example, in fan’s study on high school mathematics teachers in chicago, reading professional books and journals were considered the secondarily important source of pck. in contrast, it was considered the least important source of pedagogical curricular knowledge and pedagogical instructional knowledge (fan, 2003). as another example, in a survey of pre-service primary teachers conducted by ding, ma, and wang (2012), part-time tutoring is considered the least important source of teachers’ knowledge of pedagogical theory. however, it is considered the secondarily important source of curriculum knowledge, subject matter knowledge, and pck. one source promotes the development of multiple types of knowledge, but the effects differ. this shows that the components of experience in some sources are not single, and teachers can select the component of experience that meets their own needs to construct knowledge.  the importance of the source varies by subjects and educational stages. zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1388 in fan’s study in chicago, reading professional books and journals is not the most important source for developing high school mathematics teachers’ pck (fan, 2003). however, in zhao et al.’s (2009) study on secondary school chinese teachers and han’s (2013) study on secondary school english teachers, reading professional books and journals is the most important source of multiple types of teachers’ professional knowledge including pck. in the survey conducted on english teachers in junior secondary schools by han et al. (2014), reading professional books and journals is also the most important source of teachers’ knowledge of pedagogical theory, english subject matter knowledge, and pck. also focusing on the english subject, another investigation conducted on primary english teachers indicates that the effect of reading professional books and journals on the knowledge development is not the most important (liu, 2018). it can be seen that the importance of a source varies with subjects and educational stages.  the importance of the source varies among individual teachers. the conclusions of the commonalities and divergencies discussed above are drawn from the comparisons of the results in multiple studies. it should be noted that the results of quantitative investigations are determined by the majority of individuals in the sample. therefore, the generality of the conclusion typically overshadows the particularity of a few individuals or individual groups. for example, in fan’s study in chicago, if all the 69 teachers surveyed were taken as a whole, then the evaluation of pre-service training would not be high. however, five of these teachers reported that pre-service training contributed a lot to the development of their knowledge of teaching methods and it was very important (fan, 2003). this difference can also be found among different groups of teachers with different demographic backgrounds. still taking fan’s study as an example, among the teachers surveyed, the exchanges with colleagues are regarded as the most important source of teachers’ pck; nevertheless, teachers with different lengths of teaching experience had different views on the importance of this source. specifically, teachers with more years in teaching tend to obtain less pck in their daily communication with colleagues, compared with teachers with fewer years in teaching (fan, 2003). maybe it is because of the disparities in expertise between senior and junior teachers, that is, senior teachers have more experience and would share their experience with their young colleagues instead of learning from their young colleagues. junior teachers with less experience would more likely to get help from their senior colleagues and thus learn more. discussions and suggestions re-understand the practice, reflection, collaboration and exchanges of teachers teachers’ experience and reflection and exchanges with colleagues are considered the most important sources of their knowledge development. this provides not only empirical evidence for the related theories of teacher professional development, but also guidance for the concrete path of teacher professional development in practice. zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1389 from dewey’s introduction of the concept of “reflection” to the field of education to schon’s (1983) advocacy of teachers to become “reflective practitioners”, and then to posner’s (1989) proposal of “ experience + reflection = growth”, it becomes the formula of the growth path for teachers. it emphasizes the importance of teachers’ practice and reflection. the results obtained from the analysis of the previous studies in this paper support the above viewpoints from the perspective of teachers’ knowledge sources. the nature of teachers’ “reflection on practice” or “reflection in practice” is the transformation and reorganization of their own experience. it highlights the significance of the individual teacher’s internal cognition and the close association between teachers’ knowledge development and practice. moreover, to a certain extent, it explains why teaching practicum and internships are regarded as an important source of knowledge in pre-service training. besides, the importance of exchanges with colleagues found in the previous studies confirms the important values of “teacher collaboration,” “team learning” and “organizational learning culture”. exchanges with colleagues are experience sharing, aiming to realize the value-added growth and expansion of experience through interpersonal interaction. if experience and reflection represent the characteristics of teachers’ knowledge development in the cognitive dimension, exchanges with colleagues reflect the social nature of teachers’ knowledge development and teacher learning. based on this re-understanding of teachers’ experience and reflection and exchanges with colleagues, more attention should be paid to the two sources to promote teachers’ knowledge development. more specifically, teachers need “to be reflective, accumulative, associative, and attentive” (fan, 2003, p. 213). correspondingly, teacher educators and school administrators should also invest more in creating favorable conditions for teachers to maximize the benefits of the two sources. re-think the focus of teacher education the results of the previous studies show that compared with in-service experience, preservice training experience plays a very limited role. except for teaching practicum and internships, which are relatively highly evaluated, most of the other sources during preservice training are considered of low importance. given that pre-service training has clear goals, covers a wide range of knowledge, and is taken full time, theoretically it should have played an important role in teachers’ knowledge development. however, it is not as it should be. on the contrary, it is in-service experience that encompasses more sources of high importance. does this mean that the focus of teacher education should shift from pre-service training to in-service training? we believe that current research findings are not enough to support a response to this question. three more specific issues remain to be explored. first, is the limited role of pre-service training caused by its existing problems? or is it because pre-service training is inherently less helpful, and any remedy will not make it as effective as in-service experience? the role of pre-service training revealed by the previous studies reflects what has actually been achieved, and yet, it does not necessarily represent what should and could have been achieved. second, is the experience from pre-service training replaced or overshadowed by in-service educational experience, or is it integrated into and further developed by zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1390 the in-service experience? from the perspective of teacher education integration, preservice training and in-service teacher education are closely related. the former lays the foundation for the latter, and the latter is somehow like the extension and expansion of the former. if pre-service training is weakened or ignored, the effectiveness of inservice education will also be impaired. third, what is the value of pre-service training to the development of teachers’ professional competencies? the previous studies revealed the effects of various sources on the development of teachers’ knowledge. however, teachers’ professional competence is not limited to knowledge but also includes abilities, ideas, and ethics. if the overall professional competencies of teachers are taken into consideration, the role of pre-service training might have to be re-examined. to sum up, the role and value of pre-service training should be examined holistically. given that the maximal effects of pre-service training have not yet defined, further investigation and reflection should be emphasized and the problems should be diagnosed in searching for the paths of reform. this idea also applies to in-service training as in-service training also contains some sources that have limited effectiveness. implications and prospective for the research on the sources of teachers’ knowledge the research on the sources of teachers’ knowledge helps to timely understand and accurately evaluate the usefulness of various sources to provide insights for the improvement of teacher education and teacher professional development. based on the previous studies, future research in this line can be conducted in a more scientific and in-depth manner. first, the theoretical framework of sources of teachers’ knowledge should be improved. since teachers’ knowledge includes different types, and each type of knowledge has specific components within it, the theoretical framework of teachers’ knowledge should not adopt the “holistic mode”. instead, “single-category-focused mode” or “topic-focused mode” might be more appropriate. we believe that, given that there are many sources of teachers’ knowledge and the nature and usefulness of each source are different, the theoretical framework of teachers’ knowledge sources should also be as specific as possible. for example, it is not advisable to use an overgeneralized source, such as “pre-service training”, without looking into more specific sources in pre-service training. second, appropriate research methods should be adopted in studies of sources of teachers’ knowledge. it is recommended, when feasible, to combine questionnaires, classroom observations, and interviews to collect and triangulate the research data, to use random sampling to recruit the research subjects, and to analyze quantitative data by inferential analysis. third, by integrating the investigation of the sources of teachers’ knowledge with the examination of teacher education courses or teacher professional development activities, a more comprehensive understanding of the usefulness, the content, the contribution process of knowledge sources can be achieved. finally, it should be noted that the usefulness or importance of knowledge sources is ultimately a value judgment. it depends on personal needs and perceptions of zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1391 the subject (i.e., the teacher) and is affected by the quality of the object (i.e., the source itself) as well. teachers’ knowledge development is a complex internal cognitive process as well as a social practice influenced by external circumstances. the previous studies present the commonalities and divergencies in the effects of various sources of knowledge, but still little is known about the function mechanism of various sources. therefore, investigation of teachers’ knowledge sources is only a part of the research on teachers’ knowledge development. the psychological and social-cultural mechanisms of teachers’ knowledge development are a topic for further exploration. references ding, r., ma, y., & wang, y. 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[chinese] https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/al http://www.cqvip.com/qk/91144x/201105/39722472.html http://www.cqvip.com/qk/91144x/201105/39722472.html http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-sxyb201203008.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-sxyb201203008.htm https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=10020845-200912-201001050023-201001050023-90-92 https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=10020845-200912-201001050023-201001050023-90-92 https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=10020845-200912-201001050023-201001050023-90-92 http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-sxyb201501010.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-sxyb201501010.htm https://doi.org/10.7666/d.y896667 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-018-9886-y https://doi.org/10.7666/d.y996305 https://doi.org/10.16194/j.cnki.31-1059/g4.2005.11.006 https://doi.org/10.16194/j.cnki.31-1059/g4.2005.11.006 http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xjjs201111011.htm http://www.cnki.com.cn/article/cjfdtotal-xjjs201111011.htm https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-019-09912-8 https://www.airitilibrary.com/publication/aldetailedmesh?docid=16725905-200911-201002240057-201002240057-66-70 zhao & fan. most useful source of teacher knowledge development. bece, vol.10, no. 2, 2022 1393 detailedmesh?docid=16725905-200911201002240057-201002240057-66-70 zheng, d., & ye, s. (2012). a study on the knowledge of classroom evaluation of primary and secondary school teachers and its sources: based on a sample survey in zhejiang province. research in educational development, 32(20): 68-78. [chinese] doi: https://doi.org/10.14121/j.cnki.10083855.2012.20.015 zhou, f. (2016). the composition and development of teachers’ individual knowledge. beijing: chinese science publishing & media ltd. (cspm). [chinese] isbn: 9787030498328 zhu, x. (2010). research on the development of teaching knowledge of chinese teachers. beijing: national institute of education sciences. isbn: 9787504146250 the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of educational science of hunan normal university 2020(6):68-76. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 赵冬臣, 范良火.(2020). 什么是教师知识发展的最有用来源?—对 27 项教师知识来源实证研 究的元分析. 湖南师范大学教育科学学报, 2020(6):68-76. received: 05 february 2021 revised: 27 february 2022 accepted: 10 march 2022 https://doi.org/10.14121/j.cnki.1008-3855.2012.20.015 https://doi.org/10.14121/j.cnki.1008-3855.2012.20.015 article-dongchenzhao-bece_title_mar2022 article-dongchenzhao--bece_maintextmar2022 bece. newsletter vol.14, no.1, 2023 1770 who are studying as pre-service teachers in universities? an investigation of gender composition and urban-rural backgrounds of pre-service teachers enrolled between 1982 and 2019 by wang, w. y. & xie, d. s. correspondence to: weiyi wang, fujian normal university, china. e-mail: wwy5819@163.com n 2018, the chinese government issued the opinions on comprehensively deepening the reform of teacher supply in the new era and the action plan for teacher education revitalization (2018-2022) to emphasize the need to attract high-quality students to join in teacher education programs through various means such as advanced enrollment, setting public-funded targeted teaching positions, tuition refunding for novice teachers, and shortening compulsory service periods. the purpose of this study is to investigate the pre-service teacher body composition and its alterations in the past few decades to identify what kind of college students have studied as pre-service teachers and the changes in student sources for teacher education programs? the study adopted stratified sampling to select as subjects pre-service mathematics, history, chinese language and literature, english, art, chemistry, and ideological education teachers recruited in the years of 1982, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2019 by six long-running teachers’ universities in shanghai city, fujian, shaanxi, sichuan, and jiangxi provinces. the proportion of students sampled is 25% of the total enrollments in each year. the sample of the study included 12,030 subjects with their student numbers ending in odd numbers. the opportunity index was used to analyze the changes in opportunities for students of different genders and urban-rural backgrounds to participate in pre-service teacher education programs. the research found that the number of male pre-service teachers, from both urban and rural areas is continuously decreasing, while that of female pre-service teachers, especially those from rural areas, has significantly increased, leading to the shift from a male-predominated to femalepredominated composition of pre-service teacher body. as of 2019, girls had six times more opportunities than boys to enroll in teacher education programs, indicating a severe gender imbalance in pre-service teacher body composition. this imbalance existed among students from both urban and rural areas. source: journal of south china normal university, 2023; 2023(1):38-47. i mailto:wwy5819@163.com universities and innovation potential of the city: a quasi-experimental study of newly built campuses of colleges and universities in china dongyang chen, wei ha institute of economics of education, peking university, beijing 100871, china abstract: colleges and universities have been playing an increasingly important role in regional innovation-driven development. based on panel data (1999-2016) of 287 cities in china, this study conducted an empirical analysis of the influences of the new campuses which were built for the expanded college enrollment on the city’s patentable inventions and innovations. the time-varying did model was adopted in the analysis. the regression results demonstrate that newly built campuses have boosted inventions and innovations in their cities, benefiting various innovators including individuals and firms; that the impact of newly built campuses increases over time; the newly built campuses of vocational colleges have mainly influenced innovation actors like businesses, while those of regular colleges and universities have impacted both individuals and organizations; that the new campus built in the different city from its headquarter exerts greater promoting effects on the innovation of the city than the campus relocated in the original city and the campus of a newly established university; that the indirect effect of newly built campuses on the invention of all innovation actors is more significant than the impact of their direct collaboration with the latter; that a newly built campus have a more prominent effect on regional innovation when it is situated in an area with a high concentration of universities; and that the existence of the old campus of a university amplifies the promoting effect of its newly built campus on local innovation and the amplifying function strengthens over time. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 12(2):1635-1642. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab015 chen & ha. (beijing). universities and innovation potential of the city. bece, vol.12, no.2, 2022 1636 how to cite: chen, d., & ha, w. (2022). universities and innovation potential of the city: a quasi-experimental study of newly built campuses of colleges and universities in china. best evidence in chinese education, 12(2):1635-1642. keywords: colleges and universities, innovation of the city, newly built campuses correspondence to: wei ha, institute of economics of education, peking university, beijing 100871, china. email: wha@pku.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:wha@pku.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ chen & ha. (beijing). universities and innovation potential of the city. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1637 introduction as a result of the intensified reform of market-oriented economy, serving economic development, undertaking scientific research, and training talent have been equally emphasized in china’s higher education. the predominance of higher education institutions in the nation’s scientific research and innovation has been well acknowledged. universities’ role in social development was further confirmed by a succession of external policies such as the national revitalization through science and education strategy 1995, the action plan for revitalizing education in the 21st century and the national key basic research development plan (the “973 plan”) in 1998, and the empowerment of universities in patent applications in 2002. over the past twenty years, local governments have committed substantial investment to constructing additional campuses in response to the expansion of college enrollment. at the same time, they have also attempted to utilize this opportunity to open up more zones for innovation such as high-tech development parks and innovation incubation bases to achieve innovation-driven regional development. their plans for college town construction unexceptionally revealed their policy intention to integrate local higher education resources, promote the collaboration between industry, education, and research sectors, and develop regional high-tech industries to meet the future challenges of knowledge economy. according to the relevant statistics, among more than 300 major cities (excluding those in qinghai and tibet) in china, 209 of them are building new college towns. can so extensive construction of new campuses really drive the development of regional innovation? what are the underlying influential mechanisms? research hypotheses the newly built college and university campuses in this study refer to those built in the wake of the expansion of college enrollment initiated in 1999. according to the data collected by our research team, by 2021 there were over 1600 new campuses of various types under construction or completed by colleges and universities in 29 provincial administrative regions (except for qinghai and tibet) in mainland china. further classification of these new campuses is made as follows. regarding school types, there were 925 new campuses for regular colleges and universities and 693 for vocational colleges. the construction of new campuses by regular colleges and universities reached its peak in three to five years following the initiation of expanded colleges’ enrollment in 1999, while the number of new campuses of vocational colleges grew steadily. according to their locations, these new campuses can be divided into three categories: there were 377 “newly established campuses”, each of which was built as the first campus of its newly set up school; there were 1091 “relocated campuses in the original cities” which refer to those built in the same cities as the old campuses; there were 150 “relocated campuses in new cities” that were built in cities other than the ones where the parent campuses are located. the construction of “relocated campuses in the original cities” and “newly established campuses” was at its peak in three to five years after the introduction of expanded college enrollment. after that, the “relocated campuses in the original cities” chen & ha. (beijing). universities and innovation potential of the city. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1638 has maintained a high growth rate, while the increase of “newly established campuses” has shown a significant downward trend. first of all, according to the existing experience, the operation of the newly built campus can not only promote the invention of the university itself, but also enhance the innovation ability of other actors such as businesses and individuals, through face-to-face communication between the school and firms, scientific and technological service, application of research results, popularization of cutting-edge expertise, and creation of innovative atmosphere. thus, we propose the first hypothesis (h1): the operation of new campuses of colleges and universities can effectively promote the innovation of the city where they are built, and the influence can spill over into other innovation agents such as enterprises and individuals. second, newly built campuses of different types and location characteristics yield different knowledge spillovers and research transfer results to innovation actors in the local city due to their varying backgrounds and educational orientations. therefore, we put forward hypothesis two (h2): the impact on the city’s innovation from newly built campuses of regular universities and vocational colleges may differ; also, there may be differences in the impact between “newly established campuses”, “relocated campuses in the original cities”, and “relocated campuses in new cities.” third, there are time gaps between innovation input and output in the process of adjusting and transforming production factors by innovation actors. in the operation of new campuses, innovative elements spill over in the material or immaterial forms. in this process, learning, digestion, absorption, and diffusion of innovative elements by innovation actors are significantly dynamic. most importantly, the construction and opening of new campuses are long-term processes in real-world contexts. as a result, we bring up the third hypothesis (h3): the positive effect of the new campuses of colleges on the city’s innovation is cumulative, which gradually increases over time. last, newly built college campuses can influence external innovation actors such as firms and individuals through collaborative invention or through promoting the latter’s innovation practices by providing knowledge service. the second influencing path plays a more salient role in boosting patentable inventions in the city. hence, the fourth hypothesis is suggested: the newly built college campuses are more likely to impact external actors’ innovation through indirect involvement than through direct cooperation with them. research models based on the existing panel data, this study constructed a difference-in-differences (did) model to investigate the impact of the newly built college campuses on the city’s innovation capacity. the traditional did method is generally valid to cases in which the policy intervention occurs in a single period of time and the sample intervention status remains unchanged, otherwise the setting of interactions will severely contradict the parallel trend assumption, which may lead to biased estimation coefficients. as a result, we used a more flexible time-varying did model instead of the conventional did model in this study, since there are differences in the opening time among those new campuses and in the number of new campuses built in sampled cities. chen & ha. (beijing). universities and innovation potential of the city. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1639 a requirement for using did method is that the experimental group meets the criterion of random distribution. in other words, there are no other potential timevarying characteristics of cities that may affect the estimation results in the model. this study managed to control for the key indicators that may affect the city’s construction of new campuses such as economic foundation, population size, the number of existing campuses and the interactions of time trend, etc. and add fixed effects of the city and fixed effects of the year. it also attempted to avoid the interference from other imperceptible omitted variables in the estimation results. the other requirement for using did method is that the innovation activities of the experimental group and the control group be aligned with the parallel trend assumption. this study further combined the preliminary time-varying did model with the event study method. a parallel trend test was conducted by observing the difference in the impact of the two groups of samples before the intervention; the research hypotheses were verified by inferring the trend from the dynamic changes of the policy effects. research findings preliminary regression results preliminary regression results from equation one of the model demonstrated that the operation of newly built campuses of universities has significantly promoted innovation in the cities where they are located. the regression coefficient of the effect was 0.020, that is, on average, each new campus brought about 2.0% increase in patented inventions for the city. the regression results showed that the regression coefficients of the effects of newly built university campuses on individuals, enterprises, colleges, research institutions and other actors were all positive, and the first three coefficients are statistically significant. this indicates that the knowledge spillover of the new campuses is not limited to the higher education sector but can also affect the innovation activities of external factors, such as businesses and individuals. thus, h1 is validated. to check the interference caused by the non-random distribution of newly built college campuses in various cities, this study proceeded to perform a robustness test by focusing on cities with newly built university campuses and incorporating fixed effects of provinces and years and found that the regression results of the test were consistent with the preliminary regression results. this shows that the impact of newly built university campuses on the city’s innovation is robust. to evaluate the potential impact of the possibly, randomly omitted variables on the empirical research conclusions, this study also conducted a placebo test: randomly selected the cities from the experimental group and the opening years of their new campus, and randomly regressed 1000 times according to the preliminary model. according to the regression results, the regression estimation coefficients obtained by random sampling are by no means close to the regression results of this study. thus, the regression results of this article cannot be affected by randomly changing the policy intervention time. disparities in the impact of newly built campuses chen & ha. (beijing). universities and innovation potential of the city. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1640 (i) differences in the influence of newly built campuses of different types we attempted to replace the core explanatory variables in the preliminary regression model with the numbers of newly built campuses by regular universities and by vocational colleges to compare the difference in their impact on the local cities’ innovation. it was found that the two types of new campuses both had significant positive effects on the number of inventions and patents in the local cities. new campuses of regular universities mainly affect the innovation of individuals, businesses, and tertiary education schools, while those of vocational colleges generally influence the invention of businesses and tertiary education schools. both of them have a positive impact on corporate innovation, and the impact of the latter is slightly stronger than that of the former in this regard; regular universities exerts more prominent influence on individuals’ invention and innovation. (ii) variations in the impact of newly built campuses with different locations we tried to replace the core explanatory variables in the preliminary regression model with the numbers of “newly established campuses”, “relocated campuses in the original cities”, and “relocated campuses in new cities” to examine the gaps in their effects on the cities’ innovation. it was discovered that the impact of “relocated campuses in new cities” was the strongest, which was mainly imposed on the invention of businesses and individuals; and that there is no significant difference in the effects on the cities’ innovation between “newly established campuses” and “relocated campuses in the original cities” and the effects are posed on individuals, businesses and tertiary education schools. the cumulative effects of time after controlling for the covariates, there was no perceptible difference between the experimental group and the control group before the intervention, and the “counterfactual” estimation in the model was basically reliable. the analysis results also showed that the impact of the new campuses on the innovation capacity of the city gradually increased over time, in a cumulative pattern. an expanded analysis of influencing mechanisms there may exist multiple paths for the influence of newly built college campuses on the innovation of their cities. on the basis of foregoing regression results, this study further examined the comprehensive influence of the new campuses on the patentable innovations of the city in the following four aspects. • direct collaboration or indirect involvement chen & ha. (beijing). universities and innovation potential of the city. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1641 in order to determine which form of engagement on part of the newly built college campuses, direct cooperation or indirect involvement, has the more substantial promoting effect on the innovation of the city, we experimented with replacing the explanatory variables in the regression model with the number of invention patents under universities’ direct participation and the number of invention patents which did not involve universities’ direct engagement, and then a grouped regression was carried out. the results revealed that the indirect involvement rather than the direct engagement of new campuses yields a more substantial promoting effect on the local city’s innovation and development. • converging inventions or balanced development this study first used as the proxy indicator the logarithm of the difference between the 90% quantile and the 10% quantile of the number of invention patents granted to all districts and counties within a city to examine the degree of concentration and distribution of innovation activities among different areas in the city after the new campuses were put into operation. the results showed that the estimated coefficients of each regression equation were significantly positive, which indicated that innovation activities in various districts and counties in the city have shown a certain degree of convergence after the new campuses were put into use. based on this finding, this study used the variance of the number of invention patents granted to each district and county as the regression result of the substitution index, which also verifies the above conclusion. • the impact of the concentration of newly built university campuses the greater the number of university campuses in a unit area, the more likely that the innovation actor there will benefit from their knowledge spillovers, and the overall impact of universities on the city’s innovation will be more significant. we attempted to replace the core explanatory variables in the preliminary model with the number of college campuses per hundred square kilometers to evaluate the influence of college density on the city’s innovation and found that the denser the university campuses per unit area, the more prominent the knowledge spillovers on the overall invention and innovation of the city, and that businesses there are the major beneficiaries. • the influence of the old campuses we incorporated into model two the interaction between the number of new campuses and the variable of whether there being corresponding old campuses in the same city to examine the relationship between them and its long-term trend. overall, the existence of the old campus somewhat reinforced the promoting effect of the new campus on the innovation and invention of the city, and this effect was consistently enhanced over time, which was a sign that the new and the old campus have gradually established a close connection in research cooperation. chen & ha. (beijing). universities and innovation potential of the city. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1642 conclusions the operation of newly built college campuses has promoted the innovation and invention of the city where they are located, including the invention of individuals, businesses, and other actors. the promoting effect of the new campuses is cumulative, which strengthens with the increase in years of their operation. the newly built campuses of regular colleges and universities are beneficial for the innovation of individuals and businesses, while those of vocational colleges mainly benefit businesses and other actors. compared with “newly established campuses”, “relocated campuses in the original cities”, “relocated campuses in new cities” can impose a more substantial impact on the city’s innovation. the expanded analysis shows that compared with their direct cooperation with other innovation actors in the city, new campuses’ indirect involvement has more significant influences on the number of invention patents of those actors. after the new campuses being put into use, the innovation and invention activities in the city tend to converge; the higher density of college campuses is in a unit area, the stronger promoting impact they have on the city’s innovation. the existence of old college campuses may enhance the promoting function of new campuses, and this enhancing effect will get stronger over time. the chinese version of this article has been published in peking university education review, 20(2):127-146. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 陈东阳,&哈巍. 高校与城市创新能力-基于新建校区的准实验研究.北京大学教育评论, 2022, 20(2):127-146. received: 11 october 2022 revised: 27 october 2022 accepted: 15 november 2022 2absbract-weiha-bece_titlenov_2022docx 2absbract-weiha-bece_maintextnov2022 factors influencing peer victimization from the perspective of home-school partnership: a moderated mediation model qiang huang, 1,2 jinqin hou, 3 zhiyan chen 1 1 key lab of mental health, chinese academy of sciences (institute of psychology), beijing 100101, china 2 department of psychology, university of chinese academy of sciences, beijing 100049, china 3 department of psychology and special education, china national academy of educational sciences, beijing 100088, china abstract: this study aims to explore the overlapping influences of the home and school on peer victimization in adolescents under the notion of home-school partnership and to investigate how the parent-child relationship, teacher-student relationship, teenage depressive symptoms are related to peer victimization by constructing a moderated mediation model. it surveyed 1,710 students in 5-8 grades, using the inventory of parent and peer attachment, student-teacher relationship scale (brief version), multidimensional peer victimization scale, and center for epidemiologic studies depression scale (brief version). research findings show that the parent-child relationship had a direct impact on peer victimization and indirectly affected peer victimization via the mediation of teenage depressive symptoms; and that teacher-student relationships had moderating effects on the three paths in the mediation model, playing roles in enhancing the protection effect of the parent-child relationship against peer victimization, weakening the possible impact of the parentchild relationship on teenager depression, and alleviating the predictive effect of depressive symptoms on peer victimization. the research suggests that home-school partnership is a viable avenue for the prevention of school bullying. best evidence in chinese education 2024; 17(1):1847-1852. doi: 10.15354/bece.24.ar116 how to cite: huang, q., hou, j., & chen, z. (2024). factors influencing peer victimization from the perspective of home-school partnership: a moderated mediation model. best evidence in chinese education, 17(1):1847-1852. keywords: parent-child relationship, teacher-student relationship, peer victimization, depressive symptoms, home-school partnership huang et al. (beijing, china). factors for peer victimization of home-school partnership. bece, vol.17, no.1, 2024 1848 correspondence to: jinqin hou, department of psychology and special education, china national academy of educational sciences, beijing 100088, china. e-mail: houjq@nies.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. ai declaration: the authors affirm that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2024 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:houjq@nies.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ huang et al. (beijing, china). factors for peer victimization of home-school partnership. bece, vol.17, no. 1, 2024 1849 raising the question he notion of home-school partnership has undergone decades of evolution in china and is now incorporated in its 14th five-year plan for social and economic development and prospective goals 2035. in this process, parents have experienced a transition from playing supplementary roles to being partners of the school in child education. at present, the overlapping spheres of influence theory is the most impactful one in the domain of home-school co-education. it advanced the idea that the three chief settings of the home, school, and community have interactive and overlapping effects on the growth of students and developed six co-education practices (epstein & salinas, 2004). peer victimization occurs when an adolescent is bullied by a peer or peers, including physical, verbal, material, and relational victimization. research shows that peer victimization could induce a wide variety of problems, emotional, behavioral, and academic, in adolescents, posing severe threats on their healthy growth. according to developmental psychology, the severity of peer victimization reaches its highest level at the beginning of secondary education and subsequently declines as the grade advances. likewise, the issue of teenage depression is particularly pronounced in the early stage of secondary education. the co-occurrence of peer victimization and depressive symptoms in adolescents has garnered wide attention in academia. the parent-child relationship is seen as an important factor influencing peer victimization. it is not only the first interpersonal relationship for a child but also serves to be the template for developing other social relationships when they grow up, determining the quality of their peer friendships. in the meantime, the parent-child relationship is also related to the child’s depression level. a good parent-child relationship helps create a warm and supportive home atmosphere for the teenager and plays a protective role in the event of damaging incidents, reducing the risk of depression in them. this study seeks to construct a moderated mediation model based on the overlapping spheres of influence theory, incorporating the personal factor (depression), familial factor (parent-child relationship), and school-related factor (teacher-student relationship), to examine the mediating effect of depressive symptoms on the relation between the parent-child relationship and peer victimization while also paying attention to the moderating effect of the teacher-student relationship on this relation. research methodology participants through cluster sampling, the research team selected students in grades 5-8 from two primary and four secondary schools (including ordinary and key schools) in suzhou and chengdu as participants. all the 1,710 questionnaires distributed were successfully retrieved. there are 396, 337, 782, and 195 students in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, respectively. among them, male (888) and female students (822) accounted for 51.93% and 48.07%. the average age of them was 13.31 ± 3.79 years old. t huang et al. (beijing, china). factors for peer victimization of home-school partnership. bece, vol.17, no. 1, 2024 1850 research tools multidimensional peer victimization scale the multidimensional peer victimization scale (mynard & joseph, 2000) was employed to measure the incidence of bullying. it is a widely used scale and has been revised in its use among the chinese population. the scale consists of 16 questions and adopts three-point rating (0= “never happened,” 1= “occasionally happened,” and 2= “frequently happened”), with which, participants report their experiences of being bullied by their classmates over the past six months. the higher the score, the more severe bullying the student suffered. in this study, the scale’s coefficient of internal consistency reliability was 0.89. inventory of parent and peer attachment the scale to measure the parent-child relationship is from the inventory of parent and peer attachment. it is a self-report scale with 25 questions in three dimensions: communication, trust, and alienation. the likert five-point scale (from 1= “strongly disagree” to 5= “strongly agree”) has been widely adopted in china and was revised for its application in junior secondary school students (zhang et al., 2011). the average score of each dimension was calculated using reverse scoring; after that, the scores of the three dimensions were put together with equal weights. the higher the scores, the better the parent-child relationship the participant experienced. in this study, the scale’s coefficient of internal consistency reliability was 0.94. center for epidemiological studies depression scale (ces-d) the brief version of ces-d was adopted to measure the depression level of the participant (he et al., 2013). with nine questions, it is a scale of self-report measures using the four-point rating method (0= “less than 1 day,” 1= “1-2 days,” 2= “3-4 days,” and 3= “5-7 days”). the average score was calculated with certain questions being scored reversely. the higher the score, the more severe depression the participant experienced. in this study, the scale’s coefficient of internal consistency reliability was 0.87. student-teacher relationship scale the brief version of the student-teacher relationship scale was used to measure the participant’s relationship with their teachers (hou & chen, 2017). the scale consists of 15 questions in two dimensions: intimacy and conflict. the likert five-point scale (from 1= “strongly disagree” to 5= “strongly agree”) has been widely applied to chinese samples. the average score of each dimension was calculated with certain question being by scored reversely; after that, the scores of the two dimensions were added up with equal weights. the higher the scores are, the better the teacher-student relationship is. in this study, the scale’s coefficient of internal consistency reliability was 0.79. huang et al. (beijing, china). factors for peer victimization of home-school partnership. bece, vol.17, no. 1, 2024 1851 survey procedures and data processing the questionnaire survey was administered to the class as a whole by the psychological teacher at each school, and the questionnaires were collected on the spot. the rubric of the questionnaire describes the purpose of this study and gives the promise to keep all responses from the participants confidential. descriptive statistical analysis and moderated mediation model analysis were conducted using spss 19.0 software. research findings the parent-child relationship directly impacts peer victimization and indirectly affects peer victimization via the mediation of teenage depressive symptoms. good home relationships are beneficial for children developing optimistic views of themselves and others and positive attitudes towards the environment, which are transferred to other interpersonal relationships, contributing to the establishment of healthy peer relationships among adolescents and reducing the risk of peer victimization. on the contrary, poor family relationships can increase the possibility of peer victimization. in addition, positive parent-child relationships protect adolescents from the potential hazards of depression. parental companion and support help children with the release of negative emotions brought on by stressful events. the teacher-student relationship has moderating effects on the direct relation between the parent-child relationship and peer victimization and their indirect relation mediated by teenage depressive symptoms. in other words, the home and school can work together to become protective factors against school bullying. specifically, the teacher-student relationship can help boost the effect of the parent-child relationship in protecting adolescents from peer bullying, weaken the negative impact of the parentchild relationship on child depression level, and reduce the predictive effects of depressive symptoms on peer bullying. implications firstly, a desirable school environment with positive teacher-student relationships as a chief component of it, is an overriding factor in preventing peer victimization and teenage depression. it helps heighten the role of the home environment in protecting students from peer bullying and alleviates the adverse effects of teenager depressive symptoms in eliciting peer bullying as well as mitigating teenager depressive symptoms per se. second, home-school partnership is a feasible avenue for the prevention and control of school bullying. the results of home-school partnership include not only direct interactions between the home and school but also indirect interactions between them, that is, the overlapping influences of the home and school on students. third, it is important for the school to intervene in students’ depressive symptoms while implementing targeted governance of school bullying. the home-school interaction should be given full play in preventing teenage depression. huang et al. (beijing, china). factors for peer victimization of home-school partnership. bece, vol.17, no. 1, 2024 1852 references epstein, j. l. & salinas, k. c. (2004). partnering with families and communities. educational leadership, 61(8):12-18. hou, j. & chen, g. (2017). the impacts of the parent-child attachment and teacherstudent relationship on the motivation of goal-directed learning in secondary school students: a longitudinal study. chinese journal of special education, 2017(4):79-84. he, j., chen, z., guo, f., zhang, j., yang, y., & wang, q. (2013). the development of the brief version (chinese) of the center for epidemiological studies depression scale. chinese journal of behavioral medicine and brain science, 22(12):11331136. mynard, h. & joseph, s. (2000). development of the multidimensional peer victimization scale. aggressive behavior, 26(2):169-178. zhang, y., zhang, y., zhang y., wang, j., & huang, c. (2011). the reliability and validity of the revised inventory of parent and peer attachment (chinese version) applied to junior secondary school students. chinese journal of mental health, 25(1):66-70. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of psychological development and education, 2024; 2024(6):845-852. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 黄强,侯金芹,& 陈祉妍. (2024). 家校共育视角下同伴侵害的影响因素探究: 有调节的中介模型.心 理发展与教育, 2024(6):845-852. received: april 02, 2024 revised: april 11, 2024 accepted: may 01, 2024 ar-jinqinhou-bece_title-may_2024 ar-jinqinhou_bece-maintext-may2024 can non-subject-based off-campus training improve student mental health in the context of the implementation of the double reduction policy? a study based on a survey in 30 counties in six eastern, central, and western provinces of china weidong fu, wei li central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china abstract: mental health of primary and secondary school students has drawn wide public attention against the backdrop of the implementation of the double reduction policy. this article aims to analyze the effects of non-subject-based off-campus training on student mental health based on an investigation among primary and secondary school students from 30 counties (cities, districts) in six eastern, central, and western provinces of china. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 13(2):1697-1701. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar033 how to cite: fu, w., & li, w. (2023). can non-subject-based off-campus training improve student mental health in the context of the implementation of the double reduction policy? a study based on a survey in 30 counties in six eastern, central, and western provinces of china. best evidence in chinese education, 13(2):16971701. keywords: mental health, non-subject-based training, double reduction policy fu & li. (hubei). off-campus training improve student mental health in china. bece, vol.13, no.2, 2022 1698 correspondence to: weidong fu, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hunan, china. e-mail: 604143009@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:604143009@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ fu & li. (hubei). off-campus training improve student mental health in china. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1699 introduction according to the survey results of the report on national mental health development in china (2019-2020), only 14.24% of chinese teenagers reached the standard of mental healthiness and 24.6% of them were identified as suffering from depression in 2020 (fu, zhang, & chen, 2021). this shows a worrisome circumstance of mental health development in chinese primary and secondary students. hence, how to enhance their mental health level has become a severe challenge in chinese basic education. in july 2021, chinese government issued the opinions on further reducing the burden of homework and off-campus training for compulsory education students (often referred to as the double reduction policy). as a result of the implementation of the double reduction policy, the number of subject-based off-campus training institutions has been significantly reduced, with a 95.6% decrease in offline institutions and 87.1% reduction in online training platforms. this study focuses on the current state of nonsubject-based after-school training in the context of the execution of the double reduction policy and the impact of the participation in non-subject-based off-campus training on mental health of primary and secondary school students. research methods research subjects this study conducted a questionnaire investigation simultaneously in the eastern province of guangdong, central provinces of hubei and hunan, and western provinces of sichuan and guizhou by means of stratified sampling and obtained 11340 questionnaires, among which 8436 were valid. as “participating in non-subject-based offcampus training or not” is a key factor in the analysis, questionnaires with this critical information missing were eliminated, and ultimately 5973 questionnaires were used in this study. research tools the independent variable: participating in non-subjectbased off-campus training or not. the dependent variables  depression two items from the depression scale developed by the china education panel survey (ceps) were used to measure students’ depression levels.  state anxiety it is psychological and physiological transient reactions directly related to adverse situations in a specific moment. consulted were the state anxiety scale from the state-and fu & li. (hubei). off-campus training improve student mental health in china. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1700 trait-anxiety scales revised by zhang (1998) and the self-rating inventory of test anxiety revised by wang (1995).  positive affect it refers to individuals’ positive attitudes. the positive and negative affect scales developed by watson et al. (1988) were consulted. covariates individual, family, and school-level covariates were included in the analysis. this study controlled for trait anxiety as a covariate of state anxiety since state anxiety may be affected by trait anxiety of the individual. data analysis the processes of data analysis included the following: (i) descriptive statistics were used to present the dependent variables; (ii) ordinary least square regression was adopted to analyze the relationships between the independent variable and dependent variables; (iii) coarsened exact matching (cem) was used to match the treatment and the control groups, and the balance of the matching was checked; (iv) iweight was utilized to regress the relationships between the independent variable and dependent variables; (v) robustness check was conducted on the model. research findings  after the launch of the double reduction policy, the number of primary and secondary school students participating in non-subject-based off-campus training decreased slightly, while the time and money investment of the participants in the training basically remained stable.  participating in non-subject-based off-campus training could significantly relieve the depression of primary school students but had no significant effect on their state anxiety and positive affect. it had no remarkable impact on the depression, state anxiety, and positive affect of junior secondary school students.  non-subject-based off-campus training could effectively ease the depression and state anxiety of urban students and rural non-left-behind students but had no significant influence on mental health of rural students and left-behind students (children of migrant workers). fu & li. (hubei). off-campus training improve student mental health in china. bece, vol.13, no. 2, 2023 1701 references fu, x. l., zhang, k., & chen, x. f. (2021). report on national mental health development in china (2019-2020). beijing: social sciences academic press (china). 2021. wang, c. k. (1995). the application of the self-rating inventory of test anxiety in secondary school students and relevant factors. chinese journal of clinical psychology, 3(1):3. watson, d., clark, l. a., & telegen, a. (1988) development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the panas scales. journal of personality and social psychology, 54(6):1063-1070. doi: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063 zhang, m. y. (1998). psychiatric evaluation scale manual. changsha: hunan science and technology press. 1998. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of central china normal university (humanities and social sciences), 2023, 62(01):171-180. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 付卫东 & 李伟. “双减”背景下非学科类校外培训能改善中小学生的心理健康状态吗？—基于 东中西部６省３０个县（市、区）的调查 . 华中师范大学学报 (人文社会科学版), 2023, 62(1):171-180 received: 05 february 2023 revised: 01 march 2023 accepted: 10 march 2023 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063 ar1-weidongfu-bece_titlemarch_2023 ar1-weidongfu-bece_maintextmarch2023 bece. newsletter vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1971 is mathematics vocabulary important? the mediating effect of mathematics vocabulary on the relationship between cognitive abilities and mathematics performance by liu, d., zeng, y., & chen, x. correspondence to: di liu, east china normal university, china. e-mail: dliu@spe.ecnu.edu.cn athematics vocabulary is an important indicator of mathematical language competence of the student. a desirable mastery of mathematics vocabulary is crucial to mathematical study, based on which, the student builds their understanding of math concepts and develops mathematical thinking. this article is an examination of the effect of mathematics vocabulary on the relationship between general cognitive abilities and mathematics performance, with a sample of 249 third graders from two primary schools in shanghai. research findings:  there are positive correlations between mathematics vocabulary and math achievement, math problem solving and computation capacities in pupils. a better command of mathematics vocabulary often predicts better performance in math tasks.  mathematics vocabulary partially mediates the relationship between cognitive abilities (such as reasoning and working memory) and performance in math tasks. implications:  mathematics vocabulary is an essential foundation for math study, serving as an important link between cognitive abilities and math tasks. improving students’ command of mathematics vocabulary can help elevate their math performance, problem solving and computation capacities.  teachers should pay more attention to the instruction of mathematics vocabulary, aiding students in deepening their understanding of math concepts with methods like analysis and comparison. mathematics textbook writers should also attend to the consistency and accuracy of vocabulary presentation to avoid the confusion in terminology use, which may lower math learning outcomes. m mailto:dliu@spe.ecnu.edu.cn vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1972 source: global education, 2024; 53(12):148-160. bece. newsletter vol.14, no.1, 2023 1765 the current state of teacher participation in after-school service under the double reduction policy and improvement suggestions: a survey of 9,741 teachers from 131 primary and secondary schools in beijing by li, g., li, h. t., xin, t., & zhang, s. correspondence to: sheng zhang, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: zsllz@163.com he opinions on further reducing the burden of homework and offcampus training for compulsory education students (also known as the double reduction policy) released by the chinese government in july 2021 stipulate that educational institutions must improve their after-school service to meet varied needs of the students. the purpose of this study is to examine through a questionnaire survey the current status of teacher engagement in the after-school service, the differences in the participation in the service among teachers of distinct professional backgrounds, teachers’ intention of participation and actual involvements in the service, and the factors restricting teachers’ intention of participation and involvements. a survey was conducted on 9,741 teachers from 131 primary and secondary schools in beijing. the questionnaire was aimed at gathering information about: (i) the teacher’s in-service school backgrounds (grade, school district, the educational quality of the school) and professional experience (discipline, being the class teacher and/or leader of teaching research group or not); (ii) their engagement in after-school service, including attendance at the service, type of service, participation intention and actual involvements; (iii) factors influencing their participation in the service, such as workload, incentives for after-school service, training, school management, and family support. the analysis of the survey data showed that 91.61% of the teachers investigated participated in the after-school service, and the majority of tthem had a high level of participation intention and involvement. there were significant differences in participation intention and involvements among teachers from different schools and with varying professional experience. issues with after-school service in terms of incentives, management, and workloads remain to be addressed. source: china educational technology, 2023; 2023(4):42-48. t mailto:zsllz@163.com effects of online learning on student moral development: a meta-analysis based on 42 experimental and quasi-experimental studies hao wang, aimin tang qufu normal university, qufu 273165, shandong, china abstract: the widespread practices of online learning have sparked increasing interest in its educational efficacy. the effects of online learning on learners’ moral development remain contentious in existing research. the purpose of this metaanalysis was to ascertain how online leaning impact students’ moral development. it included 42 experimental and quasi-experimental studies with an aggregate sample of 5303 learners after the processes of literature screening, data extraction, and risk of bias assessment. analytical results revealed that online learning had positive effects on student moral understanding and reasoning, but no significant impact on student moral emotions and behavior. subgroup analyses by student type, course type, online learning pattern, and involvement of interactive activity showed that there were disparities in the effect size between all subgroups and that only the moderating effect of student type on student moral reasoning was statistically significant. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 15(1):1789-1793. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar095 how to cite: wang, h., & tang, a. (2023). effects of online learning on student moral development: a meta-analysis based on 42 experimental and quasiexperimental studies. best evidence in chinese education, 15(1):1789-1793. keywords: online learning, moral education, moral development, meta-analysis wang & tang. (shandong, china). online learning and student moral development. bece, vol.15, no.1, 2023 1790 about the authors: hao wang, faculty of education, qufu normal university, qufu 273165, shandong, china. aimin tang, faculty of education, qufu normal university, qufu 273165, shandong, china. e-mail: tam6706@126.com correspondence to: aimin tang at qufu normal university of china. conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:tam6706@126.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ wang & tang. (shandong, china). online learning and student moral development. bece, vol.15, no. 1, 2023 1791 introduction online learning is a paradigm of learning that is partially or completely internet-based and electronic communication device-dependent. despite the significance of online learning for moral education being widely acknowledged, there is a lack of agreement on how online learning affects moral development among researchers. therefore, it is necessary to conduct a meta-analysis that includes a wide range of relevant studies in order to obtain accurate and timely research findings. data and methods this meta-analysis adopted the methods proposed in cochrane handbook for systematic reviews of interventions for data treatment (higgins et al., 2022) and defined the reporting items according to the prisma 2020 statement (page et al., 2020). inclusion and exclusion criteria th present study established literature inclusion and exclusion criteria according to the framework of picos:  subjects: students exercising online learning.  interventions: solely online learning and blended learning.  outcome indicator: scores by student moral understanding, reasoning, emotion, and behavior development scales.  research design: experimental or quasi-experimental study  exclusion criteria: using patients suffering from specific diseases as subjects; electronic games as interventions; information or data on outcomes missing; systematic reviews; republished literature; articles with complete text unavailable. literature search method the present study collected empirical studies on the impact of online learning on student moral development by searching databases including cnki, wanfang data, pubmed, web of science, ebsco, eric, taylor & francis, proquest, and wiley online library. targeted studies were those published before september 2022. literature screening and data extraction this study engaged two researchers in screening literature and extracting data independently as well as performing cross-checking. discrepancies in screening and extraction results were resolved through discussion or consultation with a third party. risk of bias assessment studies included in this analysis comprised randomized controlled trials and nonrandomized studies. wang & tang. (shandong, china). online learning and student moral development. bece, vol.15, no. 1, 2023 1792 research results literature screening procedure and results with the prescribed literature search method, the present study obtained 6230 pieces of literature, of which 6,222 were attained through database retrieval and 8 through manual tracing. eventually, 42 studies were included in the meta-analysis according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. basic features of the studies included there were 7 randomized controlled trials and 35 non-randomized trials, with a sample of 5303 learners included in the analysis. among them, 20 studies were published after 2020, accounting for 47.62% of the total included literature and contributing the latest research findings on this topic. the 42 studies encompassed participants (subjects) from 15 countries around the world with three of them focusing on students from china. college students constituted the samples of 33 of the studies, in-service personnel such as teachers, nurses, and managers were the participants of eight of them, and primary school students made up the sample of one of them. online learning courses entailed in these studies included both specialized moral education courses and non-moral education courses. solely online learning and blended learning were the two main forms of online learning adopted. in terms of the effects of online learning on student moral development, 16 studies reported outcomes of student moral understanding, 9 studies reported outcomes of student moral reasoning, 15 studies reported outcomes of student moral emotions, and 11 studies reported those of student moral behavior. meta-analytical results online learning could moderately and positively impact student moral understanding and positively but slightly affect student moral reasoning, whereas it had no significant effects on student moral emotions or moral behavior. moderating effect analysis school students could make greater progress in moral understanding through online learning, while in-service learners could benefit more from online learning in moral reasoning, moral emotions, and moral behavior. specialized moral education courses had greater effects on students’ moral understanding improvement, while non-moral education courses had more significant effects on students’ moral emotion development. solely online learning was more favorable to students’ moral reasoning and emotion development, whereas blended learning was more beneficial for students' moral understanding advancement. online courses with teacher guidance and peer interplays contributed to students’ moral understanding and emotion elevation, while online self-study courses without interactions had positive effects on students’ moral reasoning development. wang & tang. (shandong, china). online learning and student moral development. bece, vol.15, no. 1, 2023 1793 reference higgins, j. p. t., thomas, j., chandler, j., cumpston, m., li, t., page, m. j., & welch, v. a. (editors). cochrane handbook for systematic reviews of interventions version 6.3 (updated february 2022). cochrane, 2022. available at: www.training.cochrane.org/handbook page, m. j., mckenzie, j., bossuyt, p., boutron, i., hoffmann, t., mulrow, c., moher, d. (2020, september 14). the prisma 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. doi: https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/v7gm2 the chinese version of this article has been published in educational research and experiment, 2023(3):61-70. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 王浩, 唐爱民. (2023). 在线学习如何影响学生的道德发展-基于 42 项实验与准实验研究的 meta 分析. 教育研究与实验, 2023; 2023(3):61-70. received: 7 august 2023 revised: 22 august 2023 accepted: 08 september 2023 http://www.training.cochrane.org/handbook https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/v7gm2 ar-aimintang-bece_titlesep_2023 ar-aimintang-bece_maintextsep2023 bece. newsletter vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1919 the effects of thematic reading on mental resilience development in rural left-behind children: an empirical study by feng, l. & jiang, y. correspondence to: yingjie jiang, northeast china normal university, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org ental resilience is the ability to cope with difficult situations that happens in the individual’s life, conducive to their adaptation to change and uncertainty in addressing setbacks. it is of vital importance for mental health. mental resilience development is an essential component of mental health education for basic education children. rural primary schools in china have a high proportion of left-behind children of migrant workers, whose mental health, including mental resilience issue, is a major concern of the public. based on the reading therapy theory, this empirical study aims to examine the effects of thematic reading on mental resilience development in rural left-behind children with a sample of 83 third and fourth graders from a primary school in northern hebei province. the subjects were divided into the experimental group (consisting of students scoring lower on the mental resilience questionnaire) and the control group (consisting of students scoring higher on the questionnaire). a two-month thematic reading course was administered to the experimental group. research findings: • the between-group comparison shows that the reading intervention successfully bridged the gap in mental resilience between the experimental and control groups • the intra-group comparison indicates that significant mental resilience improvement occurred in students with the experimental group after the intervention, whereas there was no change in the mental resilience level among students with the control group in the two months. the research findings demonstrate the effectiveness of well-structured, purposeful reading training in improving the mental resilience of rural leftbehind children. the study also proves the malleability of mental resilience in primary school children, lending support to the idea of “the age of 11 or below being the preferable age for mental resilience development,” popular in the mental resilience research community. m mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1920 source: journal of teaching and management, 2024; 2024(18):67-70. bece. newsletter vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2051 the role of generative artificial intelligence in the teaching and learning of english as foreign language: an empirical study of genai-based feedback in secondary english writing by liu, m., zou, w., zong, m., & yang, b. correspondence to: bing yang, hubei performance evaluation information management research center, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org his study is an evaluation of the effect of genai-based feedback on english writing performance of secondary school students as english-asforeign-language (efl) learners, based on experimental data from 201 seventh graders from four classes at j middle school in wuhan, hubei province, china. using the genai software “doubao,” which is built on the skylark model, as the experimental platform, the researchers compared the english writing scores of the experimental group (trained with genai-based feedback) and the control group (trained with teacher feedback) across four writing assignments. research findings: • genai-based feedback was more effective than teacher feedback in improving the writing’s relevance to the topic in the students with ordinary writing skills, while neither genai-based feedback nor teacher feedback showed significant improvement effect on this aspect in the highperforming students. • compared to teacher feedback, genai-based feedback led to greater improvement in grammatical accuracy in english writing. • genai-based feedback was more effective in improving wording appropriateness of students’ english writing than teacher feedback. • genai-based feedback significantly enhanced the logic of narrarive in students’ english writing, whereas teacher feedback showed no measurable effect in this regard. the research results imply that the introduction of a real-time feedback mechanism is beneficial for students being promptly informed of their performance and deficits in english writing in terms of relevance, grammar, wording, and logic, enabling targeted revisions and improvements; that genai-based feedback is more suitable for beginners in english writing; and that genai-based feedback has the potential to narrow the gap between students with different levels of english writing proficiency. t mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2052 source: china educational technology, 2025; 2025(06): 70-79. bece. newsletter vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1904 does the double reduction policy alleviate parental education anxiety? an empirical study based on a survey of 29 provincial administrative regions in china by qi, z, fang, j. & ren, s. correspondence to: zhanyong qi, shan’xi normal university, china. e-mail: qizhanyong@snnu.edu.cn arental education anxiety has long been a pervasive social issue in china. to shape a legitimate educational ecology to alleviate parental education anxiety, the chinese government released the “double reduction policy” in 2021. effective governance of education anxiety necessitates a thorough understanding of the status quo of parental education anxiety and its contributing factors. this article is an in-depth investigation of the effects of various factors on parental education anxiety including policy-related factors at the macro level, school-related factors at the meso level, and parent and student-related factors at the micro level. research findings:  the double reduction policy has considerably lowered the levels of education anxiety in chinese parents. nevertheless, the focuses of their anxiety remained the same, namely, child academic results and school progression (school choice).  there was intra-group heterogeneity in parental education anxiety regarding gender, occupation, home economic status, child education phase, child grade ranking, etc.  policy-, school-, parentand student-related factors all had significant impacts on parental education anxiety. parents with higher economic status, lower educational expectations, and lower frequency of homework tutoring had lower levels of education anxiety. those having children with lower grade rankings, higher frequency of contact from teachers, and negative perceptions of the policy had higher levels of education anxiety.  female parents tend to have higher levels of education anxiety than their male counterparts. parents in urban areas had higher levels of education anxiety than those in rural areas. parents with children at the junior secondary level had higher levels of education anxiety than those with children at the primary level. parents having their children carry on participating in off-campus subject-based supp mailto:qizhanyong@snnu.edu.cn vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1905 plementary tutoring after the release of the double reduction policy had higher levels of education anxiety.  based on their research findings, the authors put forward the following suggestions:  the government should improve publicity of the double reduction policy and strengthening its regulation of the off-campus training market while also increasing investment in education to support balanced development of educational resources in urban and rural areas.  it is important to establish a public school-supported home education counseling service system to facilitate home-school communication.  it is imperative to help parents to improve their education ideas and discern those impractical educational expectations to reduce their education anxiety. source: chinese journal of distance education, 44(4):28-46. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1159 non-cognitive abilities the indispensable contributor to adolescents’ development jijun yao school of education science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210023, jiangsu, china “if i meet other people and criticize their weaknesses, i rob myself of higher cognitive power. but if i try to enter deeply and lovingly into another person's good qualities, i gather in that force.” –rudol steiner he previous view of education quality paid more attention to the appearance of cognitive ability: test scores. however, a lot of practice and research have proved that the level of cognitive ability cannot completely predict the development of an individual in school and society. the noncognitive abilities of individuals represented by communication, cooperation, emotional management, etc. can help improve students’ cognitive level and regulate students’ learning motivation; help students achieve better academic performance and achievement; income has an impact, which ultimately affects the individual’s happiness. these kind of specific abilities other than cognitive abilities, which have a profound and lasting impact on individual adaptation and social development, are core abilities that individuals gradually form in the process of growth and development, and are also called “social and emotional abilities”. the term was promoted by the “social and emotional learning” (sel) promoted by unicef worldwide, and the study on social and emotional skills (sses) implemented by the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd). oecd has been committed to promoting the development of youth social and emotional skills. in december 2017, the oecd released the “social and emotional skills: happiness, connectivity, and success” report, which plans to evaluate the social and emotional skills of students aged 10-15 in © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. t bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1160 some countries and cities around the world. the research started in 2017, spanning three years, and conducted field surveys and evaluations in 2019. at the end of 2019, the first round of evaluation was conducted in 10 cities in 9 countries around the world. on september 7, 2021, the oecd’s first global youth social and emotional ability assessment report was officially released. the report showed that social and emotional abilities had an impact on education, health and quality of life (happiness, life satisfaction, and test anxiety). important factors affecting social and emotional abilities include school belonging, teacher-student relationship, campus bullying and so on. as one of the countries that participated in the first round of testing, china conducted an assessment work in 151 elementary and middle schools in 10 districts and counties of suzhou, jiangsu province, and surveyed 7,550 students in the 10-year-old and 15-year-old groups. at the same time, a questionnaire survey of parents, teachers and principals was carried out, and more than 26,000 samples were obtained. based on the oecd international student social and emotional ability evaluation data, a series of research results on the social and emotional ability evaluation of chinese students have been formed. the current issue of the best evidence in chinese education (bece) focuses on the research and evaluation of the development of adolescents’ social and emotional abilities, and shares the results of chinese scholars’ research on the sses evaluation of their own adolescents. gao et al. (2021) analyzed the performance of chinese adolescents from the perspective of task ability; liu et al. (2021) focused on the analysis of the emotional regulation ability of chinese adolescents; tang et al. (2021) concentrated on the performance of chinese adolescents in collaboration ability; shao et al. (2021) focused on the openness of chinese youth; huang et al. (2021) discussed the performance of chinese youth in their communicative abilities. these five short reports introduced in detail the performance of chinese young people in the sses test from five aspects: task ability, emotion regulation, collaboration ability, open ability and communication ability. they analyzed what factors affected the development of these abilities, and further explored how to improve these abilities through education policies and practices. on this basis, zhao et al. (2021) gave an overview of china’s participation in the oecd global youth social and emotional competence assessment, introduced and analyzed the significance and value of oecd’s global youth social and emotional competence and the progress of related research. meanwhile, they gave a more detailed account of the development of youth social and emotional competence assessment in china, and discussed the social and emotional competence testing. cheng (2021) also used the oecd sses test as a model to discuss the aspects that should be considered in the non-cognitive ability assessment in terms of measurement methods, measurement tools, and test subjects. at the same time, he also gave feedback on possible problems in the global assessment. some thoughts have come out. bece, vol.9, no.1, 2021 1161 this issue of the journal focuses on the theme of the assessment of adolescents’ social and emotional abilities, and published a brief report and summary of the results of the test of adolescents’ social and emotional abilities from china. we also try to introduce the results of the global youth social and emotional ability assessment conducted by oced from multiple aspects, as well as the performance of chinese youth in this assessment, so as to provide timely and accurate information for follow-up related research. references cheng, x. (2021). exploration of the non-cognitive ability assessment: the scientific value of the survey on social and emotional skills. best evidence in chinese education, 9(1):1163-1167. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.co017 gao, x., chen, h., wu, j., & huang, j. (2021). task performance: report on the study of social and emotional skills of chinese adolescents (i). best evidence in chinese education, 9(1):1197-1202. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp031 huang, j., wang, q., chen, h., & gao, x. (2021). communicative competence: the fifth report of the social and emotional competence test of chinese adolescents. best evidence in chinese education, 9(1):1217-1221. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp035 liu, z., zhu, r., cui, h., & huang, j. (2021). emotional regulation: report on the study of social and emotional skills of chinese adolescents (ii). best evidence in chinese education, 9(1):1203-1207. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp032 shao, z., liu, z., yang, s., & huang, j. (2021). open-mindedness: report on the study of social and emotional skills of chinese adolescents (iv). best evidence in chinese education, 9(1):1213-1216. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp034 tang, y., zheng, j., sun, x., & huang, j. (2021). collaboration: report on the study of social and emotional skills of chinese adolescents (iii). best evidence in chinese education, 9(1):1209-1212. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp033 zhao, f., meng, w., li, f., & zhou, l. (2021). overview and insight from the china research report on the global youth survey of social and emotional skills by the world organization for economic cooperation and development. best evidence in chinese education, 9(1):1169-1195. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.re055 correspondence to: jijun yao, ph.d. school of education science nanjing normal university nanjing 210023 jiangsu china email: yaojijun_njnu@163.com conflict of interests: none. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.ed031 https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.21.co017 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp031 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp035 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp032 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp034 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.rp033 https://doi.org/10.15354/bece.21.re055 mailto:yaojijun_njnu@163.com does preschool education experience help disadvantaged students become academically resilient? empirical evidence from ceps data zhenyi li, wanpeng lei college of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, china abstract: supporting socio-economically disadvantaged students to improve their academic resilience is vital in promoting social mobility and halting intergenerational transmission of poverty. based on the baseline data 2013-2014 from the china education panel survey (ceps) database, this paper examined the impact of preschool education experience on academic resilience of disadvantaged students using coarsened exact matching (cem) and hierarchical logistic regression. research findings show that disadvantaged children have less access to preschool education than their advantaged peers, with a kindergarten attendance rate lower than 70%; that preschool education can significantly improve children’s cognitive ability and effectively predict academic resilience of disadvantaged students; and that preschool education is a better predictor of resilience of rural disadvantaged students than that of their urban counterparts. the government should reinforce subsidies for early childhood education that can serve as compensation for disadvantaged kids; and should further universalize preschool education to secure the opportunity of high-quality pre-primary school education for disadvantaged children. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 13(1):1665-1670. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar026 how to cite: li, z., & lei, w. (2023). does preschool education experience help disadvantaged students become academically resilient? empirical evidence from ceps data. best evidence in chinese education, 13(1):1665-1670. keywords: preschool education, disadvantaged students, resilient students li & lei. (hubei). preschool experience for disadvantaged students in academic achievements. bece, vol.13, no.1, 2023 1666 correspondence to: wanpeng lei, college of education, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, china. e-mail: 2466691134@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:2466691134@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ li & lei. (hubei). preschool experience for disadvantaged students in academic achievements. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1667 raising the questions preschool education plays a compensatory role in promoting the development of disadvantaged students, making up for the deficiency of home education due to the low education level of parents (britto, yoshikawa, & boller, 2011). from the global perspective, numerous countries have formulated support policies to boost preschool education to close the gaps between children from different family backgrounds (pang & xia, 2013). existing empirical research demonstrated that early childhood growth has enduring effects on individuals’ lifelong development (darmstadt et al., 2019). heckman and raut (2016) discovered in their study that investment in preschool education can bolster children’s cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and that educational subsidies for disadvantaged students can improve economic mobility of low-income families and help terminate intergenerational transmission of poverty in them. from a long-term standpoint, investment in pre-school education is one of the most cost-effective strategies that improve the productivity and heighten the competitiveness of the nation by intervening in the intergenerational transmission of poverty. utilizing the baseline data of the china education panel survey (ceps), this article aims to address the following questions: what is the status quo of preschool education among disadvantaged children? is preschool education beneficial to the cognitive development of disadvantaged children? are there group differences in the effects of preschool education experience on academic resilience between urban and rural students? coarsened exact matching (cem) and hierarchical logistic regression were adopted in the analysis. the research design the source of data this study sourced data from the baseline investigation of ceps in the academic year 2013-2014, which was designed and conducted by the national survey research center at renmin university of china. adopting probability-proportional-to-size sampling, it surveyed the seventh and ninth grade students and their parents, teachers, and principals by questionnaires to collect information about students’ preschool attendance, family backgrounds, cognitive capabilities and more. the baseline survey included approximately 20,000 students from 438 classes of 112 schools in 28 counties (or city districts) in china. the selection of variables the dependent variable the dependent variable in the study is “the resilient student” (1 = being resilient student, 0 = being nonresilient student). oecd defines resilient students as those who fall in both the bottom third of their country’s socio-economic background distribution and the top third of their country’s performance distribution on the pisa science assessment li & lei. (hubei). preschool experience for disadvantaged students in academic achievements. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1668 scale (oecd, 2011). the operational definition of resilient students in this study is “students who fall in both the bottom fourth of china’s socio-economic background distribution and the top fourth of china’s performance distribution on cognitive ability assessment scale. data shows that there are 4710 disadvantaged students in the sample and resilient students account for 12.17% of them. the present study measured the subject’s family social and economic status (ses) by parents’ highest education level, highest occupational status, self-reported household economic circumstances, and the size of home book collection. a continuous variable (kmo=0.695) was obtained via a principal component analysis and was further converted into an ses index variable with a range of 1-100. according to this index, those students whose family ses falls in the bottom fourth of china’s socioeconomic background distribution are defined as disadvantaged students. the index was also a criterion for identifying resilient students. the explanatory variable the core explanatory variable in this study is “having received preschool education or not” (yes = 1, no = 0). the question “have you attended any kindergartens or preprimary classes before the age of three?” was included in the ceps’s questionnaire. according to the ses index, the subjects are divided into three groups: the disadvantaged, ordinary, and advantaged groups. data shows that the percentages of students who had preschool education experience among the three groups are 68.03%, 81.59%, and 89.10%, respectively, with significant gaps (x 2 = 675, p= 0.000). for urban and rural groups, the proportions of students with preschool education experience are 84.94% and 75.71%, respectively, indicating a considerable difference (x 2 = 254, p= 0.000). the control variables this study has controlled individual-, family-, and school-related variables that may pose impact on individual preschool attendance and cognitive ability. individual-related control variables include gender, grade, type of hukou (registered permanent residence), and being the only child in the family or not. family-related control variables include family economic circumstances before the student’s primary school attendance and the average number of years of schooling in the local county or city district where the student lives. the school-related control variable is the location of the school (rural school= 1, urban school= 0). research methods  coarsened exact matching (cem) cem established by iacus, king, and porro (2012) was determined as an effective approach to define the net impact of preschool education experience on cognitive ability of disadvantaged students.  hierarchical logistic regression li & lei. (hubei). preschool experience for disadvantaged students in academic achievements. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1669 the main purpose of this study is to examine whether preschool education experience can help disadvantaged students become resilient students. the dependent variable in the study is a binary variable (1= being resilient student, 0= being non-resilient student), which necessitates a logistic regression. moreover, data comes from the two dimensions: the student and the school. in order to reduce the impact of intraclass correlation, this study adopted hierarchical logistic regression for analysis. research findings the cognitive ability of disadvantaged students disadvantaged students have significantly poorer cognitive ability than their ordinary and advantaged peers. family limitations in financial, cultural, and social capital have hindered the development of cognitive ability of disadvantaged students. the impact of preschool education experience on academic resilience of disadvantaged students after controlling for individual-, family-, school-, and district-related factors, preschool education experience can effectively predict the likelihood of disadvantaged children becoming resilient students. the disadvantaged students who have received preschool education had a 24.7% higher probability of becoming resilient students than those without any preschool education experience. therefore, early childhood education is a potential booster of academic resilience of disadvantaged students. the heterogeneity analysis the rate of preschool enrollment of rural children is prominently lower than that of their urban peers. in terms of the difference in the effect of preschool education between rural and urban disadvantaged students, preschool attendance can well predict academic resilience of rural disadvantaged students, but has no significant influence on their urban counterparts’ school resilience according to the results of heterogeneity analysis. conclusions preschool education is the start of one’s lifelong training and an indicator of social equity. as a basic component of social welfare, preschool education affects the growth of hundreds of millions of children. high quality preschool service for disadvantaged children can compensate for the adverse impact of their unfavorable family background and potentially bridge the performance gap between disadvantaged and advantaged teenagers. we can conclude from the evidence based on ceps data that: (i) disadvantaged children’ access to preschool education is still limited; their preschool attendance rate is below 70%, considerably lower than that of their ordinary and advantaged peers. (ii) preschool education experience is beneficial to disadvantaged students in developing academic resilience. early childhood education can effectively promote the growth of li & lei. (hubei). preschool experience for disadvantaged students in academic achievements. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1670 cognitive ability of disadvantaged students, indicating that it plays a compensatory role in offsetting the adverse effect of their disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. in addition, preschool education experience can effectively predict the probability of disadvantaged students’ becoming resilient students, which is 24.7% higher than that among disadvantaged students without such experience. references britto, p. r., yoshikawa, h., & boller, k. (2011). quality of early childhood development programs in global contexts: rationale for investment, conceptual framework and implications for equity and commentaries. social policy report, 25(2):1-31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/j.23793988.2011.tb00067.x darmstadt, g., yang, j., nie, j. c., an, q., liu, k., & shi, y. j. (2019). promoting early childhood development: from individual to society. journal of east china normal university (education science edition), 37(3):164-172. heckman, j. j. & raut, l. k. (2016). intergenerational long-term effects of preschoolstructural estimates from a discrete dynamic programming mode. journal of econometrics, 191(1):164-175. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016%2fj.jeconom.2015.1 0.001 iacus, s. m., king, g., & porro, g. (2012). causal inference without balance checking: coarsened exact matching. political analysis, 20(1):1-24. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mpr013 oecd. (2011). against the odds: disadvantaged students who succeed in school. oecd publishing. 2011. doi: https://doi.org/10.1787/19963777 pang, l. j. & xia, j. (2013). strategies for developing global preschool education: popularization, equity and high quality. journal of educational studies, 9(3):49-55. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of education and economics, 2022(05):50-57. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 李贞义 & 雷万鹏. (2022). 学前教育能助力处境不利学生成为抗逆学生吗?—来自 ceps 基线 数据的经验证据. 教育与经济, 2022(5):50-57. received: 14 november 2022 revised: 21 december 2022 accepted: 24 december 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2379-3988.2011.tb00067.x https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2379-3988.2011.tb00067.x https://doi.org/10.1016%2fj.jeconom.2015.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1016%2fj.jeconom.2015.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mpr013 https://doi.org/10.1787/19963777 1absbract-wanpenglei-bece_titlenov_2023 1absbract-wanpenglei-bece_maintextnov2023 how is middle-class parents’ education anxiety generated? a study based on a survey of home education of junior secondary school students in 8 provinces and cities jingya luo, xinzhuo zhu huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan 430074, china abstract: drawing on a 2022 survey of home education of junior secondary school students in china’ eight provincial administrative regions, this study seeks to examine the chief factors influencing the generation of education anxiety in chinese middle-class parents using a moderated mediation model. research findings include that: (1) education anxiety is pervasive among middle-class parents who exhibit high levels of education anxiety but low levels of education involvement; (2) the parent’s perception of educational stratification can significantly predict their education anxiety; (3) the relationship between the parent’s perception of educational stratification and their education anxiety is mediated by their expectation of child education; (4) the parent’s perception of educational competition has a moderating effect on the relationship between their educational expectation and education anxiety. best evidence in chinese education 2024; 18(2):1907-1911 doi: 10.15354/bece.24.ar138 how to cite: luo, j., & zhu, x. (2024). how is middle-class parents’ education anxiety generated? a study based on a survey of home education of junior secondary school students in 8 provinces and cities. best evidence in chinese education, 2024, 18(2):1907-1911. keywords: parental educational anxiety, educational stratification, middle-class parents, parental involvement article luo & zhu. (china). how is middle-class parents’ education anxiety generated? bece, vol.18, no.2, 2024 1908 correspondence to: xinzhuo zhu, school of education, huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan 430074, china, e-mail: 57097061@qq.com conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2024 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:57097061@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ luo & zhu. (china). how is middle-class parents’ education anxiety generated? bece, vol.18, no.2, 2024 1909 introduction ducation anxiety is currently pervasive among chinese parents, particularly chinese middle-class parents, who are typically overly concerned with the role of education in social stratification and mobility (i.e., their perceptions of education stratification). middle-class parents pay inordinate attention to the education of their children, leading to an ongoing increase in education anxiety among them. this study focuses on examining the chief factors for the generation of middle-class parents’ education anxiety with the view to offering implications for education anxiety alleviation in this group. research hypotheses h 1: the parent’s perception of educational stratification is an effective predictor of their education anxiety. those who endorse educational stratification have higher levels of anxiety about their children’s education. h 2: the parent’s educational expectation mediates the relationship between their perception of educational stratification and their education anxiety. h 3: the parent’s perception of educational competition has a moderating effect on the relationship between their educational expectations and education anxiety. the correlation between educational expectations and education anxiety is more significant among parents with more intense feelings of educational competition. research methodology data sources this study sourced data from a 2022 survey of home education of junior secondary school students in eight provincial administrative regions by the research group of the project “education anxiety of the new-generation middle-class parents,” supported by the china national social sciences fund. in this study, we define the middle class as the group of people who are employed as middleand lower-level cadres in public organizations and middle-level management of large businesses, with a college or above education background and with an annual household income of 100,000 960,000 rmb. according to these screening criteria, a sample of 4,913 middle-class families was obtained. establishing variables e luo & zhu. (china). how is middle-class parents’ education anxiety generated? bece, vol.18, no.2, 2024 1910 in this study, the parent’s perception of educational stratification is the independent variable, indicated by the degree to which the interviewed parent agrees with the notion that education is the most important channel for social mobility. parental educational anxiety is the dependent variable, measured with the parental educational anxiety scale developed by the said research group. the parent’s educational expectation is the mediation variable, indicated by the parent’s attitudes toward their children’s enrollment in general high schools, prestigious high schools, and top-rank universities. the parent’s perception of educational competition is the moderation variable. in addition, this study controls family-related as well as student-related factors that can potentially affect the parent’s education anxiety. data analysis the study conducts empirical analysis of the theoretical models it proposes using the spss process program developed by hayes and the path analysis method. model 4 is used to test the mediating effect of the parent’s educational expectation on the relationship between their perception of educational stratification and their education anxiety. model 14 is used to test the moderating effect of the parent’s perception of educational competition on the relationship between their educational expectation and their education anxiety. research findings (i) education anxiety is pervasive among chinese middle-class parents, who display high levels of education anxiety and low education involvement. the child’s academic performance and physical and mental health are the primary sources of education anxiety of the parent; supervision of the child’s homework completion is the chief form of parental educational involvement. (ii) the parent’s endorsement of educational stratification positively predicts their education anxiety. (iii) the parent’s educational expectation mediates the relationship between their perception of educational stratification and education anxiety, and the direct mediating effect is much higher than the indirect effect. (iv) the parent’s perception of educational competition moderates the relationship between their educational expectation and education anxiety. luo & zhu. (china). how is middle-class parents’ education anxiety generated? bece, vol.18, no.2, 2024 1911 the chinese version of this article has been published in education & economy, 40(2):40-49. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 骆婧雅, 朱新卓. (2024). 中产阶层家长教育焦虑是如何形成的?——基于 8 省市初中生家庭教育 状况的调查. 教育与经济, 40(2):40-49. received: november 01, 2024 revised: november 07, 2024 accepted: november 11, 2024 how is middle-class parents’ education anxiety generated? a study based on a survey of home education of junior secondary school students in 8 provinces and cities jingya luo, xinzhuo zhu 8bjingya luo, xinzhuo zhu huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan 430074, china 9bhuazhong university of science and technology, wuhan 430074, china keywords: parental educational anxiety, educational stratification, middle-class parents, parental involvement correspondence to: xinzhuo zhu, school of education, huazhong university of science and technology, wuhan 430074, china, e-mail: 57097061@qq.com conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2024 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. introduction e ducation anxiety is currently pervasive among chinese parents, particularly chinese middle-class parents, who are typically overly concerned with the role of education in social stratification and mobility (i.e., their perceptions of education stratification). middle-class parents pay inordinate attention to the education of their children, leading to an ongoing increase in education anxiety among them. this study focuses on examining the chief factors for the generation of middle-class parents’ education anxiety with the view to offering implications for education anxiety alleviation in this group. research hypotheses h 1: the parent’s perception of educational stratification is an effective predictor of their education anxiety. those who endorse educational stratification have higher levels of anxiety about their children’s education. h 2: the parent’s educational expectation mediates the relationship between their perception of educational stratification and their education anxiety. h 3: the parent’s perception of educational competition has a moderating effect on the relationship between their educational expectations and education anxiety. the correlation between educational expectations and education anxiety is more significant among parents with more intense feelings of educational competition. research methodology data sources this study sourced data from a 2022 survey of home education of junior secondary school students in eight provincial administrative regions by the research group of the project “education anxiety of the new-generation middle-class parents,” supported by the china national social sciences fund. in this study, we define the middle class as the group of people who are employed as middleand lower-level cadres in public organizations and middle-level management of large businesses, with a college or above education background and with an annual household income of 100,000 960,000 rmb. according to these screening criteria, a sample of 4,913 middle-class families was obtained. establishing variables in this study, the parent’s perception of educational stratification is the independent variable, indicated by the degree to which the interviewed parent agrees with the notion that education is the most important channel for social mobility. parental educational anxiety is the dependent variable, measured with the parental educational anxiety scale developed by the said research group. the parent’s educational expectation is the mediation variable, indicated by the parent’s attitudes toward their children’s enrollment in general high schools, prestigious high schools, and top-rank universities. the parent’s perception of educational competition is the moderation variable. in addition, this study controls family-related as well as student-related factors that can potentially affect the parent’s education anxiety. data analysis the study conducts empirical analysis of the theoretical models it proposes using the spss process program developed by hayes and the path analysis method. model 4 is used to test the mediating effect of the parent’s educational expectation on the relationship between their perception of educational stratification and their education anxiety. model 14 is used to test the moderating effect of the parent’s perception of educational competition on the relationship between their educational expectation and their education anxiety. research findings (i) education anxiety is pervasive among chinese middle-class parents, who display high levels of education anxiety and low education involvement. the child’s academic performance and physical and mental health are the primary sources of education anxiety of the parent; supervision of the child’s homework completion is the chief form of parental educational involvement. (ii) the parent’s endorsement of educational stratification positively predicts their education anxiety. (iii) the parent’s educational expectation mediates the relationship between their perception of educational stratification and education anxiety, and the direct mediating effect is much higher than the indirect effect. (iv) the parent’s perception of educational competition moderates the relationship between their educational expectation and education anxiety. received: november 01, 2024 revised: november 07, 2024 accepted: november 11, 2024 bece. newsletter vol.19, no.1, 2025, bece 1927 the relationship between principal authentic leadership and teacher knowledge sharing: an empirical analysis based on the self-determination theory by mao, y., zhang, w., & guan, d. correspondence to: wanying zhang, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: wanyingbnu@163.com eacher knowledge sharing is a process in which teachers collaborate to boost their understanding and construction of knowledge by integrating fragmentary knowledge owned by individuals into a shared knowledge system. it helps promote common development in teachers as well as enhance the school’s quality of knowledge base as an educational community. nevertheless, the teacher may tend to keep their knowledge private to maintain their professional distinctiveness. also, educational and instructional expertise is often interwoven into the education process, and its implicit nature is an impediment to its sharing. hence, teacher knowledge sharing has become a pronounced issue in modern school management. recent research in this area reveals that the principal leadership style has a significant impact on the teachers’ knowledge sharing behavior. this study investigates the relationship between principal authentic leadership and teacher knowledge sharing, as well as its influencing factors, from the perspective of the selfdetermination theory. research findings: • principal authentic leadership can positively predict teacher knowledge sharing. this leadership style ensures the security of the behavior of publicly sharing information in teachers and prompts their realization of the significance of mutual support. • the effect of principal authentic leadership on teacher knowledge sharing is moderated by the teacher’s perception of insider status. stronger perceptions of insider status elicit positive behaviors in teachers; enhanced teacher perceptions of organizational membership lead to significant elevation of the knowledge sharing intention in them. • social-emotional skills of teachers mediate the relationship between principal authentic leadership and teacher knowledge sharing. principal authentic leadership is effective in improving the social-emotional skills of teachers, driving them to showcase their value by sharing information with co-workers. t mailto:wanyingbnu@163.com vol.19, no.1, 2025, bece 1928 the authors of the study proposed the following suggests: (i) enhance the authentic leadership capability of school principals to ensure the teachers’ rights to voice their opinions; (ii) foster the teachers’ perceptions of insider status, bolster their social-emotional skills, and promote their identification with the school’s mission and values; (iii) increase the teachers’ agency in the school’s development and improve their job satisfaction to instigate their active engagement in knowledge sharing. source: modern education management, 2024; 2024(7):1-12. influences of teachers, students and school climate on bullying victimization: evidence from china ying zhu, 1,3 yiying teng 2,3 1. shanghai sanda university, shanghai, china 2. shanghai zhongqiao vocational and technical university, shanghai, china; 3. chapman university, california, usa abstract: given the common occurrence of school bullying incidents and high prevalence rates of victimization in china, this study aims to explore the association between multiple school-related predictors and chinese adolescents’ overall experiences with bullying victimization. guided by the social-ecological framework for violence prevention, this study integrated different factors involving teachers, students, and school climate into one single research to detect the bullying problem more systematically and holistically. further, the study applied the data from the 2018 program for international student assessment while utilizing binary logistic regression analyses to perceive anti-bullying variables and their relationships with bullying victimization. the study revealed that teachers’ emotional, instrumental, and informational support other than appraisal support were negatively associated with students’ experiences of being bullied and victimized. the research also indicated that students’ sense of belonging, a cooperative school environment, and classroom disciplinary climate played a buffering role in bullying victimization while competition in school settings adversely increased overall bullying exposure. the results have highlighted the integration of various predictors in influencing multiple social relations and school environments to battle against in-person bullying. the results also have implications for stopping cyberbullying to achieve inclusive school education for all in the post-covid-19 era. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 12(1):1547-1571. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.or065 how to cite: zhu, y., & teng, y. (2022). influences of teachers, students and school climate on bullying victimization: evidence from china. best evidence in chinese zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no.1, 2022 1548 education, 12(1):1547-1571. keywords: bullying victimization, classroom disciplinary climate, cooperation and competition, sense of belonging, teacher support about the authors: ying zhu, shanghai sanda university, shanghai, china; and chapman university, california, usa. e-mail: yinzhu@chapman.edu correspondence to: yiying teng, shanghai zhongqiao vocational and technical university, shanghai, china; and chapman university, california, usa. e-mail: yiteng@chapman.edu author contribution: zhu and teng contributed equally to the design, draft, critical revision, and final agreement of the present article to be published. conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:yinzhu@chapman.edu mailto:yiteng@chapman.edu http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1549 he significance of bullying prevention and intervention has been well addressed in a series of initiatives taken by the chinese government, including the guidance on the prevention and treatment of bullying and school violence in 2016, comprehensive plan on strengthening the management of bullying among primary and middle school students in 2017, and the newly revised minor protection law that took effect in 2021. however, school bullying still topped the agenda of this year’s two plenary sessions of china’s political bodies (2022 two sessions) and incidents of bullying victimization are often reported in media outlets. in one case, a teenager in guangdong province drowned after being slapped and knocked by peers in a restroom (zuo, 2021); in another case, an adolescent from anhui province suffered from being bullied by a group of 12 schoolmates (china national radio [cnr], 2022). these single incidents are just a tip of the iceberg and in fact, more instances of school bullying have surfaced with victimization constituting a major source of injuries (li et al., 2020). statistics from a national survey led by central china normal university has revealed that the proportion of students who had bullying experiences in 2019 and 2020 amounted to 32.4 percent (zhao, 2021). worse still, when classes were moved online due to the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, cyberbullying (a form of bullying using the internet) still persisted in china (han et al., 2021). that is why legislators and deputies at the 2022 two sessions called on schools and communities to speed up the process of building a bullyingfree, equitable, and inclusive campus for all. to achieve this goal, it is imperative for chinese researchers and educators to identify intervention predictors pertaining to school violence and bullying victimization and work out detailed plans to reduce the incidence of bullying behaviors. as for the factors predicting bullying victimization, teachers, students and school climate are generally regarded as three major components for assessing an engaging or a horrifying learning experience (e.g., ahnert et al., 2012; maxwell et al., 2017). among them, teacher support (flaspohler et al., 2009; huang & zhao, 2019), a fundamental need to belong (underwood & ehrenreich, 2014), a socially cooperative environment (van ryzin & roseth, 2018a), and benign competition in one’s immediate settings (volk et al., 2015) have been respectively evidenced in previous bullying literature. derived from classroom settings, management style or disciplinary climate is more associated with students’ academic achievement (sortkær & reimer, 2018), but seldom mentioned to be directly linked to school bullying. further, researchers’ renewed attention to the fundamental relationships involving teachers, students, classroom settings, and school cultures could help to explain cyberbullying patterns during the covid-19 pandemic (vaillancourt t zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1550 et al., 2021). but in the chinese context, little has been known about the multiple school-related factors that jointly work on anti-bullying endeavors. therefore, this empirical study aims to explore the association between the different facets of school learning and chinese students’ overall experiences with bullying victimization while controlling for such demographics as gender, age, student backgrounds, and grade repetition. three overarching research questions have guided this exploration. (i) how much variance in overall bullying experience is explained by school-related factors and demographics? (ii) do school-related predictors have associations with high or low frequencies of bullying experiences? (iii)what intervention factors predict the likelihood of chinese students’ high or low exposure to bullying victimization? literature review theoretical framework guided by the social-ecological framework for violence prevention (cdc, 2004), this study addresses the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community, and societal factors in relation to bullying and bullying victimization. originating from bronfenbrenner’s (1979) social-ecological model (sem), this updated framework offers an ecological angle to “investigate the combined impact of social contexts and influences on behavioral development” (swearer et al., 2010, p. 42). as figure 1 shows, a range of factors work to alert people to the possible risks for experiencing or perpetrating violence while the overlapping circles indicate how one level of factors influences another and how different levels of factors coexist to function on the entire model. at the individual level, prevention strategies may involve personal attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that prevent or stop violence. at relationship and community levels, a person’s close connection to family members and active interaction with schools/workplaces/ neighborhoods may provide a pathway for risk reduction and violence prevention, including teacher-student interaction, positive peer relations, and reliable school/work environments. the final level (societal factors) features social and cultural norms that encourage or hamper violence. the following sections briefly introduce the variables that fall within this framework, which will form the basis of the bullying model to be tested in our empirical study and help to understand anti-bullying efforts over time and beyond human-level impact. zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1551 figure 1: social-ecological model a framework for prevention. note: adapted from centers for disease control and prevention (p.5), 2004, cdc. teacher support students’ healthy development cannot be sustained without the involvement of teachers, who provide support for, build trust in, and form close interpersonal relationships with students (e.g., hughes et al., 2012; quin et al., 2018; ryan & patrick, 2001; wentzel et al., 2010). moreover, such teacher-student relationships seem more collaborative rather than hierarchical (schleicher, 2018). tardy (1985) pointed out that teacher support as a form of social support was composed of four categories, namely emotional, instrumental, appraisal, and informational support. emotional support is the type of teacher support that reflects love, concern, empathy, confidence, and patience; instrumental support refers to the substantial help passed on to the students in real need; appraisal support could be interpreted as the constructive feedback and appropriate evaluation system offered for students who will then know where and how to improve their learning behaviors; informational support is viewed as instruction, guidance, assistance, and counselling provided to help with students’ problem-solving (wentzel, 2016). zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1552 previous literature has revealed that teacher support positively correlates with students’ emotional and cognitive development (quin, 2016; quin et al., 2018) as well as with their interest in classroom activities (lapointe et al., 2005) and their academic enjoyment (ahmed et al., 2010; ma et al., 2021). despite much attention devoted to the connection between teacher support and academic performance, scholars have begun to realize the importance of anti-bullying efforts in the presence of teachers. furlong and chung (1995) early indicated in their empirical research that those nonvictims are almost twice as likely as bullying victims to report the presence of a teacher to whom they can express their problems and pour out their feelings; other studies (e.g., baik et al., 2019; colarossi & eccles, 2003; mazzer & rickwood, 2015) then emphasized the close relationship between teacher influences and students’ well-being, which could further determine students’ sense of security, problem behavior and victimization experience (berkowitz & benbenishty, 2012; mcneely & falci, 2004). besides, through analyzing the index of informational support, huang and zhao (2019) implied that teacher support could slightly mitigate bullying exposure, but they did not discuss the remaining three categories. hence in this study, all four types of teacher support will be examined in relation to bullying victimization in china. students’ sense of belonging in educational settings, belonging is identified as the feeling of security, acceptance and inclusion a student connects to peers, teachers, and the school (goodenow, 1993). research shows that students’ sense of belonging is closely linked to academic achievement (wang & eccles, 2012; wang & holcombe, 2010) and psychological adjustment (lester et al., 2013; loukas et al., 2016), and has sparked renewed concern for educators as a result of a high prevalence of bullying exposure (duggins et al., 2016; ma, 2003). previous studies have suggested that the stronger a sense of belonging students have, the lower the level of bullying perpetration and victimization occurs (goldweber et al., 2013; raskauskas et al., 2010). accordingly, we hypothesize that students’ sense of belonging might play a buffering role in bullying victimization while influencing multiple relationships and different communities. classroom disciplinary climate a major component of a positive classroom environment, disciplinary climate is provided when students listen to their teachers and peers attentively and focus only on their academic tasks without the interference of noise or zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1553 disorder (moos, 1979). three key elements characterize the variable: students’ reverence for classroom rules as always, teachers’ utmost responsibility for ensuring a favorable learning environment, and peers’ disruptive-free behavior in the classroom (cheema & kitsantas, 2014; matsumura et al., 2008). a positive disciplinary classroom secures more teaching and learning opportunities (mostafa et al., 2018), better academic performance (blank & shavit, 2016), students’ psychological wellbeing (kim et al., 2021; wang et al., 2020), and the efforts against bullying involvement (e.g., victimization and witnessing) (kim et al., 2021). additionally, an orderly, nondisruptive classroom can also facilitate students’ sense of belonging (organization for economic cooperation and development [oecd], 2017) and benefit ethnic minorities and students in a disadvantaged position (cheema & kitsantas, 2014). in this research, we hypothesize that classroom disciplinary climate might predict bullying victimization while influencing various social relations. cooperation and competition skills of cooperation is nurtured in an educational setting where students learn together (usually in small groups) to fulfill well-structured learning tasks and accomplish a well-defined learning goal (van ryzin & roseth, 2019; zook, 2018). if properly created, a cooperative learning environment brings about a high level of peer relatedness or peer relations (roseth et al., 2008; van ryzin & roseth, 2018a), which in turn promotes the attainment of learning goals (johnson et al., 2014) as well as encourages positive feelings and supportive interactions. ultimately, benign spiral emerges with the repetition of collaborative learning atmosphere and positive social interactions within the group (deutsch, 1949, 1962). after class, students still have the opportunity to enhance their favorable peer relations by relating each individual’s contribution to the performance of the entire group. this type of cooperation with an emphasis on social contact and skills benefits antibullying behaviors and helps to reduce bullying victimization (van ryzin & roseth, 2019). the opposite side of school learning is perceived as having a climate of competition, in which students compare one another or work against each other to obtain their academic or social benefits (e.g., excellent grades and admission to prestigious universities) (johnson & johnson, 1978; volk et al., 2015). views differ as to whether competition should be fostered in the learning process. one perspective considers competition as being supported by in-group distinctions, social hierarchy, and socioeconomic backgrounds and hence linked to increased bullying (volk et al., 2015); another opinion zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1554 identifies competition as a catalyst for student engagement and students’ competitive instincts (anderson, 2006); a third perception regards competition as potentially feasible depending on different disciplines and educational levels (chen & chen, 2014; vandercruysse et al., 2013). whatever views prevail and whatever environmental attribute is outlined, students need to learn to create and bolster positive social relations while taking advantage of every factor in the learning community (e.g., teacher and peers) to achieve what is to be achieved (johnson & johnson, 1978; gutiérrez-braojos et al. 2019). in this study, we hypothesize that both cooperation and competition might work together to influence school violence and bullying victimization while affecting different relationships and school environments. study design previous bullying-related literature has identified that in both chinese and non-chinese contexts, gender, grade repetition (or the practice of having students remain in the same grade without promotion), and economic, social and cultural status (escs) all closely correlate with bullying exposure and bullying victimization. therefore, this study regards the above literaturesupported predictors as student-level control variables (as they might confound the bullying model) and centers the underlying mechanism of the association between the fore mentioned school-related predictors and bullying victimization for chinese adolescents. in line with the theoretical model and out of the urge to identify anti-bullying factors in the chinese context, we proposed the following three hypotheses for the present study (see figure 2). h1: teacher support (at the relationship level) significantly influences bullying victimization at school. h1-1: emotional support significantly influences bullying victimization. h1-2: instrumental support significantly influences bullying victimization. h1-3: appraisal support significantly influences bullying victimization. h1-4: informational support significantly influences bullying victimization. h2: students’ sense of belonging (at the community level) strongly predicts bullying victimization. h3: school climate (at the community level) greatly affects bullying victimization while influencing various social relations. h3-1: classroom disciplinary climate strongly predicts bullying victimization. zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1555 figure 2: school-related predictors hypothesized for bulling victimization. h3-2: cooperation greatly influences bullying victimization. h3-3: competition greatly influences bullying victimization. methods sample this study analyzed the publicly available dataset from the 2018 program for international student assessment (pisa 2018) conducted by oecd in china’s beijing, shanghai, jiangsu, and zhejiang provinces (b-s-j-z, china). pisa, a triennial survey featuring 15-year-olds, measures to what extent they have obtained the critical knowledge and skills essential for active involvement in society. pisa 2018 adopted a stratified two-stage sampling procedure to select sample students. in the initial phase, schools were chosen through systematic probability proportional to size (pps) sampling (oecd, 2019c). in the subsequent phase, 42 students were selected with equal probability within each sampled school. for schools with a required number of students fewer than 42, all 15year-olds were singled out (oecd, 2019c). ultimately, 12,058 adolescents were selected from 361 schools, among which 4306 (35.7%) came from lower-secondary schools, 5594 (46.4%) from upper secondary schools, and 2158 (17.9%) from vocational schools. as stipulated by pisa’s international protocol (oecd, 2019b), pisa 2018 zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1556 china data met the minimum requirements of the weighted response rate for selected schools within participating countries/regions (85%) and that for students from those selected schools (80%). before data collection, informed consent was acquired from principals, teachers, parents, and students. the secondary data analyses of pisa 2018 would be crucial for this study as the large-scale survey through a careful sampling process reflected the real bullying situation in chinese schools. dependent variable the dependent variable in pisa 2018 was measured from the perspective of the bullying victims (oecd, 2019a) and assessed by asking students to report how often they had experienced physical, verbal and social forms of school bullying during the past 12 months (see table 1). participants responded on a four-point likert-type scale ranging from 1 = never or almost never to 4 = once a week or more. the corresponding items were then added up for the bullying scale with the internal consistency or reliability tested (cronbach’s α = 0.843). demographic variables included in the demographic variables were such student background predictors as age, gender, grade repetition, and the escs index (see table 2). age, a continuous variable, spanned from 15.33 to 15.77 years old (mean = 15.77, sd = 0.29). gender and grade repetition were all used as dummy variables with “0” for boys/no grade repetition and “1” for girls/grade repetition. the escs index, a weighted score rooted in pisa 2018, contained three family background variables, namely home possessions, parents’ highest educational levels, and their highest occupational status (oecd, 2019c). independent variables all the independent variables (teacher support, students’ sense of belonging, cooperation and competition, classroom disciplinary climate) in the study were directly derived from the pisa 2018 database (see table 3). to ensure validity and reliability of the independent scales applied to this research, scaling procedures and construct validation of context questionnaire data were well documented in the dataset with the internal consistency (cronbach’s alpha) all exceeding 0.800 (cronbach’s α > 0.800) (oecd, 2019c). parallel with tardy’s (1985) and wentzel’s (2016) categorization of teacher support, this study applied four indices from pisa 2018: teachint (rep zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1557 table 1: dependent variable: bullying scale. bullying scale: 1 (never or almost never) to 4 (once a week or more) 1. other students left me out of things on purpose. 2. other students made fun of me. 3. i was threatened by other students. 4. other students took away or destroyed things that belonged to me. 5. i got hit or pushed around by other students. 6. other students spread nasty rumors about me. table 3: independent variables and scale reliabilities. teacher support emotional support (teachint) cronbach’s α = 0.893 it reflects teachers’ love, concern, enthusiasm, and encouragement for students. instrumental support (dirins) cronbach’s α = 0.805 it represents pedagogically tangible help (e.g., clear goals for learning, instructions, a short summary of the previous lesson, and checking questions on whether teaching has been understood) in student learning. appraisal support (perfeed) cronbach’s α = 0.892 it refers to the feedback on students’ strengths in a subject, the areas that should be improved, and how the areas can be improved. informational support (teachsup) cronbach’s α = 0.851 it indicates guidance, assistance, and counseling provided to help students understand the subject. sense of belonging cronbach’s α = 0.822 it refers to students’ perceptions of community connectedness and school inclusion. school climate disciplinary climate in the test language classroom (disclima) cronbach’s α = 0.892 it measures order and discipline to be maintained in classroom settings. perception of cooperation (percoop) cronbach’s α = 0.924 it shows the environment where cooperation is addressed by students in target schools. perception of competition (percomp) cronbach’s α = 0.829 it refers to the environment where competitiveness is reported by students in target schools. table 2: descriptive statistics for demographic variables. continuous demographic variable(s) minimum maximum mean sd n age (years) 15.33 16.25 15.77 0.29 12,058 categorical demographic variables variables frequency % gender female male 5,775 6,283 47.9 52.1 grade repetition no yes 11,237 753 93.2 6.8 zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1558 resenting emotional support), dirins (indicating instrumental support), perfeed (reflecting appraisal support), and teachsup (pointing to informational support). as for students’ sense of belonging, the index naturally derived from the pisa data examined how easy it was for students to make friends at school, how they were welcomed or accepted by peers, and how they felt isolated or asocial in their community (goodenow, 1993). for school climate predictors in pisa 2018, disciplinary climate in the test language classroom (disclima), perception of cooperation (percoop), and perception of competition (percomp) were singled out for study. the disciplinary climate index described how orderly or disruptive the entire classroom environment appeared with higher values pertaining to positive climate appropriate for student learning and classroom communication. meanwhile, the cooperation index asked respondents to assess if they value cooperation, collaborate with each other, and are encouraged to cooperate at school; the competition index required participants to report if they cherish competition and compete with each other in the school environment. analytic procedure because the dependent variable (the bullying scale) was not normally distributed, we split it into a dummy one (high and low frequencies of being bullied or victimized) in response to the research questions. low frequency means that participants never or almost never experienced the listed forms of bullying events while high frequency indicates that respondents experienced at least one of the listed bullying events a few times a year or more (see table 4). further, inspired by previous logistic regression models used to understand chinese students’ perceptions of and experiences with an educational phenomenon (allen, 2019), we conducted the research developing a stepwise binary logit model (pallant, 2016). utilizing spss software version 28.0, the whole analytical process of data began with the entrance of demographic variables to create a predictive model (model 1), which was followed by the addition of other variables of interest, namely the teachersupport model (model 2), the sense-of-belonging model (model 3), and the school-climate model (model 4). the final model (model 5) ended up with all the above predictors. however, preliminary assumption tests revealed that for models 3 and 4 1 (see appendix i), the hosmer and lemeshow goodness of fit tests were not passed (significance values all below 0.05), suggesting no support for these three models (hosmer & lemeshow, 2000). hence, this study only concentrated on the other three models (i.e., model 1: demographic model; model 2: teacher-support model; model 5: full-predictor model). zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1559 table 5: logistic regression analysis of demographic, teacher-support and full-predictor models. variables model 1a model 2b model 5c b s.e. exp(b) b s.e. exp(b) b s.e. exp(b) gender age grade repetition escs 0.506‡ 0.004 0.245† -0.072‡ 0.037 0.064 0.078 0.017 1.658 1.004 1.278 0.930 0.524‡ -0.104 0.264‡ -0.017 0.039 0.066 0.080 0.018 1.690 0.901 1.302 0.983 0.495‡ -0.235‡ 0.211* 0.030 0.040 0.069 0.084 0.019 1.640 0.791 1.235 1.031 teachint dirins perfeed teachsup -0.264‡ -0.110‡ -0.022 -0.200‡ 0.025 0.025 0.024 0.028 0.768 0.896 0.978 0.819 -0.098‡ -0.064* 0.30 -0.142‡ 0.027 0.026 0.025 0.030 0.907 0.938 1.031 0.867 belong -0.454‡ 0.027 0.635 disclima -0.311‡ 0.022 0.733 percoop percomp -0.168‡ 0.248‡ 0.023 0.022 0.846 1.281 notes. *<0.05, †p < 0.01, ‡p < 0.001 a demographic model, b teacher-support model, c full-predictor model results through binary logistic regression analyses, this study explored the likelihood that chinese adolescents were exposed to high or low frequencies of being bullied or victimized. for model 1 using age, gender, grade repetition, and escs, the likelihood-ratio test produced a chi-square value of 16,101.62 and was statistically significant (p < 0.001), indicating the logistic model was better than the null model without predictors. the chi-square value for the hosmer-lemeshow test was 11.07 with a significance level of 0.198 (p > 0.05), suggesting the data fit the above model well (hosmer & lemeshow, 2000). the statistical significance (χ 2 (4, n = 11,847) = 224.125, p < 0.001) of the demographic model implied that it was able to distinguish between respondents’ high or low exposure to bullying experiences. moreover, the table 4: descriptive statistics for categorical dependent variable(s). variables frequency % bullying low 6,463 54.5 scale high 5,390 45.5 zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1560 model as a whole explained 1.9% (cox & snell r square) and 2.5% (nagelkerke r square) of the variance in the two bullying groups, and correctly classified 56% of the cases with a very small improvement of 1.5% in predictions. as presented in table 5, three of the four demographic variables made a unique statistically significant contribution to the model (except for age, p > 0.05). this meant that male students were more likely to be found in the high-level bullying groups than girls when controlling for other factors in the model. the strongest predictor of reporting the high-level bullying groups was gender, recording an odds ratio of 1.658. likewise, the odds ratio of being in the high-level bullying groups was positively associated with grade repetition (p < 0.01). for escs, its negative correlation with bullying exposure and bullying victimization was identified (p < 0.001). in model 2 with all teacher-support predictors added to the demographics, the likelihood-ratio test and the hosmer-lemeshow test again identified the model as being worthwhile with the former yielding a χ 2 (8) of 15,498.97 (n = 11,081, p < 0.001) and the latter obtaining the chi-square value of χ 2 (8) of 9.67 (p > 0.05). moreover, able to distinguish between participants’ high or low exposure to bullying behaviors (χ 2 (8, n = 11818) = 786.503, p < 0.001), the teacher-support model explained 6.4% (cox & snell r square) and 8.6% (nagelkerke r square) of the variance in bullying groups, and correctly classified 61.2% of the cases with a modest improvement of 6.7% in predictions. as observed in table 5, five of the eight predictors made a unique statistically significant contribution to the model (gender, grade repetition, teachsup, dirins, teachint). the two demographic variables (gender and grade repetition) of reporting the highlevel bullying groups echoed those in model 1, recording a slightly higher odds ratio of 1.690 and 1.302 respectively when compared with those in model 1. additionally, adolescents with more teacher support (teachint, dirins, and teachsup) were 0.768, 0.896, and 0.819 times less likely to be reported in the high-level bullying groups (p < 0.001). this pointed to the fact that emotional, instrumental, and informational support all played a buffering role in bullying victimization with emotional support being most conducive to anti-bullying efforts. thus, hypothesis 1 was partially supported except for the role of appraisal support. in the final model (model 5) with all independent variables added, the likelihood-ratio test achieved a χ 2 (12) of 14,525.39 (n = 11,723, p < 0.001), suggesting that the model was better than the null model with all predictors removed. the hosmer-lemeshow test yielded a χ 2 (8) of 9.68 (p > 0.05), indicating that the data fit the model well. the whole model again signified its ability to differentiate between respondents’ high or low frequenzhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1561 cies of bullying exposure (χ 2 (8, n = 11,723) = 1,627.086, p < 0.001). moreover, the model as a whole explained 13% (cox & snell r square) and 17.3% (nagelkerke r square) of the variance in bullying groups, and correctly classified 65.8% of the cases with a remarkable improvement of 11.2% in predictions. ten of the 12 predictors made a unique statistically significant contribution to the model (gender, age, grade repetition, teachsup, dirins, teachint, disclima, percomp, percoop, and belong) except for escs and perfeed (p > 0.05). the two demographic variables (gender and grade repetition) of reporting the high-level bullying groups recorded a slightly lower odds ratio of 1.640 and 1.235 compared with those in models 1 and 2. statistically insignificant in the previous two models, age (p < 0.001) this time witnessed a 0.791 likelihood increase in the high-level bullying groups. for the three forms of teacher support (teachint, dirins, and teachsup), they displayed similar patterns as were revealed in model 2, reporting a mitigating effect on the high level of bullying exposure with instrumental support (dirins) replacing emotional support (teachint) in model 2 as the most effective form of teacher support for anti-bullying endeavors. here in the full-predictor model, the first hypothesis was again basically supported. regarding the newly added factors in the model, students with a strong sense of belonging, in a better disciplinary climate, and in a cooperative environment were respectively 0.733, 0.846, and 0.635 times less likely to be identified in the high-level bullying groups (p < 0.001). on the contrary, students in the school settings that fostered competition among peers were 1.281 times more likely to report a high level of bullying victimization (p < 0.001). thus, hypothesis 2 was fully supported while hypothesis 3 only was partially supported. discussion applying pisa 2018 china data and utilizing binary logit regression analyses, this study has added to the empirical experience by investigating the relationship between multiple intervention factors and bullying victimization involving teachers, students, and school climate in the chinese context. from the perspective of student characteristics, male adolescents, grade repeaters (regardless of their gender), younger students, and low-income students/students from disadvantaged families are more likely to be bullied and victimized, as has been reported in a variety of chinese literature (e.g., ba et al., 2019; huang & zhao, 2019; li et al., 2020; lian et al., 2021; yu & zhao, 2021). in this sense, top priority needs to be given to the above types of students when intervention measures are introduced locally or nationwide. zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1562 second, the research findings have verified that teacher support emotionally, informationally, and instrumentally moderates school bullying and bullying victimization. this could link teachers to their practical assistance and substantial help students can seek in case of bullying occurrence. such support at the relationship level could extend beyond daily instructions provided for adolescents and penetrate further into almost every aspect of classroom learning, eventually benefiting multiple levels of influencing factors within the social-ecological framework. for example, student-perceived love, concern, enthusiasm, encouragement, and guidance are beneficial not only to students themselves, but to teacher-student communication channels, peers’ recognition, positive school climate, and a set of core social values to be preserved. to minimize bullying exposure for all students, teachers are encouraged to treat students more fairly, evaluate their behavioral and mental progress more proactively, and offer timely support to those in academic difficulties and with life or socializing problems (bosworth et al., 2018). however, appraisal support, identified as a teacher’s feedback on students’ strengths or weaknesses, is more directly associated with their behavioral engagement (carvalho et al., 2020) and academic performance (e.g., carvalho et al. 2014; fyfe & rittle-johnson, 2016; wei & xie, 2017), thus requiring more empirical evidence to identify its possible correlation with bullying victimization. third, consistent with previous chinese studies (huang, 2020; li et al., 2020), this research has illustrated that students’ sense of belonging acts as an important buffer against the detriment of bullying victimization. this indicates that students’ identification with and connectedness to a peer group or a school environment at the community level are viewed as major social resources to protect student learning against being hampered by school violence/bullying victimization (adams & hannum, 2018). for school climate, the findings have demonstrated that a disciplinary, cooperative environment supported anti-bullying endeavors. specifically, this study augments prior research on cooperative learning by showing that a cooperative environment reduces bullying victimization while promoting peer relatedness across the entire student population (ryzin & roseth, 2019). however, a socially competitive climate in this study tends to catalyze bullying victimization, urging schools and educators to reconsider the balanced relationship between cooperation and competition in bringing about student engagement and facilitating anti-bullying behaviors in school settings (oecd, 2019a). besides, a positive school climate cannot be maintained without the participation of teachers, who help students cultivate such classroom habits as being friendly to and respectful for peers as well as becoming social, feeling inclusive, and fostering values that will form certain school zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1563 norms. the connectedness within the entire school system will in turn benefit teachers, students, and schools, and eventually bullying prevention and control efforts. therefore, a single bullying incident is interpreted not as an isolated phenomenon that probably causes victimization, but as the social behavior dynamically incorporated into an intricate network of interpersonal relationships, institutional factors, community contexts, and policy components. as is reflected in the socio-ecological framework, its interactive and reciprocal nature implies that individual behavior influences and is influenced by multiple levels of factors while shaping and being shaped by the socio-cultural environment (salihu et al., 2015; townsend & foster, 2011). in this sense, to better understand students’ bullying behaviors is not to split them from the larger social context—schools in which students acquire knowledge, communicate with teachers, get along with peers, develop egos, and gradually form the way a school culture is fostered or ruined. this may point to the necessity of creating improved school conditions for increasing anti-bullying awareness on campus and encouraging sustained behavioral change on bullies. the close contact between schools and individuals also promotes the building of a nonviolent campus and effectively supports the implementation of anti-bullying programs/policies. limitations despite our focus on school-based factors in bullying victimization and the strength in integrating multiple predictors to address the issue holistically, there exist limitations in this study. first, at the individual and relationship levels, only student-perceived teacher support was taken into consideration, but in fact in the entire school community, the involvement of school administrators, principals, and other school leaders would never be ignored (ministry of education [moe], 2021). their active participation in building an appropriate school climate and use of process-oriented strategies (bosworth et al., 2018) could exert a far-reaching impact on anti-bullying endeavors and reduction of victimization. besides, this study only featured 15-year-olds in general in the test language classroom, but seldom explored the subcategories of this student body including those marginalized or at-risk groups who are prone to be bullied or victimized (e.g., students with disabilities and under-achieving students) (moe, 2017, 2021). hence, future studies can be realized in showing concern for special student groups as well as considering professionals (e.g., school counselors) and school leadership in the battle against bullying. zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1564 implications the present study has provided implications for minimizing the impacts of bullying victimization and the development of different intervention measures from the perspective of school settings, especially in the context of chinese schools. theoretically, the research allows for the room to perceive school bullying and school violence as something complicated yet interconnected that springs from a combination of multiple influences upon individual behaviors. thus, the interaction of various levels of factors for violence prevention could offer an effective mechanism for the understanding of how school bullying occurs and what to do with bullying before it begins. empirically, the findings adds to the chinese-based evidence of the association between school-based predictors and anti-bullying awareness. since the enactment of the comprehensive plan on strengthening the management of bullying among primary and middle school students in 2017, great importance has been attached to anti-bullying education for all and bullying prevention before it develops (moe, 2017). based on the experience of anti-bullying legislation in other countries, china adheres to the principle of prevention as a primary concern and intervention as a top priority in an effort to push forward the establishment of an anti-bullying campus. under such circumstances, this research regards a harmonious classroom climate and a positive school environment as the starting point to develop a sense of security, form social values (e.g., justice, unity, collaboration, and responsibility) amid cultivation of self-awareness, and eventually curb bullying behaviors on campus. at the micro level, teachers play an indispensable part in teaching students what to learn and how to shape values as they spend a large proportion of time listening to adolescents’ voices and building rapport (schleicher, 2018). in this process, teachers’ role in assisting the young to identify bullying behaviors and timely stop victimization cannot be taken no notice of. noteworthily, imperative to bullying intervention is teacher training, which means teachers’ skilled coping strategies relieve students’ anxiety in confronting bullying and help to form appropriate management styles of classroom learning (di stasio et al., 2016). as suggested in the study, teacher training is feasible in promoting a sense of school belonging, improving classroom disciplinary climate, and balancing the skills of cooperation and competition. for school climate, our study points to all stakeholders who join the entire school community in creating a caring, inclusive atmosphere, not only teachers and student victims in the forefront of this anti-bullying battle. also in climate building, our findings have recognized social comparison and intense competition as crucial characteristics that deserve educazhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1565 tional practitioners’ scrutiny and deliberation over their own teaching practices (di stasio et al., 2016). however, the lingering impacts of the covid-19 pandemic have made bullying patterns somewhat different. while strengthening online learning, the pandemic still secures cyberbullying as mentioned above. but the fact lies in that with the decrease in in-person bullying, cyberbullying follows a downward trend (bacher-hicks et al., 2021). this echoes previous evidence that cyberbullying rarely occurs independently of in-person bullying (waasdorp & bradshaw, 2015). in order to work out strategies for coping with cyberbullying, close attention would be paid to such fundamental relationships in educational reforms and anti-bullying attempts as teacherstudent interactions, peer-to-peer relations, classroom environments and school cultures (vaillancourt et al., 2021). therefore, this study may provide a route to the understanding of cyberbullying in china that in a sense replicates the patterns of in-person bullying and bullying victimization. although it is still pending to see how a positive classroom climate plays a role in adapting the bullied to the school life, the emphasis upon multiple relations within the school system offers an angle to propose intervention measures aimed at achieving equity and inclusivity for all schoolchildren in the postcovid-19 era. note: 1. for the failed models (model 3: the sense-of-belonging model and model 4: the school-climate model), please refer to the online appendix for details. acknowledgement we wish to express our sincere gratitude to dr. ryan allen and dr. doug havard, who have offered professional assistance and constructive suggestions during our research, upon the completion of this academic paper, and in the process of revision. their willingness to spare the time and energy so generously has been very much appreciated. our grateful thanks are also extended to our colleagues for their firm support and valuable insight in the research. finally, we would like to thank oecd for making the pisa database publicly available for researchers and their analyses. zhu & teng. 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(shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 appendix i figure s1. normal p-p plot of regression standardized residual. note. the points did not lie in a reasonably straight diagonal line from bottom left to top right. this would suggest major deviations from normality and multiple regression analyses did not fit for statistics. zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 figure s2. scatterplot of standardized residuals. note. in the scatterplot of the standardized residuals, the residuals appeared as a clear or systematic pattern, higher on one side than the other. this suggested that multiple regression analyses did not fit for statistics. zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 table s1. multiple regression analysis of demographic, teacher-support, sense-of-belonging, school-climate, and full-predictor models. variables model 1 a, b model 2 model 3 c model 4 d model 5 e β β β β β gender age grade repetition escs .169‡ -.008 .048‡ -.050‡ .165‡ -.019‡ .047‡ -.025† .178‡ -.030‡ .043‡ -.012 .146‡ -.030‡ .045‡ -.016 .149‡ -.039‡ .039‡ .001 teachint dirins perfeed teachsup -.113‡ -.019 .017 -.108‡ -.016 .009 .045‡ -.076‡ belong -.283‡ -.215‡ disclima -.208‡ -.169‡ percoop percomp -.153‡ .119‡ -.071‡ .112‡ notes. *<.05, †p < .01, ‡ p < .001 a demographic model, b teacher-support model, c sense-of-belonging model, d school-climate model, e full-predictor model zhu & teng. (shanghai & california). school bullying victimization in china. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 table s2. logistic regression analysis of sense-of-belonging and school-climate models. variables model 3 a model 4 b b s.e. exp(b) b s.e. exp(b) gender age grade repetition escs .568‡ -.136* .215† -.008 .039 .066 .081 .018 1.765 .873 1.239 .651 .457‡ -.158* .238† -.007 .039 .067 .082 .019 1.580 .854 1.269 .993 belong -.640‡ .026 .527 disclima -.409‡ .020 .664 percoop percomp -.344‡ .246‡ .021 .022 .709 1.279 notes. *<.05, † p < .01, ‡ p < .001, a sense of belonging, b school climate preliminary assumption tests revealed that for models 3 and 4, the hosmer and lemeshow goodness of fit tests were not passed (significance values all below .05), suggesting no support for these two models. bece_v12n1_sep2022-title-teng bece_v12n1_sep2022-maintext-teng supplementary-appendix-bece-v12n1-september2022-teng bece. newsletter vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1917 labor participation of primary and secondary school students and influencing factors: an empirical study of 164 schools by yang, x., liu, r., liu, j., & hong, w. correspondence to: rude liu, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: rdliu@bnu.edu.cn rawing on the self-determination theory and social learning theory, this study aims to examine the current state of labor participation in primary and secondary school students and influencing factors, with a sample of 34644 students from 164 schools in central china. descriptive statistics, the heterogeneity test, and the hierarchical linear regression are adopted in the analysis. research findings: • descriptive statistics indicate: the students spent less-thanexpected time on labor activities both in homes and schools; there was a smaller variety of labor activities in the school than in the home; the majority of the schools surveyed paid inadequate attention to labor education; there existed significant differences in labor motivation, with the intrinsic motivation predominating, social motivation related to peer influence being less impactful, and extrinsic motivation like encouragement and rewards from the teacher and parents being insufficient. • the results of the hierarchical linear regression based on correlation analysis reveal: (i) after demographic variables being controlled for, intrinsic motivation and encouragement and rewards from the teacher and parents as extrinsic motivation could positively and stably predict the content and time of the student’s labor participation at home, with intrinsic motivation having the strongest predictive power. teacher dictation as a form of extrinsic motivation posed significantly negative effects on student home labor participation. parental dictation as another form of extrinsic motivation could positively predict the varieties of labor activities of the child. social motivation could positively predict the duration of home labor participation of the student. (ii) after demographic variables being controlled for, the school’s attention on labor education could significantly positively predict the d mailto:rdliu@bnu.edu.cn vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1918 varieties of labor activities and duration of labor participation of the student. • the results of the heterogeneity tests and hierarchical linear regression reveal that there were demographic differences in labor participation among the primary and secondary school students. female students experienced more varieties of labor activities than their male counterparts. the eighth graders conducted more varieties of home and school labor activities and spent more time on school labor activities than the fourth graders. the students with siblings engaged in more varieties of home and school labor activities and spent more time on school labor activities than those without siblings. the study concludes that a more comprehensive labor education program should be developed to promote student all-round growth by establishing coordination mechanisms between the school, home and community, heightening students’ labor motivation and school attention on labor education, and by diversifying labor activities while fully considering individual differences among students. source: journal of schooling studies, 2024; 20(4):79-91. bece. newsletter vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2003 peer effects of high-achieving students by chen, t. & dong, c. correspondence to: caiting dong, guangdong university of finance, china. email: 47-301@gduf.edu.cn eer effects have not only near-term impacts on adolescents’ cognitive and non-cognitive development but also implications for their lifelong trajectories. this study is an investigation into the effects of the proportion of high-achieving students in a class on cognitive performance, educational expectations, school adaptation, and mental health of their classmates, based on data of middle school students with random class assignment from the china education panel survey (ceps). research findings: • middle school students who had ranked among top students in grade six in primary schools had a significantly positive influence on cognitive performance and educational expectations of their classmates. yet, no such influence could be found on the latter’s school adaptation and mental health. the positive influence of high-achieving students may be due to the fact that they could serve as excellent role models for their peers, boosting motivation levels, increasing active learning, fueling interest in reading, enhancing peer interaction quality in the latter. • on the other hand, high-achieving students also imposed certain academic pressures on their peers, leading to increased participation in out-of-school tutoring and longer study hours in them. heterogeneity analysis reveals that the former’s positive influence on the latter’s cognitive performance is short-term, only evident in the seventh grade and no longer significant in the ninth grade. nevertheless, their influence on the educational expectations of ordinary students was more enduring. additionally, the peer effects of high-achieving female students were more prominent than those of their male counterparts. the findings of this empirical study have significant implications for china’s current educational policies at the compulsory education level, such as school place allocation reform and admission by lot-drawing. these policies, which involve randomly assigning students to schools and balancing class compositions, can mitigate over-concentration of high-ability students in certain schools or classes. dispersing high-ability students across schools p mailto:47-301@gduf.edu.cn vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2004 and classes can give fuller play to their exemplary roles and peer effects. overall, this is beneficial for balanced development of basic education, narrowing academic divides caused by school choice, and promoting equity in education. source: china journal of economics, 2025;12(02):265-282. bece. newsletter vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1915 the impact of the double reduction policy on family fertility intention: a study based on a survey of 29 provinces across china by chen, x. & ning, b. correspondence to: bentao ning, east china normal university, china. e-mail: btning@ses.ecnu.edu.cn nation’s population is the bedrock of its socio-economic development. in the 1990s, china began to enter the period of low fertility, and its total fertility rate has remained below the replacement level since. family fertility intention, a major predictive indicator of family reproduction behavior, constitutes an important parameter for projecting fertility levels, relating to the long-term development of the population. facing the long-standing issue of low fertility, most studies have focused on the impact of fertility policy on the size of the population with little research on the influence of education policy. this study aims to explore the relationship between parents’ attitudes towards the double reduction policy and their intention of having more than one child, as well as the mediating effects of family education expenditure and parental educational anxiety on this relationship, using 10341 parents of primary and secondary school students from 29 provincial administrative regions as research subjects. research findings: • parental positive attitudes towards the double reduction policy could effectively predict the enhancement of parental intention of having more children. compared with parents disagreeing with the policy, those endorsing it exhibit significantly higher intention of having more than one child. • the policy had a greater impact on the second-child fertility intention than on the third-child fertility intention in parents. in the meantime, the policy is more impactful among parents with higher education levels than those with lower education levels in heightening their fertility intention. • family education expenditure and parental educational anxiety had chain mediating effects on the relationship between the parents’ attitudes towards the policy and their intention of having more than one child. the double reduction policy alleviates the financial burden of education on parents and their educational anxiety; at the same time, the mitigated parental educational anxa mailto:btning@ses.ecnu.edu.cn vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1916 iety, in return, further reduce the family’s educational spending, thus helping enhance the parents’ intention of having more children. the authors give the following suggestions: • improve the understanding of the double reduction policy in the parents of compulsory education students. this policy is a systematic one, involving multiple stakeholders. its effectiveness is contingent on parents’ attitudes towards it and their willingness of cooperation. • strengthening the execution of the double reduction policy. it is important to heighten the supervision of off-campus training institutions and improve the supporting measures for the implementation of the policy. • increase the coordination between the education and population policies. to boost the parents’ motivation for having more than one child, it is imperative to formulate a welfare policy framework that is family-friendly and familysupportive. source: journal of east china normal university, 2024; 42(5):75-85. the relationship between mobile phone dependence and mental health among adolescents: the mediating role of academic burnout and the moderating role of coping styles anming he, 1 jiaojiao wan, 2 qiuping hui 1 1. school of education science, xinyang normal university, xinyang 464000, henan, china 2. school of education science, henan university, kaifeng 475004, henan, china abstract: to investigate the relationships between adolescent mental health and mobile phone dependence (mpd), academic burnout, and coping styles as well as the underlying mechanisms, this study surveyed 1191 adolescents, using the mobile phone dependence indicator scale, adolescent academic burnout questionnaire, simplified coping style questionnaire, and sci-90 self-report mental symptom inventory. the analysis results by structural equation modeling techniques are that: (i) mpd is a significant negative predictor of adolescent mental health; (ii) academic burnout partially mediates the relationship between mpd and adolescent mental health; (iii) negative coping styles moderate the second half of the mediating path; the mediating effect was more significant among adolescents with higher levels of negative coping than those with lower levels of negative coping. the findings of this study offer implications for the protection and promotion of adolescent mental health in the mobile internet era. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 12(1):1581-1587. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab008 how to cite: he, a., wan, j., & hui, q. (2022). the relationship between mobile phone dependence and mental health among adolescents: the mediating role of academic burnout and the moderating role of coping styles. best evidence in chinese education, 12(1):1581-1587. he et al. (henan). mobile phone dependence and mental health among adolescents. bece, vol.12, no.1, 2022 1582 keywords: mobile phone dependence, academic burnout, coping style, mental health, adolescents correspondence to: jiaojiao wan, school of education science, henan university, kaifeng 475004, henan, china. e-mail: 1060581865@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:1060581865@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ he et al. (henan). mobile phone dependence and mental health among adolescents. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1583 introduction mobile phone dependence (mpd), also referred to as cellular phone addition and the problematic mobile phone use, is the individuals’ overindulgence in mobile phonerelated activities which causes strong, persistent cravings for the use of them and consequently, significant impairment in users’ social and psychological functions. the lowered level of mental health is one of the most salient negative ramifications brought by mobile phones to adolescents. the mpd-induced reclusiveness hinders the fulfilling of human needs for interpersonal communication, belonging, and self-actualization, which leads to detrimental emotions of adolescents such as senses of inferiority and loneliness. academic burnout is a prolonged, negative state of mind related to students’ learning, represented by emotional exhaustion, academic apathy, and reduced sense of achievement. previous studies also found that intense mobile phone users are more likely to be distracted, a mental status unfavorable to learning, and that students with high levels of mpd are more prone to academic procrastination and weariness. hence, we posit that mpd can positively predict adolescent academic burnout. in addition, academic burnout may be harmful to adolescent mental health. academic burnout is a form of consumption and loss of mental resources in learning, and the lack of resources can lead to difficulties of adaptation. teenager mental health is a typical issue of adaptation in adolescence. therefore, the more severe the academic burnout, the lower the level of mental health of the teenager. we hypothesize that academic burnout may play a mediating role in the relationship between mpd and teenager mental health. according to diathesis stress theories, individuals’ coping styles pose important influences on their mental health. scholars discovered that in contexts of risks, protective coping responses could buffer the negative impact on mental health, while disengagement coping could intensify the negative influence on mental health. thus, it is very likely that coping styles can moderate the effect of risk factors on adolescent mental health. hence, a hypothesis is proposed that coping styles moderate the direct effect of mpd on adolescent mental health and the second half of the path of the indirect influence of mpd on teenager mental health mediated by academic burnout. to sum up, based on relevant theories and existing empirical findings, the present study established a moderated mediation model to examine the effects of mpd, academic burnout, and coping responses on adolescent mental health. data of the big sample of 1191 adolescents were employed to investigate the mediating and moderating mechanisms of the influence of mpd on teenager mental health, the mediating role of academic burnout, and the moderating role of coping styles in the chain of mediation, in an effort to provide evidence-based theoretical guidelines for the prevention of and intervention in adolescent mental problems in the mobile phone era. research methods subjects he et al. (henan). mobile phone dependence and mental health among adolescents. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1584 the survey was conducted on the cohort of 11to 25-year-olds. cluster random sampling was adopted to select entire classes of students from 8 colleges in heilongjiang, tianjin, shandong, henan, and jiangxi provinces on the principle of equivalence of liberal arts, sciences, and arts. junior secondary students from two middle schools and senior secondary students from two high schools in henan province were also recruited in classes based on the social-natural sciences equivalence and grade balance. a total of 1300 teenagers participated in the questionnaire survey, and 1191 valid questionnaires (91.62% validity rate) were obtained with 602 ones from boys (50.5%) and 589 ones from girls (49.5%). research tools  the mobile phone dependence indicator scale. it includes four dimensions: losing control, anxiety/craving, withdrawal/escape, and productivity loss, with a cronbach’s a coefficient of 0.88 in this study.  the self-report mental symptom scale. it encompasses ten categories of symptoms such as somatization, obsessive-compulsive, over-sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobia, paranoid, psychotic disorder, and others, with a cronbach’s a coefficient of 0.88 in this study. the higher the scores one obtained from this scale, the worse their mental state was.  the simplified coping style questionnaire. this is a questionnaire adapted to the demographic characteristics of china, with cronbach’s a coefficient of 0.814 for the entire scale, 0.84 for the positive coping style (i.e. engagement coping) scale, and 0.74 for the negative coping style (i.e. disengagement coping) scale in this study.  the adolescent academic burnout questionnaire. it includes three dimensions: physical and mental exhaustion, cynicism, and low self-efficacy, with a cronbach’s a coefficient of 0.73 in this study. data processing data were evaluated by the common method bias test, descriptive statistical analysis, and other relevant analyses via software spaa 2.0, and the structural equation modelbased analysis was utilized to test the validity of the moderated mediation model through software amos 23.0. research results the common method bias test the common method bias test results showed that there were 13 factors with characteristic roots above 1, and that the first factor could explain 25.31% of the total variation, less than the 40% critical value, indicating there was not a significant common method bias. he et al. (henan). mobile phone dependence and mental health among adolescents. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1585 relations between adolescent mpd, academic burnout, coping styles, and mental health mpd were significantly and positively correlated with adolescent academic burnout, disengagement coping, and scores in mental health, but not related with engagement coping. scores in mental health were positively correlated with academic burnout, disengagement coping, but negatively related to engagement coping. academic burnout was negatively correlated with engagement coping, while positively related to disengagement coping. the test of the moderated mediating effect with disengagement coping as the moderator variable the test results of the moderated mediation model by structural equation modeling techniques showed that disengagement coping significantly moderated the relationship between adolescent academic burnout and mental health (β = 0.07, p < 0.001), but had no moderating effect on the relationship between mpd and adolescent mental health (β = 0.03, p > 0.05). for teenagers with high levels of disengagement coping, their scores from the mental health scale considerably increased with exacerbated academic burnout (β= 0.48, t= 10.82, p< 0.001); it was also true among teenagers with low levels of disengagement coping, but the speed of increase significantly slowed down (β= 0.27, t= 5.99, p< 0.001; β=0.48 was decreased to β=0.27). the test of the moderated mediating effect with engagement coping as the moderator variable engagement coping did not show prominent moderating effects on the relationships between mpd, academic burnout, and mental health (β= -0.03, 0.00, p> 0.05 both). that means engagement coping did not moderate the influence of mpd on adolescent mental health. discussion the mediating role of academic burnout this study discovered that mpd could positively predict academic burnout, which is consistent with the findings of previous research on academic burnout. at the same time, it was found that academic burnout could significantly predict teenager mental health, which supports resource conservation theories that contend one’s adaptiveness is closely related to their possession of resources. more importantly, it was confirmed that academic burnout partially mediated the relationship between mpd and adolescent mental health; mpd could not only directly influence adolescent mental health, but also indirectly affect it via academic burnout. the introduction of the variable of academic he et al. (henan). mobile phone dependence and mental health among adolescents. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1586 burnout helps explain the pathway through which addictive behaviors like mpd affect adolescent mental health. the moderating role of coping styles the moderated mediation model in this study was used to examine the moderating effects of coping styles on the mediation chain of “mpd→ academic burnout→ mental health”. it was found that disengagement coping had significant moderating effects on this mediation chain and that it can moderate the second half of the path of the influence of mpd on adolescent mental health through the mediation of academic burnout. academic burnout can more effectively predict the mental health of adolescents with higher levels of disengagement coping than that of those with lower levels of disengagement coping. in other words, high levels of disengagement coping, can considerably aggravate the negative impact of academic burnout on adolescent mental health. it implies that teenagers with higher levels of academic burnout and disengagement coping are of high risk of mental problems. as opposed to the initial hypothesis, engagement coping did not exhibit any moderating effects. there is an interactive relationship between academic burnout and coping styles. academic burnout imposes a particularly strong influence on mental health and social adaptation of adolescents with higher levels of disengagement coping. lower levels of disengagement coping have a more significant protective effect on teenagers with academic burnout. although young mobile phone addicts are more prone to academic burnout, early intervention in childhood can effectively reduce the possibility of mpd and academic burnout. moreover, coping skills of adolescents are somewhat malleable through intervention programs like group counseling. teenagers are at a key phase of education. compared with mpd, problems in education should be more serious risk factors; academic burnout can negatively affect any individual suffering from this problem, no matter how seldom they use disengagement coping strategies. conclusions (i) adolescent mental health is closely related to mpd, academic burnout, and coping styles. (ii) both mpd and academic burnout can predict teenager mental health. in addition to its direct effect on teenager mental health, mpd can indirectly affect it through the mediation of academic burnout. (iii) the indirect effect of mpd on adolescent mental health via the mediation of academic burnout is significantly moderated by negative coping styles. the indirect effect of mpd is more prominent among adolescents with higher levels of disengagement coping than their peers with lower levels of disengagement coping. he et al. (henan). mobile phone dependence and mental health among adolescents. bece, vol.12, no. 1, 2022 1587 the chinese version of this article has been published in psychological development and education,2022, 38(3):391-398. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 何安明, 万娇娇, 惠秋平. 手机依赖与青少年心理健康的关系:学业倦怠的中介作用和应对方 式的调节作用. 心理发展与教育, 2022, 38(3):391-398. received: 30 july 2022 revised: 11 august 2022 accepted: 27 august 2022 ar2-jiaojiaowang-bece_titlesep_2022 ar2-jiaojiaowan-bece_maintextsep2022 the role of china’s teaching research system in promoting evidence-based reform in education: a case study of jiangsu province shike zhou teaching and research office of elementary and middle schools in jiangsu province, nanjing 210013, china abstract. teaching research system is a unique professional community of education and teaching research in china. it is an important driving and leading force in promoting evidence-based reform in education in china. using fifteen-year exploration of evidence-based reform in education in jiangsu province as a case, this paper presents the ways and characteristics of evidence-based reform in education in china, with a focused analysis of the role of teaching research system in the reform. despite its uniqueness, china’s evidence-based reform in education can still contribute experience to its world counterpart. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 9(2):1227-1241. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.or067. how to cite: zhou, s. (2021). the role of china’s teaching research system in promoting evidence-based reform in education: a case study of jiangsu province. best evidence in chinese education, 9(2):1227-1241. keywords: teaching research system, evidence-based reform in education, china experience correspondence to: shike zhou, teaching and research office of elementary and middle schools in jiangsu province, jiangsu 210013, china. e-mail: jyszsk@163.com conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:jyszsk@163.com zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1228 introduction the 4th five-year plan for national economic and social development of the people’s republic of china and the outline of long-term objectives for 2035” emphasizes the orientation and objectives for the policy “building a high-quality education system”. promoting education reform through assessment mechanisms and building a high-quality education system are one of the important paths to drive highquality development during the 14th five year plan period. however, in the practical reform, there are still some problems, such as backward assessment concepts, unscientific assessment tools, inaccurate analysis and diagnosis, and unremarkable effects. to prevent subjective or even emotional judgements and stimulate sound and reasonable educational reform is essential in improving the quality of education and teaching and in building a powerful education system. in fact, how to make educational decision-making more rational and effective has not only been an issue faced by china, but also by the whole world. amidst this situation, the evidence-based reform came into being in the 1980s, providing a possible way to address this issue. being “evidence-based” refers to the concept that any decision, opinion, or conclusion must be based on solid evidence drawn from scientific research. the evidence-based reform was meant to reduce the randomness in educational development, ensure that educational reform complies with scientific logic, and achieves the goal of educational development in a more efficient and steady way. up till now, the evidence-based reform, as an important driver in global educational reform and development, has made remarkable achievements (slavin & cheung, 2019; slavin et al., 2021). in this context, the importance of acquisition and use of scientific evidence has been increasing in china’s educational reform and development. jiangsu, as a province with a high level of socio-economic and educational development, started the survey of student academic quality in basic education in 2006. since then, following the principles of evidence-based reform, jiangsu has made great efforts in pursuing effective and rational surveys and attaining a large amount of scientific evidence in improving the efficiency and quality of education and teaching. in driving the evidence-based reform of regional education, the unique teaching research system has played an important part. teaching research institutions at all levels contribute to the search for laws of effective education and teaching, summarize and promote typical experience and effective practice through research results feedback, evidence-based reform projects and multi-party cooperation. as a result, jiangsu succeeds in finding the path for evidence-based reform in education with chinese characteristics. as part of the global wave of evidence-based reform in education, china started relatively late, but has been making rapid progress. by taking jiangsu as a case and analyzing its evidence-based reform process, this study presents the patterns and characteristics of china’s evidence-based reform in education and examines the roles of china’s teaching research system in this reform. although china’s mode of promoting evidence-based reform through its unique teaching research system cannot be used by “ zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1229 other countries directly, considering china’s huge volume and the important role of the teaching research system in promoting the development of high-quality education, we believe the general laws inferred from its exploration can be used as references for global educational development. china teaching research system china’s basic education is stereotyped as a process in which rigid, intensive and authoritative exercises and training are emphasized by teachers in pursuit of academic achievements. in this process, educational outcomes depend mainly on the investment of time, energy and even money, while cultivation of students’ independent inquiry ability and teacher’s search for education and teaching methods are ignored. it is believed that when bringing excellent academic performance to chinese students, the current practice also causes problems such as heavy academic burden and unfavorable development of high order thinking abilities. for this reason, zhao (2014) believes that china may have the best and at the same time the worst education system in the world. in such an education system, students may be able to cope well with standardized examinations and obtain better exam results but have difficulty in developing other important skills based on individual talent. we believe that such stereotyped ideas are biased in that they fail to cover the other side of china’s basic education. in fact, in the basic education area, china has established a complete and powerful teaching research system. some people held the view this system is a simulation of the teaching research organizations of the former soviet union. in recent years, more researchers come to believe that china’s teaching research system is the result of domestic practice and exploration (liu, 2021). it is thought to have originated in the late qing dynasty when the then-education department began the trial to build teaching research institutions and implement teaching research policies to meet the demands for school system reform. after the national government was set up in 1912, it strengthened the guidance and survey of school teaching through a series of organizational construction, which laid the foundation for the establishment of china’s education system. after the founding of the people’s republic of china in 1949, a complete teaching research system covering the whole country has been gradually established. it started with learning from the teaching research system of the former soviet union, and then built up china’s own system with chinese characteristics based on domestic practice, which is not only the result of inheritance and development of the previous systems, but also that of exploration under the new historical background (li, 2014). to date, china has built up a teaching research team of nearly 100,000 staff and a five-level working system. in 2019, the state council issued the document named “opinions on how to deepen education and teaching reform and comprehensively improve the quality of compulsory education,” 1 which not only fully affirmed the professional and supportive role of teaching research in basic education, but also put forward a series of tasks and requirements on how to strengthen teaching research in the next stage, further reinforcing the role and status of the teaching research system. chizhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1230 na’s teaching research system has become a professional community for the growth of chinese teachers and the improvement of education and teaching quality. its functions include training and guiding teachers, engaging teachers in teaching research and directing teaching reform. some scholars believe that emphasis on teaching research is advantageous to chinese teachers, and the research itself is far superior to the general inservice training received by foreign teachers (chen, 2021). given that, simply attributing the excellent academic achievements of chinese students to highly intensive learning is somewhat biased. what worth noticing is the significant positive impact of china’s teaching research system on the educational reform. furthermore, china’s teaching research system is not only a conglomerate of professional research institutions, but also undertakes certain administrative functions. in terms of organizational structure, it mainly consists of teaching research offices at all levels, from the central to local. the system exerts vertical and centralized management to implement the national policies on education through all kinds of teaching research programs. in addition, teaching research offices at each level can also set up their own teaching research projects and reform measures according to the specific needs of regional education reform and development. therefore, the system is run with a management mode combining centralization and decentralization. moreover, although china’s teaching research offices at all levels exist in the form of “research institutions”, they are also responsible for formulating educational and teaching policies, managing scientific research projects and funds, assessing and displaying teaching scientific research outcomes, etc. because these roles are closely related to the development of schools and teachers, the “instructions” issued by teaching and research offices are normally highly valued and seriously implemented by schools at all levels. compared with western teaching research institutions and professional bodies of teachers, china’s teaching research system has stronger resource allocation and administrative power. such power enables china’s teaching research system a strong capacity to organize and implement broad, highly intensive and targeted reforms and experiments (liang et al., 2010; lu & shen, 2010). in the 21st century, chinese educators have significantly increased awareness of scientific evidence acquisition, and accordingly, made great progress in the improvement of teaching quality and effectiveness. with the expansion of the influence of evidence-based reform, how to promote evidence-based reform with chinese characteristics has become an important topic in china’s education community. early this century, jiangsu established a provincial academic survey system for the purpose of accurate assessment of student academic performance and exploration of teaching effectiveness, and on that basis, vigorously promoted evidence-based reform in education. in this process, the teaching research offices in primary and secondary schools in the provincial teaching research system played an important role in the reform and in harnessing the direction of the reform. citing jiangsu as a case, this article will further explain the progress of evidence-based reform in china and how the unique teaching research system works in this momentous reform. zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1231 fifteen-year evidence-based reform in jiangsu province in 2006, jiangsu initiated the follow-up evidence-based reform, based on the provincial survey of basic education quality. in the initial phase of the reform, jiangsu relied on the survey of academic performance to obtain promising evidence from relevant research. after further accumulation of such evidence, the provincial teaching research office arranged a series of follow-up reforms through the teaching research system, so as to obtain more stable evidence and reform experience. the fifteen-year reform can be divided into four stages. preliminary stage of exploration (2006-2012): systematic study and team building jiangsu in 2008, the provincial basic education quality survey center of jiangsu was established, the first of its kind in china. efforts were made in improving the survey rules and methods and building a stronger team with expertise. through cooperation with the national project team and participation in survey projects, the center accumulated surveying experience, and formed work specifications and relevant supporting systems. after that, three rounds of survey of compulsory education quality were carried out in jiangsu province, which help build up practical experience and laid a foundation for follow-up work. practical stage of reform (2012-2016): tool innovation and system construction a team of experts in academic quality survey were built in jiangsu province to study and create academic quality standards in line with the teaching situation of the province. they were engaged in research and development of assessment frameworks and tools for students’ core skills and key abilities, in establishing the comprehensive index assessment system of student academic quality in compulsory education in jiangsu province, and in creating a feedback system of survey result. xishan district and binhu district of wuxi city and hongze district of huai’an city were chosen to carry out the follow-up reform based on the analysis at the city district and county levels and the cooperative research on how to improve the quality of regional compulsory education. the pilot reform of improving the teaching management level based on the assessment and analysis was conducted in nanjing foreign language school xianlin campus. follow-up stage of implementation (2015-2018): model construction and project promotion zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1232 under the guidance of evidence-based reform theory, the follow-up reform projects were implemented, and the working model of regional education quality improvement put forward. in 2015, the provincial department of education set up “the major followup reform program based on the assessment and analysis “. twenty-nine key followup projects were launched at the levels of city, county, and school to promote the practical application of survey results of academic quality. a number of role models of the follow-up reform emerged, such as suzhou industrial park, nanjing qinhuai district and nanjing foreign language school xianlin branch. in 2017, the provincial teaching research office, in cooperation with nanjing pukou district government and other institutions, carry out an evidence-based experimental intervention research to improve the quality and practical effectiveness of evidence-based reform. finalizing stage of promotion (2018-2021): results refinement and application implementation cooperating with academic institutions like nanjing normal university, the provincial teaching research office strengthened scientific research and reinforced application of survey results. as a result, the evidence-based reform model of jiangsu’s education was formed, which effectively integrates the academic research, teaching research management and the teaching practice of the front-line teachers and facilitates scientific decision-making and scientific ways of teaching. it solved the problems of over reliance on experience and lack of rationality and effectiveness in the process of educational reform and development. the popularization and application of this model in the whole province has greatly improved the quality of education and teaching and promoted the allround development of students. evidence-based reform in education led by the teaching research system in terms of organization, method, and model to date, the survey of basic education quality has become a powerful driver to jiangsu’s educational experiment and reform. with the joint efforts of multiple departments and institutions, jiangsu province has built organizational, back-up and working systems for evidence-based reform based on the survey of education quality, with scientific research as major duties and practice improvement as the objective. academic survey system at present, jiangsu’s survey of basic education quality covers all the main subjects at the compulsory education stage and all cities and counties in the province. teaching research offices at all levels make contributions to the wide-coverage and completeness of this survey system (see table 1). jiangsu province attaches great importance to the construction of a professional survey team, and continuously raises the academic level zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1233 table 1. survey sample size in jiangsu province over the years (2006-2020). year 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 total number of students 113,438 174,747 194,675 197,586 213,585 224,763 262,245 375,086 1,756125 number of students 28,473 35,759 31,458 33,636 34,971 37,484 40,407 54,744 296,932 number of principals 3,314 4,563 4,182 4,441 4,590 5,121 5,354 5,607 37,172 number of schools 1,762 2,290 2,109 2,260 2,453 2,695 2,808 2,917 19,294 of the survey team by introducing professionals and strengthening personnel training. a full-time survey and analysis team of more than 150 staff has been built and made an important force in promoting evidence-based reform. scientific and accurate assessment tools the lack of scientific and accurate assessment tools has always been a factor restricting china’s evidence-based reform in education. to solve this problem, the provincial teaching research office not only hires experts to participate in the preparation of questionnaires, but also organizes special personnel to analyze the assessment tools of pisa and other international projects, so as to absorb the theories, experience and methods of those classic assessment projects. focusing on assessing student core skills and key abilities, the provincial teaching research office first developed complete assessment tools and investigation tools for chinese, mathematics, english of primary school and chinese, mathematics, english, physics, biology, geography of junior middle school and produced more than 15,000 survey and analysis reports on education quality in 11 categories. cutting-edge and innovative, the assessment tools not only have good reliability and validity and high accuracy, but also solve the assessment problems in noncognitive factors, high order thinking dispositions and other correlative factor scales, in the context of national conditions and teaching conditions, (see figure 1). furthermore, jiangsu province has developed a comprehensive index system for survey of basic education quality in jiangsu province by taking reference from research results of other surveys of education quality at home and abroad (see figure 2). this index system can not only survey students’ learning, but also comprehensively analyze correlative factors, processes, mechanisms, and results, respond to the key, difficult and hot issues of educational reform and development, and evaluate the implementation effect of educational policies and measures. based on these tools and indicators, a complete and accurate survey information system for jiangsu learning and teaching is created. being comprehensive, practical and scientific, this system is in the leading position in china, providing accurate and high-quality evidence for the improvement of education quality in jiangsu. follow-up educational experiments and evidencebased reform zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1234 figure 1. test results of measurement dimension, reliability and validity of high-order thinking disposition scale for primary and middle school students. figure 2. comprehensive index system of basic education quality survey in jiangsu province. zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1235 figure 3. implementation model of follow-up evidence-based reform. figure 4. multi-party cooperative reform community. the evidence-based education reform in jiangsu province proceeded after the completion of survey. the provincial teaching research office started to address the relevant research findings and to promote their application in the front-line teaching practice, with the purpose of improving the education and teaching quality based on scientific evidence. in this regard, jiangsu’s teaching research system creatively organized and implemented the “follow-up reform” using the academic survey data analysis. the “follow-up reform program based on assessment and analysis” involved 29 projects in the whole province, including 2 entrusted projects by colleges and universities, and 9 projects at each level of district, city, county and school. from 2017, to integrate survey, teaching research and scientific research, follow-up reform projects were included in zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1236 the subject research projects of primary and secondary schools in jiangsu province for the first time. 15 provincial key projects were granted, which were supported and complemented by projects at all levels. a total of 700 projects were set up to encourage and promote all localities and schools to carry on follow-up evidence-based reform. under the guidance of the provincial teaching research office, suzhou, changzhou and other places achieved remarkable outcomes through local academic surveys and follow-up reforms. the provincial teaching research office allocated special funds to support relevant research and reform projects, and invested 22.5 million yuan in recent five years, which effectively guaranteed the smooth progress of the reform (see figure 3). in recent years, the follow-up evidence-based reform in jiangsu has emphasized the importance of the stability of evidence and the mining of causality and carried out educational intervention experiments of different scales in many places. further efforts will be made to explore the laws of education and teaching more steadily and deeply and improve the effectiveness and quality of education by adopting the cutting-edge methods and technologies of international evidence-based research. multi party cooperative reform community in the long-term exploration, jiangsu has evolved a reform community consisting of professional researchers from colleges and universities, governmental administrative departments and teaching research institutions, and primary and secondary schools, which complement one another with each party’s advantages and share a collaborative relationship (see figure 4). this community takes the improvement of education quality as the first priority, and implements the relevant research results and policy measures, to make sure that research results can really play a part in upgrading the quality of education and teaching. under the condition of data security, jiangsu teaching research office opens data resources, decentralizes the design authority of survey projects and research topics, and tries to introduce multiple intellectual resources to improve the quality of survey and the effectiveness of the reform. therefore, while enhancing the education quality of jiangsu to a new level, the model of evidence-based reform in education led by teaching research system helps integrate multi party strength in research and practice, enabling quick and effective responses to difficult and hot issues in the process of education reform and development. before each assessment session, the provincial teaching research office will adjust the methods and contents of assessment and investigation according to the previous research findings and the new problems, new situation and new needs faced by jiangsu province. a task force is delegated by the office to analyze the contents of pisa and other international authoritative assessment projects, so as to follow the latest progress in the area of international education assessment in terms of student skills, assessment methods, correlative factors and research topics, to better understand and judge the direction of global education reform and development. at the same time, more analysis of jiangsu educational situation is made to confirm the urgent needs and common concerns of the public. in recent years, to make the survey of basic education quality more targeted and practical, the office have focused on issues like student burden reduction, effective teaching strategy, educational equity for the underprivileged, student stress zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1237 figure 5. follow-up reform outcomes at the school level: taking nanjing foreign language school xianlin campus as a case. resistance, teacher job satisfaction, student high-order cognitive ability development, educational resources allocation. outcomes of evidence-based reform in education after 15 years of exploration, jiangsu has made remarkable achievements in evidencebased reform in education. the concept and mode of “scientific evidence-based and follow-up reform” have been integrated into all aspects of school teaching reform, and fruitful results have been attained in practice. firstly, the quality of basic education is significantly improved, and student allround development is promoted. at the school level, through survey and assessment, comprehensive and accurate diagnosis of school teaching problems has been made, and remarkable results have been achieved in the follow-up reform in experimental schools such as nanjing foreign language school xianlin campus (see figure 5). at the local level, follow-up reform projects are taken seriously in seeking for effective ways to improve the education quality and promote student all-round development. at the provincial level, jiangsu has made remarkable achievements in previous pisa and relevant national surveys, with continuzhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1238 ous improvement of various indicators and steady progress in high-quality and balanced development, which fully indicates that the reform has achieved significant results. secondly, the integration of evidence-based reform into normal teaching and research drives the quality improvement and transformation of grass-roots teaching and research in the province. under the guidance of the provincial teaching research office, all localities carry out evidence-based teaching diagnosis in teaching and research, reform teaching methods, constantly improve teachers’ professional skills and teaching quality. various models of classroom reform have emerged throughout the province, such as nantong’s “learningcentered classroom”, xuzhou’s “learning and presentation classroom”, yancheng’s “critical learning classroom”, suzhou’s “suzhou-style classroom”, huai’an’s “integrated learning classroom”, taizhou’s “micro classroom”, zhenjiang’s “integrated classroom”. thirdly, the assessment tools of student core skills and key abilities, question designing technology and investigation by questionnaires have been widely used in the whole province. directed by the provincial teaching research office, changzhou, yangzhou, suzhou and other places deepened follow-up reforms by using provincial assessment tools and technologies. after several rounds of training, their standardized framework of survey of academic quality, and question designing skills have become an important reference for academic assessment for all cities in the province and made an important contribution to the improvement of exam question quality in the middle school entrance examination in our province. the popularization of these tools and technologies has greatly improved the quality of educational assessment and reform in jiangsu, and the relevant exploration and achievements are in the leading position in the country. finally, aimed to improve education quality by survey, the evidence-based reform model of jiangsu makes a big difference in the country. jiangsu’s evidence-based reform in education has attracted extensive attention. fujian, hainan, xinjiang, sichuan, qinghai and other provinces have sent personnel to jiangsu to study and transplant jiangsu experience to the survey and teaching reform in their own provinces. in recent years, the teaching research staff have published more than 30 papers in authoritative journals at home and abroad, and relevant personnel have been invited to make theme reports at important conferences over the world for many times. china education daily and xinhua news agency reported on jiangsu’s achievements in education reform and interviewed leading research personnel, which was well received. a project team created the “best evidence in brief” website (http://www.cnbeb.org.cn:81/). its official account of wechat has registered nearly 20 thousand subscribers both at home and abroad and become an important channel for obtaining information on evidence-based research and reform results in education. http://www.cnbeb.org.cn:81/ zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1239 discussion: uniqueness and universality of china evidence-based education reform jiangsu, as one of the regions of high socio-economic and educational development levels in china, takes the lead in evidence-based reform in education, in which china’s unique teaching research system plays an important role. in the case of jiangsu, its strong teaching research system has always been the director and motivator of the provincial evidence-based reform in education. decision-makers’ determination to transform the traditional experience-dependent teaching modes to scientific evidence-based education models is the prerequisite for the role of the teaching research system in the reform. moreover, the strong capacity of resource mobilization, organization and coordination of china’s teaching research system lays a solid organizational and institutional foundation for the rapid progress and remarkable effectiveness of this reform. as mentioned earlier, china’s teaching research system is not only a conglomerate of research institutions, but also performs the administrative and organizational function in teaching and scientific research. in the process of evidence-based reform in education in jiangsu, massive human and financial resources are required in both organizing large-scale provincial academic survey and setting up follow-up reform projects. the establishment of an academic survey system covering the whole province, the compilation of a complete package of scientific assessment tools, the promotion of large-scale intervention experiments within the province, and the formation of evidence-based education policymaking and implementation mechanisms, within just 15 years, depend entirely on the strong force of such a system. local educational departments, whether they support evidence-based reform in education or not, must keep in line with the overall arrangement under this system, which ensures the effective promotion of reform. once the effect of the reform at the initial stage is confirmed, such a system can help carry out large-scale verifying experiments and then further deepen the reform. in fact, china teaching research system as a whole has always had such a powerful capacity, yet undoubtedly, some of the reforms it initiated previously could not reach the goals as expected or be verified of their effects. the success of jiangsu’s evidence-based education reform is attributed to the strong organization and coordination abilities of its teaching research system, yet more to the value orientation and action path determined by the teaching research system led by the provincial teaching research office. during the 15 years of exploration, the reform has consistently been based on solid scientific research, to ensure the correctness of reform direction and the effectiveness of reform measures. jiangsu’s education reform and experiment are of great significance to the promotion of china’s evidence-based reform in education and innovation of teaching research approach, in that the follow-up evidence-based reform in jiangsu takes scientific evidence as the basis of reform and practice, through which long-standing problems with china’s education reform such as lack of scientific approach and poor effectiveness can be solved. the survey of basic education quality in jiangsu and the relevant analysis provide the reform with full support of scientific research. directed by laws of education, the reform can overcome blindness and achieve the expected results. zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1240 moreover, the follow-up evidence-based reform uses reform experimental projects as media in applying survey results fully into practical work, thereby dissolving the separation between professional research and practical work. such follow-up reforms start with scientific research, and then apply it to practical work, and in turn draw research subject matter from practical work, thereby to form a promotion path of reform combining theory with practice, resulting in the pertinence and effectiveness of scientific research, and the strengthened guidance on practical work. it should be noted that the great achievements made in the jiangsu evidencebased reform in education is significantly conditioned by china’s unique teaching research system and its powerful strength. in a sense, the path of china’s evidence-based reform in education can hardly be replicated by other countries. however, emphasis on scientific survey tools, multi-party cooperation in reform and gradual expansion of reform scope from pilot experiments to popularization are universal experience in line with laws of educational development. challenges and prospects despite the remarkable results achieved by the follow-up evidence-based reform of jiangsu supported by the survey of educational quality, the reform is still facing several challenges and has a long way to go when looking into the future. firstly, data conditions need to be further improved and vertical tracking data covering more subjects are to be built. the lack of vertical tracking data has been constraints to china teaching research and the progress of evidence-based reform in education. a comprehensive and scientific vertical tracking database is essential infrastructure in further push for such reform. secondly, the progress of global evidence-based research should be followed, and more cutting-edge and scientific analysis technology be introduced. with the technological and scientifically advancement, more cutting-edge technology and methodology have been applied to the educational survey and the evidence-based reform. china’s evidence-based reform in education should draw more investment of energy and effort in the future, keep pace with global cutting-edge technology and localize educational innovation, in the push for intelligence-oriented development in this field. lastly, the follow-up reform should be reinforced, and closer combination of scientific evidence and practical work be advocated. in the future, more flexible and innovative follow-up measures are needed to further strengthen the promotion, publicity and application of evidence and improve the effectiveness of evidence use. zhou. china’s teaching research system and education reform. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1241 note: 1. the project team began to develop the high order thinking disposition scale for primary and middle school students in 2016. referring to similar studies at home and abroad, after testing trials of nearly 100,000 samples in more than 2 years, an assessment tool with high reliability and validity was obtained and applied to the provincial survey in 2018. the assessment results are good. the above figure shows the confirmatory factor assessment results. the assessment tool takes the lead in solving the technical problem of high order thinking disposition assessment in provincial survey and has high academic value and practical application value. references chen, j.m. (2021). teaching research: treasure of china’s education. journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 39 (5): 1-11. doi: https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.10005560.2021.05.001 li, s. (2014). sixty years of china’s primary and secondary school teaching research: reflection and prospect. contemporary education sciences, 29 (17):15-19. liang, w., lu, l. t., & huang, d. f. (2010). development of basic education research system with chinese characteristics. educational research, 31(12):77-82. liu, y.x. (2021). tracing back to the root: teaching research originated from the local practice in china. journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 39(5):85-98. doi: https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.10005560.2021.05.005 lu, n.g. & shen, w. (2010). the historical evolution of the functions of teaching researchers in china. global education, 39(7): 66-70+88. slavin, r.e. & cheung, a.c.k. (2019), evidence-based reform in education: responses to critics, science insight education frontiers, 2(1):65-69. doi: https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.19.ar027 slavin, r.e., cheung, a.c.k., & zhuang, t. (2021). how could evidence-based reform advance education? ecnu review of education, 4(1):7-24. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2096531120976060 zhao, y. (2014). who’s afraid of the big bad dragon? why china has the best (and worst) education system in the world. bmc genetics, 16(1):1-13. doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12863-015-0165-4 received: 11 october 2021 revised: 30 october 2021 accepted: 05 november 2021 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.05.001 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.05.001 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.05.005 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.05.005 https://doi.org/10.15354/sief.19.ar027 https://doi.org/10.1177/2096531120976060 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12863-015-0165-4 orignialarticle-shikezhou-bece_title_dec2021 originalarticle-shikezhou--bece_maintextdec2021 bece. newsletter vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1865 teacher vitality and positive teacher-student relationships: a study of emotional transmission between teachers and students by yan, w., shi z., & peng, k. correspondence to: kaiping peng, tsinghua university, china. e-mail: pengkp@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn he interaction between teachers and students has long been a vital research question among educational researchers. in recent years, incremental attention has been paid to the impact of positive psychological traits and emotions of teachers on teacher-student interactions. drawing on the vitality theory, this study posited that the vitality of teachers contributed to enhancing students’ vitality and fostering positive teacher-student relationships via the emotional transmission effect, particularly through students’ perception of teacher enthusiasm. this hypothesis was empirically examined with a sample of 2,386 chinese secondary school students and 76 head teachers. research findings: • after controlling for the gender and age of teacher and student participants, teacher vitality could significantly and positively predict students’ perception of positive teacher-student relationships. • after controlling for the gender and age of teacher and student participants, teacher vitality could indirectly impact students’ perception of positive teacher-student relationships via the mediating effect of students’ perception of teacher enthusiasm; the mediating effect of student vitality; and the chain mediating effect of students’ perception of teacher enthusiasm and student vitality. implications: • the role of teacher vitality in boosting positive teacher-student relationships is realized through the emotional transmission between teachers and students. • the teacher-student relationship, an integral part of classroom instruction, is interwoven into the whole processing of teaching and learning. good teacher-student relationships substantially foster students’ development of knowledge and character. • education administrators of all levels and school leaders should work to enhance the vitality of teachers and circumvent job t mailto:pengkp@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1866 burnout in them by alleviating their work burdens and increasing their professional autonomy; by engaging them in curriculum management; and by optimizing their compensation as well as improving their physical and mental wellbeing. • the encouragement of teacher and student vitality necessitates a vibrant school climate. it is necessary for the society to pay respect to the operation autonomy of the school, for the school administrators to pay respect to the professional autonomy of the teacher, and for teachers to pay respect to the student’ autonomy in learning and development. source: journal of east china normal university, 2024; 42(3):78-86. bece. newsletter vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1867 the cost of virtual reality in health: an empirical analysis of the impact of online gaming on adolescent mental health by sun, h., su, j., & ru, p. correspondence to: peng ru, tsinghua university, china. e-mail: rupeng@tsinghua.edu.cn mong many factors contributing to adolescents’ mental health issues, the prevalence of online gaming is considered as a major one in the literature. this article is an analysis of the effect of online gaming on teenager mental health with a close examination of various factors influencing the effect including personal characteristics of the student and peer, family, and school characteristics. the research is based on the data from the china education panel survey (ceps) 2014-2015. the seventh and ninth graders from 438 classes in 112 schools were included in the sample. research findings: • in general, online gaming was unfavorable to adolescents’ mental health development. after controlling for other factors, the bigger amount of time the student spent on online gaming, the poorer mental health they had. • regarding student personal factors, there was no gender difference in their mental health; students with hukou in rural areas had lower levels of mental health; student academic performance was positively related to their mental health levels; student misconduct was a negative predictor of their mental health. after controlling for these personal factors, online gaming time negatively predicted adolescents’ mental health levels. • the school’s ranking and the average academic level of the class were negatively related to the student’s mental health state. this may be due to the intense academic competition among higher-achieving peers. after controlling for peer characteristics-related factors, the intensity of online gaming was negatively predictive of the student’s mental health state. • the parent-child relationship and family ses were significantly and positively related to student mental health; parental supervision was negatively but not significantly related to student mental health; living with parents or not directly correlated with the adolescent child’s mental health state. after controlling a mailto:rupeng@tsinghua.edu.cn vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1868 for these family-related factors, there was an inverse relation between online gaming time and adolescent mental health. • after controlling for school-related factors, such as the school location and school type, the intensity of online gaming was significantly and negatively related to the student’s mental health level. source: tsinghua journal of education, 2023; 44(6):103-114. bece. newsletter vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1898 the disparities in students’ access to college admission information: narrowing the “information divide” by wu, q. correspondence to: qiuxiang wu, renmin university of china, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org his study investigates the effects of student socio-economic status (ses) on their access to college admission information with a sample of 2056 12th-graders from a county-level city in western china. research findings:  the effect of the student’ ses on their access to college admission information is contingent on their utilization of information from their connections and the internet. students with high ses have the access to more open information networks through superior family social capital (e.g., connections with professional expertise and experience), as opposed to those with low ses, who can only enjoy comparatively narrow information networks based on the limited knowledge on college choice of their own and their connections in the village and rural school. this gap in social support is a direct consequence of the ses differences between the two groups. the low-ses group is more likely to experience the stagnation of information flow in this regard.  students’ internet use in accessing college admission information is associated with their personal preferences and information search tactics. high-ses students are skillful in using internetbased official platforms provided by the government’s college admission management departments and universities’ admission offices to obtain richer and more authoritative information. on the other hand, low-ses students may resort to social media, such as wechat, micro-blog, and tiktok, and as a result, the information gathered is unreliable and incomplete. students’ use of internet-based channels is determined by their internet use habits developed under different social and cultural backgrounds as well as being influenced by the social support they have received. internet-based information channels used by low-ses students are less effective or sometimes, even misleading.  the high school and classroom teacher play vital roles in providing valuable information on the transition to postsecondary education for students. the school’s guidance in this regard can sigt mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1899 nificantly narrow the ses gap in the access to college admission information between students; the classroom teacher plays an important compensatory role in supplying low-ses students with relevant information, which should have been partially fulfilled by their parents. based on its research findings, the study highlights the following implications: (i) for lower-ses students, the improvement in the individual’s information literacy can make up for the inadequacy in college admission information due to the lack of social support. (ii) public institutions, particularly the high school, have the obligation to transmit comprehensive information on university admission to students and provide relevant education to enhance their information acquisition competence. (iii) school progression counseling institutions should be encouraged to open up advisory services of reasonable charges to meet low-ses students’ needs for both public and ondemand information about university admission. in addition, the study proposes to establish an information support mechanism based on joint efforts of homes, public agencies, and private institutions to promote the equity in the access to gaokao-related information among all students. source: educational research, 2024; 45(6): 53-62. bece. newsletter vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1957 the impact of parental control on mental health of primary and secondary school students and its educational implications by xing, s., gao, x., & yu, g. correspondence to: guoliang yu, renmin university of china, china. e-mail: yugllxl@sina.com n the chinese cultural context, the absolute authority of chinese parents over their children has predisposed them to adopt controlling parenting. this article is a re-examination of the relationship between parental control and mental health of primary and secondary school students in china, using the meta-analytical techniques. research findings:  there is a moderately positive relationship between parental control and student mental problems, indicating parental control is a significant risk factor for child mental health.  the relationship between parental control and child mental health is moderated by variables including the age of the student, the source of psychological control, the home cultural background, and the publication year of the study included.  the study proposes the following suggestions in response to the negative consequences of parental control for child mental health:  encourage parents to develop scientific notions of education and increase knowledge on home education for creating parent-child relationships on an equal footing and diminishing controlling parenting.  strengthen mental health education for primary and secondary students to increase their capacity to cope with pressures from parents and improve their emotional regulation, as well as their ability to seek for emotional support from non-home-based resources.  urge schools to provide home education training to parents and promote school-family-community co-education. source: educational science research, 2024; 2024(10):20-27. i mailto:yugllxl@sina.com bece. newsletter vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1921 the relationship between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance in chinese basic education students: a meta-analysis based on 68 papers in chinese by liu, y., hu, h., & guo, k. correspondence to: kan guo, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: guokan@bnu.edu.cn athematics anxiety includes a variety of negative emotions, such as fear, tense, and worry, induced by the student’s math learning experiences. according to existing literature, there is a stable negative correlation between student mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance, and the incidence of anxiety experience is the highest among all negative emotions in student math learning. existing meta-analytical studies mainly draw on samples from western countries with most research results inapplicable to the chinese context. this study is an analysis based on 22 journal articles and 46 theses in chinese using the meta-analytic technique. it aims to examine the correlation between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance in chinese basic education students as well as the potential moderating factors. research findings: • there is a moderately negative correlation between mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance in chinese basic education students at all levels, including primary, junior secondary, and senior secondary students. • there are regional differences in the correlation between student mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance with the correlation in students in western regions being much stronger than that in students in eastern and central regions. • the type of the mathematics anxiety rating scale does not exhibit moderating effects on the relationship between student mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance. • the negative correlation between student mathematics anxiety and mathematics performance is stronger in high-stakes tests than in non-high-stakes ones. research implications: • the chinese mathematics education community should pay more attention to the pervasive issue of mathematics anxiety among basic education students as a high level of mathematics anxiety m mailto:guokan@bnu.edu.cn vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1922 and poor mathematics performance are both unfavorable for their long-term development. • the double reduction policy provides that the number of examinations at the compulsory education level should be substantially reduced to alleviate the students’ academic anxiety. the provision deserves more serious consideration; its legitimacy is evidenced by the research results of this study. source: journal of educational studies, 2024; 20(2):165-178. bece. newsletter vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1872 do new gaokao schemes increase students’ autonomy in subject selection: an empirical analysis based on the catboost regression tree model by zhou, j., shan, z., & qin, h. correspondence to: hongxia qin, xiamen university, china. e-mail: qinghx99@126.com n china, the college entrance examination (also known as gaokao) is an event of paramount importance to the public. in the context of educational reform, the new gaokao schemes are undergoing adjustments and improvements. the issue of whether the new gaokao schemes are effective in supporting autonomous subject selection of students is pending further research. this article is an empirical investigation of the issue based on data from 2022’s “gaokao reform questionnaire survey” of college students who have gone through the whole process of the high-stakes examination. research findings: • the new gaokao schemes have increased students’ autonomy in subject choice. the “3 + 3” and “3 + 1 + 2” patterns, as new gaokao models, showed no significant differences in the effects on student autonomous subject selection, but both outperforming the prior “3 + x” model. • the expanded rights of students to subject choice did not lead to an enhancement of their subject selection abilities, but conversely, a certain degree of decline in this regard. facing more choices and the increased configurations of subjects, the student could not make a legitimate decision on their own but had to seek advice of others. • the new gaokao schemes intensified the conflicts between the intentions of the student, parents, and senior secondary teachers in electing subjects. the discrepancies between the needs of student school progression, development, and future employment compromised students’ autonomy in subject choice while exacerbating their worries about this issue. • from the standpoint of enhancing students’ autonomy in subject selection, the “3 + 1 + 2” scheme was the most rational choice, favorable for the stable and sustainable reform of gaokao. i mailto:qinghx99@126.com vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1873 in brief, the new gaokao scheme involves both students’ rights to subject choice and their selection capacities. a blind expansion of students’ autonomy in subject selection without regard to their selection abilities is not beneficial to their post-choice academic adaptation. authorities concerned should provide students with more support in improving their capability of electing subjects by providing guidance on subject selection know-how and developmental planning in order to help them make better use of their selection autonomy and reach equilibrium between the freedom of development and optimization of development. source: journal of east china normal university, 2024; 42(3):12-25. bece. newsletter vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1900 the effects of criticism on the behavioral improvement intention of junior and senior secondary school students: the role of the teacher-student relationship by cheng, y., yan, l., & zhang, f. correspondence to: feng zhang, ningbo university, china. e-mail: zhangfeng@nbu.edu.cn he cultivation of good behavioral habits in students is among the chief goals of school education. the teacher’ praise and criticism play important roles in this process. as opposed to praise, criticism is a negation of student misconduct, which is usually deemed negative feedback by the students criticized, but in the teacher’ eyes, is meant to make them aware of and correct their misbehavior. currently, there remain divides among researchers on the effects of criticism in the education process. recruiting 228 8thand 11th-graders from a middle school and a high school in x city, this study seeks to explore the effects of different types of criticism (outcome, process, and person criticism) on the relationship between the secondary teacher and their students as well as on the latter’s behavioral improvement intention. also examined is the role of the teacher-student relationship in the relation between the type of criticism and student behavioral improvement intention. research findings:  as opposed to outcome criticism, the effects of process criticism and person criticism on the teacher-student relationship varied in the two education phases. for the high school students, process criticism could help enhance their perception of the close relationship with their teacher, whereas person criticism had the opposite effect. for the middle school students, both process criticism and person criticism could weaken their perception of the close relationship with their teacher.  both process criticism and person criticism impacted the students’ behavioral improvement intention by changing their perception of the relationship with their teacher, though with differential features in junior and senior secondary education. in junior secondary education, both of them had negative impacts on student behavioral improvement intention by undermining the close relationship between the teacher and students. in senior secondary t mailto:zhangfeng@nbu.edu.cn vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1901 education, process criticism helped augment the behavioral improvement intention of the students by bolstering the teacherstudent relationship, whereas person criticism negatively affected their behavioral improvement intention by impairing the teacherstudent relationship. research implications:  long-term experience of person criticism has the potential of establishing negative self-concepts in students, who would choose to reject the opportunities for self-improvement. the teacher must avoid it in administering criticism to students.  there are differences in the effects of process criticism on the behavioral improvement intention of junior and senior secondary school students, as well as in the impact routes. the teacher must be mindful of the possible negative consequences of process criticism for middle school students.  junior secondary students in their early adolescence have difficulty distinguishing process and person criticism and comprehending the positive intent of teacher criticism, which means middle school teachers, face more challenges in correcting their students’ misbehavior. source: psychological development and education, 2024; 41(1):42-50. the construction and application of regional education quality monitoring databases: a case study of suzhou’s education quality monitoring jian shen, 1 qiang luo 2 1. suzhou high school-sip, suzhou 215000, jiangsu, china 2. suzhou education quality monitoring center, suzhou 215000, jiangsu, china abstract: the development of school education depends on the quality of the education provided, and it is a key metric for assessing the effectiveness of schools in developing talent. building specialized, intelligent education quality monitoring (eqm) databases is crucial for speeding eqm progress in the big data era. this article examines the development of regional eqm databases in the areas of operational procedure and logical structure based on the idea of data lakes by using the development of databases for the eqm data analysis system (das) in suzhou city as a case study. the goal of this study is to assist in addressing the current issues with regional eqm data processing and ensuring eqm’s successful implementation. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 12(2):1613-1628. doi: 10.15354/bece.22.re031 how to cite: shen, j., & luo, q. (2022). the construction and application of regional education quality monitoring databases: a case study of suzhou’s education quality monitoring. best evidence in chinese education, 12(2):1613-1628. keywords: education quality monitoring, data analysis system, data lake, database shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no.2, 2022 1614 about the authors: jian shen, suzhou high school-sip, suzhou 215000, jiangsu, china. e-mail: james@suzhou.edu.cn qiang luo, suzhou education quality monitoring center, suzhou 215000, jiangsu, china. e-mail: 452384761@qq.com correspondence to: qiang luo at suzhou education quality monitoring center of china. funding: this study is part of the study “regional education quality improvement paths based on eqm big data” (e-b/2020/16), funded by jiangsu’s 13th five-year plan for education sciences. conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:james@suzhou.edu.cn mailto:452384761@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1615 introduction ducation quality is crucial to the advancement of school education because it is an indicator of school performance, educational development, and talent training. building a system to monitor the quality of compulsory education is an essential step in deepening the reform of educational evaluation in the new era and changing the unscientific orientation of educational evaluation. the state council’s overall plan for deepening educational evaluation reform in the new era, released in october 2020, proposes the use of innovative evaluation tools as well as the application of artificial intelligence, big data, and other modern information technologies to develop a longitudinal evaluation system for the entire process of students’ learning in all grades as well as a transversal system to comprehensively evaluate the results of moral, intellectual, physical, and social development (state council, 2020). a database is a warehouse that organizes, stores, and manages data in accordance with a data structure; it can connect and interact with data through tools such as data collection, organization, analysis, and visualization to provide evidence for scientific research and decision-making processes. education quality encompasses, among other things, the outcomes of school operation, teacher instruction, student learning, and family education. the education quality monitoring (eqm) database collects information about participating schools, teachers, students, and parents and stores and analyzes it using information technology, computer technology, and analytical data mining. the domestic study on compulsory education quality monitoring (ceqm) focuses mostly on two topics. one is to examine its implementation measures and support mechanisms, such as the research and development of monitoring tools (wang, 2016), the establishment and operation of monitoring institutions (zhang, 2010), the application of monitoring results (yang, 2019; guo & wang, 2016), and it support for monitoring (wang, 2016; zhang et al., 2016). the second field of research focuses on eqm’s implementing actors and the development of a monitoring system that includes eqm at the national, provincial, municipal, and district levels (li & chen, 2020; xin & zhao, 2020; li et al., 2017; zhou, 2016). these two interrelated topics are the primary focus of ceqm research. however, there is a paucity of research on how to leverage big data technology and appropriate theories to generate an eqm database and build a data analysis system (das) for eqm, which has impeded the development of education quality monitoring. e shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1616 the purpose of this study is to examine the building of the regional eqm database using the construction of the eqm database in suzhou as an example in order to address the difficulties in data analysis. the status quo of eqm development in suzhou massive amounts of data are involved in eqm. suzhou’s ceqm 2021, for example, generated more than 67.15 million data records during the data collection stage, each of which is made up of data of various types and structures. it is necessary to retrieve relevant data from previous years for followup analysis during the data analysis stage. every year, hundreds of millions of raw monitoring data points must be processed. with such a large amount of data and complex structures, the planning and construction of an eqm database is an urgent task that must be completed. the “compulsory education academic quality monitoring project” was launched in suzhou city, jiangsu province, in 2015, and the suzhou education quality monitoring center (hereinafter referred to as the suzhou eqm center) has been tracking and monitoring junior secondary school students ever since. more than 1.3 million students had been tested by 2021, more than 180 million pieces of monitoring data been collected, and more than 14,000 monitoring reports been issued (song & luo, 2021). the suzhou eqm center strengthens the application of intelligent technology in monitoring practices in response to educational evaluation reform in the artificial intelligence era and builds a regional eqm database with suzhou characteristics. it has also established a data analysis system and made incremental technological advances in standardized data governance, intelligent data analysis, and visualized data presentation. suzhou eqm center created the das framework based on its own needs (figure 1), which divides the data analysis procedure into six processes involving 12 functional modules. the das provides data assistance for the data presentation step after the data gathering stage. data import, data cleaning, quality analysis, project establishment, calculation analysis, and data push are the six steps that make up the data analysis process. based on the aforementioned structure, two additional structural layers algorithm support and data lake are added to the data analysis system to create a full analysis system design. to be exact, the data lake contains six databases, including raw data, virtual hierarchical data, user rights control, desensitized project data, algorithm rule resources, and result presentation data. the algorithm support layer also contains four algorithm libraries (figure 2). shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1617 figure 1. procedure and architecture of data analysis system for suzhou eqm. figure 2. a plan of suzhou eqm data analysis databases. the construction paths of regional eqm databases in the new era of big data and data science, having a centralized data architecture that is consistent with operational processes is critical. this is also true in eqm. good database architecture should be able to grow with the monitoring scale and evolve with technological advancements. suzhou eqm center creates databases for eqm data analysis based on the “data lake” concept. the data lake unifies the storage of all organizational data, including both the original data in the source system and the converted data (campbell, 2017). it has become an important tool for organshen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1618 izations wishing to make use of big data. structured data (relational database data), semi-structured data (csv, xml, json, etc.), unstructured data (emails, documents, pdfs), and binary data (images, audio, and video) are all stored in the data lake, forming a centralized data storage that holds all types of data. it aggregates and stores streams from various data sources, much like a large lake in nature, and outputs valuable data based on specific needs. in terms of monitoring data, the data lake contains not only data from various platforms, such as a question bank system, an examination service system, a scanning and marking system, and so on, but also a wide range of files, such as spreadsheets, scanned images, databases, and so on. it also saves process and result data from various data analysis processes. its inclusiveness enables the cross-analysis of diverse data information and the use of large capacity and high-speed data pipelines, as well as the management of the entire data lifecycle to make data flow processes such as access, storage, processing, and application traceable (figure 3). the logical structure design that stresses the security, integrity, and efficiency of all databases is also a crucial issue since the database must be constructed to support the monitoring procedure, making the design based on data analysis procedures the most significant component. the location of various storage types can only be determined by a database architecture that takes into account the two factors mentioned above. this architecture can also guarantee that data is safeguarded, effectively stored, and accurately processed. database design based on analytical processes separation of raw data and project data importing different types of data from various platforms is frequently necessary for eqm data analysis. examples include participant, school, and regional information from the examination system; monitoring tool information, dimensional information, scoring instructions, and other data from the question bank system; and original response records, scoring records, scanned images, and other data from the scanning and marking system. the raw databases for eqm are made up of all this data. different logical principles must be called upon and applied to the raw data in accordance with the demands of monitoring programs. in the regional school quality analysis project, data must be retrieved on a regional basis, and in the private school project, data must be based on the classification of private schools for children of migrant workers or nonmigrant workers. as an example, it is necessary to include the monitoring shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1619 figure 3. a schematic diagram of the data lake of suzhou eqm data analysis system. figure 4. a schematic diagram of raw databases and data analysis projects of suzhou eqm 2021. data of the same subject for consecutive years in the tracking analysis. therefore, the raw database and the project database should be maintained separately in the data lake to meet the various calling logics of various data analysis projects (figure 4). shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1620 virtual stratification in a project-based database the data is frequently converged and displayed by various school attributes in various data analysis initiatives. for instance, a three-level structure of “suzhou city, district, and school” is necessary for calculation and report creation in the regional analysis project, whereas a three-level structure of “district, group, and school” is necessary in the educational group project. a distinct virtual stratification module is added to the system function module to construct a different database for each project based on the logic of virtual stratification to satisfy the needs of the project. according to the specifications of the data analysis project, a three-tier structure based on school attributes can be created, as illustrated in figure 5, supporting a range of monitoring reports. database design based on logical structure hierarchical management of classified databases the database faces more internal security concerns because of its growing value and accessibility. for instance, unlawful overstepping operations and hostile infiltration result in the theft and disclosure of confidential information, but it is unable to adequately trace and audit the events that caused these events. strengthening data security management is especially crucial for databases that contain a lot of personal data. information leakage must be prevented at all costs, in addition to rapid improvements and effective vulnerability management. database security protection techniques that are flexible and targeted are the most effective way to do this. a crucial security measure for databases is database access control, and suzhou eqm center now mostly uses role-based access control (rbac). users and operation rights are intertwined with the idea of roles. to achieve hierarchical management, various roles are first developed in accordance with the organizational functions, each of which corresponds to a distinct level of operation privileges. rbac must assign the user’s account a role and associated rights in accordance with the information in the role rights database, in addition to verifying the user’s identity and password when they log in to the system (figure 6). the application system can be modified to meet the new access control requirements in the case of a functional shift in the organization by merely reassigning permissions to the roles. suzhou eqm center has also implemented four different types of security protection measures for the database. in order to prevent operational paralysis in advance and ensure the ongoing availability of operational sys shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1621 figure 5. a schematic diagram of the data virtual stratification logic in data analysis projects. figure 6. the process of account authentication. tems, it must be able to monitor the database operation state in real time and provide early warning when the condition is abnormal. the second is to be able to evaluate the database system’s risk, including weak password detection, system vulnerability, configuration risk, etc., to identify user and system access behavior patterns to the data and produce access rules with various levels of strength. thirdly, it must be able to keep track of data activities in real time, create data access models, assess access risks promptly, find and prevent unauthorized access, and encrypt sensitive data to improve data seshen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1622 curity protection. the fourth is to use audit logs to carry out thorough user access behavior monitoring. finding the risk source at the outset and following the individual responsible for the risk become required actions to close the security gap once the security risk has materialized. using the audit log query tool, this issue can be fixed. desensitization and recovery of sensitive data for the purpose of scheduling exams, information on the monitoring subjects, such as student, teacher, and other personnel personal identifying information, must be gathered during the eqm process. a desensitization and recovery module should be set up in the system to centrally desensitize, encode, and save sensitive information in basic data in order to guarantee data security. it is also necessary to establish an administrator position for the desensitization module, whose primary responsibility is to grant permissions to data in the desensitization and restoration module, because data analysis is a collaborative task that requires the participation of numerous people. this functional module and any associated forms and fields are not accessible to other roles in the system. the coding rules for the desensitization and recovery of each datum are mostly stored in the desensitization rule algorithm library in the suzhou eqm databases. these guidelines are used to desensitize the sensitive database used for data collection in order to obtain code-version basic data. to create the analysis result database with real names, the calculation and analysis module recovers the code-version result database. in order to offer data support for later data presentation and report creation, the desensitized codeversion result database and the recovered name-version result database are finally pushed to the data presentation link through a data interface (see figure 7). establishment of an algorithm rule repository the term “algorithm rule repository” primarily refers to the storage of data analysis algorithms as a new type of data asset and the formulation of pertinent specification processes in accordance with the guidelines and specifications of data asset management. by building unique algorithm repositories for each functional module, the data analysis system controls them. data production, data processing, data analysis, data preservation, data access, and data reuse are the six nodes that make up the loop structure model that the uk data achieve (ukda) uses to characterize the cycle of research data (uk data service, n. d.). su shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1623 figure 7. a schematic diagram of data flow in the desensitization and recovery module. figure 8. a schematic diagram of the algorithm repository application process and the algorithm asset lifecycle. zhou eqm center splits the life cycle of data analysis algorithms into four stages based on this model: planning and definition, condensing and storing, choice and use, and updating and iteration (figure 8). to meet the unique shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1624 and creative demands of data analysis for various monitoring projects, applicable analysis algorithms can be chosen from the algorithm library during the process of specific application for various monitoring projects. additionally, new data analysis algorithms, various indicators, and charts can be customized in accordance with various analysis models. the algorithm rule repository contains a cleaning rule algorithm library, a quality analysis index algorithm library, a desensitization rule library, and a data analysis algorithm library, which provide algorithm support for the four processes of data cleaning, quality analysis, data desensitization, and calculation of analysis, respectively. each algorithm library has amassed a specific number of algorithms as a technological reserve and is regularly generating new algorithms as the eqm project advances. taking the cleaning rule library as an example, to adapt to the needs of diverse projects, it has so far accumulated 106 cleaning methods for a variety of situations, such as missing tests, contradictory alternatives, contradictory logic between questions, invalid answers, etc. also, using the data analysis algorithms library as an illustration, there are multiple algorithms for a single indicator of “percentile grade,” as well as algorithms that encapsulate multidimensional characteristics of the educational ecology, such as the balance of education, ecological health, etc. practical application of eqm databases in suzhou although it only makes up a small portion of suzhou’s overall eqm process, the development of databases is a key technology that underpins high-quality monitoring. through these databases, the effective and reliable operation of each functional module of the suzhou eqm data analysis system is ensured (figure 1). this increases the effectiveness of the analysis and evaluation of monitoring data and satisfies the specific requirements of data analysis for the various suzhou monitoring projects. using various quality analysis algorithms from the algorithm rule resource library, the monitoring tool quality analysis module in the data analysis system, for instance, provides quantitative indicators for analyzing test questions, improving tool quality, and improving teaching. it is based on classical measurement theory and structural equation modeling. as well as indicator algorithms used to verify the validity and reliability of each dimension of the pertinent factor instruments, there are algorithms for indicators of disciplinary tools, such as reliability, difficulty, differentiation, percentage of score bands, and ability value of score points. during the whole eqm 2021 process, this functional module offers more than 100 high-quality analysis reports for the monitoring tools at all grade levels and for all subjects, shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1625 figure 9. screenshots of some functions of the monitoring tool quality analysis module. figure 10. screenshots of the functions of calculation and analysis related modules. providing a data foundation for the development and accumulation of monitoring tools (figure 9). in the “calculation and analysis” process, for instance, the virtual stratification database is utilized to ensure that the data required for each project can be reliably accessed in order to execute numerous projects simultaneously. through the algorithms of various data analyses in the algorithm rule repository, a series of quality assurance measures, such as “double-track parallelism and double-blinded comparison; seamless docking and errorless flow; sampling verification and reverse verification,” are realized in the analysis. using these databases and functional modules, the data processing procedure has been standardized, the effectiveness of data analysis has been enhanced, and the precision of data calculation has been ensured. during the shen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1626 figure 11. screenshots of the functions of each system at the data presentation stage. data analysis in 2021, the suzhou eqm center completed the basic data processing in just two weeks with high efficiency and high quality and, on this basis, completed the projects of basic data of junior secondary schools, basic data of elementary schools, educational group research, and private school education quality, as well as a total of more than 3,600 reports of various monitoring results, which ensured the smooth implementation of suzhou’s education reform (figure 10). not only does the database play a crucial role in the data analysis process, but it also ensures the secure and efficient flow of data inside each system throughout the whole eqm process. by setting data requirements during the data gathering phase, the “data standardization” module completes the integration of data from disparate systems. moreover, the database supplies data sources for subsequent data presentation, which are handled by the “data push control” module and delivered on demand to the batch report generating system, the data chart integration system, the big data display system, and other platforms (figure 11). conclusion the development of databases for the data analysis system is a lengthy process. with the extensive and in-depth promotion of eqm, we will be conshen & luo. (jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1627 fronted with new issues and challenges, necessitating ongoing innovation and the study of new technologies in our research. in the era of big data, we believe that the building and maintenance of databases demands not only a reorganization of data structure but also a modernization of big data mentality and data asset management procedures. together with our contemporaries in the field of eqm, we anticipate seizing these new chances and conquering these new obstacles. references campbell, c. (2017, 19 may). top five differences between data lakes and data warehouses. blue-granite.com. available at: https://www.bluegranite.com/blog/bid/40259 6/top-five-differences-between-data-lakesand-data-warehouses guo, d. h. & wang, h. y. 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(jiangsu). build up regional education quality monitoring databases. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1628 received: 15 september 2022 revised: 05 october 2022 accepted: 01 november 2022 bece_qiangluo_title_nov2022 bece_qiangluo_maintext_nov2022 the effect of child preschool education on labor force participation of married women of childbearing age xuexuan gao , weifang min graduate school of education, peking university, beijing 100871, china abstract: in the context of the decline in working-age population and exhaustion of demographic dividend in china, how to increase the supply of labor has become an issue critical to economic development. optimizing preschool education system and enhancing the accessibility of high-quality and low-cost pre-primary schooling help free married women from childcare, boost their labor force participation, and thus, augment the supply of labor. this study discovers that the labor force participation rate of women who enroll all their preschool-age children in kindergartens is 1.32 times that of those who do not do so; and that for working women, preschool attendance of all their kids can increase their working time by four hours per week. after classifying the sample according to the level of household income and type of hukou (registered permanent residence), it finds that child preschool attendance can more significantly raise the employment probability of women from high-income families and more prominently increase working hours of those with rural hukou. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 13(1):1671-1678. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.ar028 how to cite: gao, x., & min, w. (2023). the effect of child preschool education on labor force participation of married women of childbearing age. best evidence in chinese education, 13(1):1671-1678. keywords: preschool education, married women of childbearing age, labor force participation, working hours gao & min. (beijing). child preschool education and labor force participation of married women. bece, vol.13, no.1, 2023 1672 correspondence to: weifang min, graduate school of education, peking university, beijing 100871, china. email: wfmin@pku.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:wfmin@pku.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ gao & min. (beijing). child preschool education and labor force participation of married women. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1673 the background of the study in the wake of the founding of the p. r. of china, the country established an equal employment system for men and women and provided a relatively complete childcare service for preschool children to retain mothers in the workforce (shi, 1999). chinese women have maintained a relatively high level of labor force participation compared with their counterparts in other countries. however, the establishment of marketoriented economy as a result of the nation’s reform and opening up impaired the preschool childcare system and pre-primary education was no longer provided as public welfare, which posed negative impact on women’s employment, especially the employment of those from low-income households, and made them less competitive in the labor market (zhu & wang, 2005). researchers attempted to examine the relation between mothers’ devotion to childcare and their lower labor force participation and confirmed that mothers invest far more time and energy in taking care of the family and young kids than fathers, thus more likely to withdraw from the labor market (xiong & li, 2017). as a result, married women of childbearing age in china experienced a decline in labor force participation due to the difficulty in balancing work and family; among them, those having children aged between 0 and 6 in homes were most significantly affected, with their employment rate dropping from 90.3% in 1991 to 74.9% in 2011 (du, zhang, & dong, 2018). to improve female employment, china has made immense efforts to expand preschool education since 2010. by 2020, 48.1826 million children were enrolled in kindergartens; the gross enrollment rate of preschool education reached 85.2%. the scale and coverage of preschool education were close to the average level of oecd countries. the popularization of preschool education has made it accessible to a much larger population, especially to that in the underdeveloped regions in central and western china, and has freed more married women from the burden of childcare, enabling them to return to work after giving birth to a child. according to data from the world bank, china witnessed a rapid decline in the labor force participation rate of its female population from 2000 to 2010, but the downward curve has levelled out since 2011, which can be attributed to the popularization of preschool education and the liberation of female labor force. with the loss of china’s demographic dividend and decrease in its fertility rate, adult women have become an important source of labor supply. investigations into the influence of child preschool education on mothers’ employment are vital to the increase of the supply of labor in china. utilizing data from china family panel studies (cfps) 2010-2018, this article undertakes empirical research on the effect of the popularization of preschool education on promoting labor force participation of married women of childbearing age in china. data and descriptive statistics the data source gao & min. (beijing). child preschool education and labor force participation of married women. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1674 data used in this study is sourced from the cfps database, which samples from 25 provincial administrative regions. the wide coverage of the samples assures their representativeness. cfps are longitudinal surveys using the year of 2010 as the baseline with data of 2018 being the latest; altogether they provide data in 5 periods. this study focused on the labor force participation of married women with children aged between 3 and 5, since the caring modes for kids in 0-2 age group are too diverse to be easily defined. the sample of the study was made up of married women from 21 to 49 years of age with 3-5 years old children. after deleting subjects lacking core variables and administering mean value interpolation to those lacking non-core variables, a sample of 5364 women was obtained. descriptive statistics descriptive statistics showed that the women sampled had 1.8 children each on average with a mean age of 30 years old and most of them were in good health according to their self-evaluation; that their labor force participation rate was 62% and those in employment work approximately 33.5 hours each week. among the subjects having labor incomes, the logarithm of their average income was 9.31. in terms of education level, the average length of schooling of the women sampled was 8.45 years, which is approximately junior secondary level, and only 12% of them received higher education (college or above). that means most of them had not experienced higher education. the impact of education level on employment might be underestimated in this study. the relationships between child preschool education and maternal labor force participation child preschool education and the labor force participation rate of mothers the measurement model in this study, the dependent variable “being in employment or not” is a binary variable. the logit model was used to evaluate the effects of child preschool education on maternal labor force participation instead of the linear probability model, because the latter may cause heteroscedasticity and produce estimate values of the dependent variable that are out of the interval [0, 1]. also, the logit model can explain the change in the odds ratio caused by a one-unit increase in the explanatory variable. in addition, the year dummy variable was incorporated in the model to eliminate the gaps induced by year differences, as the sample entailed a group of cross-section data from different periods. the regression results demonstrated that child preschool education has a significant positive effect on maternal labor force participation. when all children in a family attended nursery schools, the mother’s employment probability is 1.32 times that of her counterpart whose children failed to receive preschool education. calculation results of gao & min. (beijing). child preschool education and labor force participation of married women. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1675 the coefficient of the variable of grandparental care showed that for women from families where elderly members provided childcare, the probability of their labor force participation is 1.57 times that of those who could not get support from the elderly in terms of childcare. prior work experiences were also an important factor determining whether a woman would rejoin the labor market; for those who have been formally employed for more than 6 months, the probability of resuming work was 3.66 times that of those without this experience. rural women were more likely to resume labor participation after giving birth to a child than their urban counterparts. furthermore, older women in better health conditions and from higher-income families are more likely to restart working. it is also worth noting that the analysis results did not show a significant effect of high education levels on women’s labor force participation as presumed, which may be due to the low proportion of women who have received higher education in the sample. child preschool education and labor force participation of women from distinct economic backgrounds it was presumed that the effect of child preschool education on maternal employment varied among families of different economic status. in this study, annual household income was used as the criterion to classify and analyze the heterogeneity of the sample. based on the logarithm of the annual household income, this article divided the sample into three categories: women from low-income, middle-income, and high-income families. the regression results showed that regardless of family income levels, child preschool education had a significant effect on promoting maternal labor participation, and that the higher the household income level, the stronger the promotion effect. the results of calculation of the correlation coefficients revealed that, the probability of maternal employment in low-income families after children enrolled in nursery schools was 1.34 times that before children attended kindergartens. for middleincome and high-income families, the probability of maternal participation in the labor force after their children received preschool education was 1.44 and 1.49 times that before their children’s kindergarten attendance, respectively. with grandparental care for children, the employment probability of mothers in high-income families would increase by 1.09 times, which was significantly higher than that in lowand middleincome families the robustness test the logarithm of the cost of preschool education in the area where the subject lives was employed as instrumental variable to validate the impact of child preschool education on maternal resumption of work. child preschool attendance is negatively correlated with the cost of preschool education. that is to say, the higher the cost of preschool education in a certain area, the weaker the family’s demand for it. the less affordable the child preschool education, the more likely it is for the mother to withdraw from labor force. therefore, the instrumental variable is negatively related to the endogenous variables, which means that in gao & min. (beijing). child preschool education and labor force participation of married women. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1676 the first phase of regression, the coefficient of the instrumental variable should be negative, while in the second phase of regression, the coefficient of the explanatory variable after fitting the instrumental variable should be significantly positive as it is in the initial logit model. the regression results of the study showed that the coefficient of the instrumental variable was significantly negative in the first phase of regression and that the coefficients of the endogenous explanatory variables are significantly positive in the second phase of regression. the wald test and ar test on the instrumental variable demonstrated that the instrumental variable was exogenous and valid, and no overidentification occurred in the tests, which satisfied the requirements for the instrumental variable. by introducing the instrumental variable of the cost of preschool education, this study verified that child preschool education could significantly promote the labor force participation of married women. child preschool education and maternal working hours the measurement model child preschool attendance can also pose impact on working hours of women in employment. as working mothers have to balance between childcare and work, they can have more discretionary time and work for longer if their children are taken care of by preschool education institutions. after having screened the sample to identify women who reported effective working hours, this study obtained 2,275 subjects for the ensuing analysis. women’s effective working hours per week are basically normal distribution, and thus ols regression can be applied. the regression on the full sample demonstrated that women whose preschool-age children were enrolled in kindergartens worked 4 more hours per week than those whose preschool-age children did not attend nursery schools. the heterogenous effects of child preschool education on women with different types of hukou according to the regression results, sending children to preschool education institutions could significantly increase the working hours of rural women by 3.4 hours per week. grandparental care for children had a greater effect on the weekly working hours of rural women than those of their urban counterparts, probably due to the fact that the high charge or poor availability of rural preschool education institutions makes rural women more reliant on the childcare provided by grandparents. in addition, rural women with the labor force type of “being employed” may participate in off-farm work aside with agricultural production, which means that they work longer hours than their urban counterparts in the same job. gao & min. (beijing). child preschool education and labor force participation of married women. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1677 the heterogenous effects of child preschool education on women with different numbers of children the regression results showed that child preschool education had the greatest impact on the working hours of mothers with only one child, increasing their weekly working time by 5.1 hours; and that it also has a positive effect on the working hours of mothers with more than one child, which were raised by 3.1 hours each week. moreover, the mother with more than one child could increase her working hours only when all her children were enrolled in nursery schools; otherwise, she would strongly depend on the childcare provided by the elderly in the family. conclusions focusing on the effect of child preschool education on labor force participation of married women of childbearing age in china, this study discovered that the mother can be freed from childcare when preschool service is available to all her preschool-age children, which considerably increase her employment probability. this positive effect is the most prominent among women from high-income households, probably due to their strong willingness and capability of resuming their career. after enrolling their children in preschool education institutions, women employed, especially those from rural areas, can increase their working time, which, as a result, boosts the supply of labor for the whole society. currently, in most chinese families, grandparental care for young children remains a vital source of support for mothers’ rejoining the labor force. however, as a result of the dwindling family size and the introduction of delayed retirement policy in china, the burden of childcare will be shifted back to mothers and discourage them from resuming work, thus reducing the total supply of labor force. hence, the development of preschool education becomes crucial to relieving married women of the burden of childcare, reducing the opportunity cost of their employment, and encouraging their labor force participation. improved maternal employment can further enhance the efficiency of human resource allocation, promote economic growth and at the same time bolster gender equality in chinese society. references du, f. l., zhang, y. y., & dong, x. y. (2018). the impact of childcare on labor force participation of urban women in china. world economic papers, 2018(3):1-19. shi, h. z. (1999). 50-year history of early childhood education in the people’s republic of china (i): early childhood education in the socialist transformation period (1). early childhood education, 1999(10):4-5 xiong, r. x, & li, h. w. (2017). childcare, public service, and non-farm labor force participation of chinese rural married women: evidence from cfps data. china economic quarterly, 16(1):393-414. gao & min. (beijing). child preschool education and labor force participation of married women. bece, vol.13, no. 1, 2023 1678 zhu, j. & wang, c. (2005). contemporary early childhood education and research in china. in o. saracho & b. spodek (eds.), international perspectives on research in early childhood education (pp.55-78). greenwich: information age publishing . the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of peking university education review, 20(2):17. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 高雪姮 & 闵维方. (2022) 学前教育对婚育女性劳动参与的影响. 北京大学教育评论, 20(2): 17. received: 27 december 2022 revised: 05 january 2023 accepted: 12 january 2023 1absbract-weifangmin-bece_titlenov_2023 1absbract-weifangmin-bece_maintextnov2023 bece. newsletter vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2005 how do teacher workloads affect student development? by li, j. & liang, h. correspondence to: huiqing liang, henan university, china. e-mail: lhqbnu@163.com ased on data from the china education panel survey 2013-2015, the study examines the effects of teacher workloads on student development, with the view to providing evidence for the implementation of china’s “teacher burden reduction” policy and double reduction policy. research findings: • there was an inverted u-shaped relationship between the teacher’s weekly working hours and student academic performance, with 42.3 hours being the inflection point, below which student academic achievements tended to elevate with the increase in the teacher’s working hours. • distinct work burdens on the teacher exhibited varying impacts on their job burnout and students’ academic performance. regarding objective workloads, teachers working no more than 42 hours, with 85% or above of which spent on instructional duties, teaching no more than 15 periods, and spending no more than 10 hours on lesson preparation and no more than 11 hours marking students’ homework per week reported lower levels of burnout and were more supportive to their students, who attained more favorable academic results. regarding subjectively perceived burdens, excessive pressures from the school and community could significantly reduce the teacher’s supportive behaviors towards students and negatively affect their academic performance. • overly heavy burdens on the teacher could indirectly negatively impact their students’ academic performance by exacerbating their job burnout and reducing their emotional assistance to students. suggestions: • optimize the composition of teachers’ responsibilities and duties and set legitimate limits to their working hours. • improve teacher evaluation criteria by placing more weight on developmental and value-added evaluation to reduce subjective b mailto:lhqbnu@163.com vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2006 pressures perceived by teachers and extend the range of teacher performance indicators beyond the exam results and school progression rates of students. • pool resources to alleviate non-instructional burdens on teachers and increase in-service training to combat teacher job burnout and enhance the quality of teaching. source: journal of soochow university (education science edition), 2025; 2025:1-13. bece. newsletter vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2049 preference for general over vocational tracks: an investigation based on a survey of 21,531 junior secondary students from three autonomous prefectures by shen, y. correspondence to: youlu shen, hainan normal university, china. e-mail: youlushen@126.com his study aims to investigate the issue of preference for general over vocational tracks (pfgovt) at the senior secondary education level in ethnic minority areas as well as the underlying reasons. the research team conducted a survey of 21,531 ninth-grade students from three autonomous prefectures where ethnic minority populations predominate, namely, liangshan yi autonomous prefecture in sichuan province, nujiang lisu autonomous prefecture in yunnan province, and linxia hui autonomous prefecture in gansu province. the survey was preceded by in-person interviews with certain numbers of junior secondary students, parents, teachers, and local educational officials. research findings: • pfgovt was pervasive among junior secondary school graduates in the three prefectures, for whom attending general senior secondary schools was invariably the first choice. more than half of the students surveyed expressed a strong determination to pursue the general senior secondary track, and nearly 30 of them would accept the secondary vocational education as a last resort only when they failed to enter general high schools. • factors, including gender, family residence location, paternal occupation, maternal educational level, household income level, and academic performance ranking, significantly affected the degree of pfgovt of each individual student. • primary reasons for students’ unwillingness to pursue vocational education included the uncertainties in finding employment with a vocational school degree, worries about increasing financial burdens on their parents, the undesirable quality of current vocational education, poor discipline management of secondary vocational schools, low pay for secondary vocational graduates, low social recognition of practical skills, and social discrimination against vocational students. based on its findings, the study proposes the following recommendations: (i) schools, governments at all levels, and the media should actively disseminate information about recent developments in secondary vocational education to increase the public knowledge of the prospects of personal det mailto:youlushen@126.com vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2050 velopment as secondary vocational students. (ii) measures should be taken to address the specific reasons for students’ reluctance to pursue the vocational track, including increasing investment in secondary vocational education, creating more employment opportunities for vocational graduates, and raising the income levels of secondary vocational graduates; (iii) career planning training should be encouraged in primary and secondary schools to enhance the appeal of the vocational track. source: journal of central china normal university (humanities and social sciences), 2025; 64(03):163-174. bece. newsletter vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1843 an empirical study of the relation between rural school size and student academic achievement in the context of rural revitalization by zeng, s., lei, j., su, s., & zeng, p. correspondence to: pingfei zeng, zhejiang normal university, china. e-mail: zpf@zjnu.cn his article is an empirical study of academic achievement of rural students in x county, based on the analysis of how their senior secondary entrance examination results related to baseline performance (represented by terminal exam results of the first semester in grade 7) and academic progress (represented by student academic growth between grades 7 and 9). the rural schools included in the study were divided into two groups: small-size and medium-large-size schools. fully investigated were the gaps in student senior secondary entrance examination results and academic progress among rural schools of distinct sizes as well as the impact of school sizes on different student groups. research findings include that:  student baseline performance and academic progress had positive correlations with their senior secondary entrance examination results. the impact of student baseline performance was greater than that of academic progress.  medium-large-size rural schools performed better in the senior secondary entrance examination than small-size ones. the former had advantages over the latter regarding teacher resources, reputation, and school management and thus, had better student sources, which explained the disparities in senior secondary entrance examination results between the two groups of schools.  students from small-size rural schools made greater academic progress than their peers from medium-large-size rural schools. this is because they received more attention from their teachers despite their relatively lower baseline performance. moreover, the instructional methods of their teachers were more suitable to their needs.  the overall academic progress made by high-, moderately-, and low-performing student groups from small-size rural schools was significantly greater than their counterparts from medium-largesize schools. comparatively, moderatelyand lowperforming t mailto:zpf@zjnu.cn vol.16, no.2, 2024, bece 1844 students from small-size schools made bigger strides than the high-performing group. the study proposes suggestions as follows:  in rural school evaluation, considerations should include both student baseline performance and academic progress. a reasonable combination of formative and summative assessment will contribute to the betterment of the quality of rural education.  there should be more incentives for small-size rural schools to improve their teaching quality in that they are more academically value-added. they have the potential to be better recognized and accepted by students and student parents. source: journal of shanghai educational research, 2023; 2023(11):29-34. does teacher training narrow the educational gap between urban and rural students? empirical evidence from ceps baseline data ran sun, ping du faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china abstract. based on the baseline data of the china education panel survey, this paper explored the relationship between teacher training and academic performance in urban and rural samples respectively and the impact of teacher training on the urban-rural gap of students' academic performance. the results showed that: firstly, there was a significant urban-rural gap in academic performance, and the gap in high quantiles and language subjects were even larger. secondly, the results of unconditional quantile regression showed that teacher training could improve the performance of urban students with different academic levels and rural students with intermediate or above academic levels, but it cannot improve the performance of rural students with lower academic levels. in addition, the overall effect of teacher training in urban areas is significantly higher than that in rural areas. thirdly, different quantiles of oaxaca-blinder decomposition found that the endowment effect and the coefficient effect of teacher training were the important causes of the urban-rural performance gap, but the relative sizes of the two were different according to the different grades and different quantiles of performance distribution. therefore, to increase the training opportunities and improve the training quality of rural teachers as well as enhance the resource conversion rate of rural students are of great practical significance for narrowing the urbanrural performance gap. best evidence in chinese education 2021; 9(2):1243-1261. doi: 10.15354/bece.21.ar036. how to cite: sun, r., & du, p. (2021). does teacher training narrow the educational gap between urban and rural students? empirical evidence from ceps baseline data. best evidence in chinese education, 9(2):1243-1261. sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no.2, 2021 1244 keywords: teacher training, urban-rural gap, unconditional quantile regression, oaxaca-blinder decomposition about the author: ran sun, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. e-mail: ransunsunny@163.com correspondence to: ping du, faculty of education, beijing normal university, beijing 100875, china. e-mail: duping868@sina.com conflict of interests: none. © 2021 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:ransunsunny@163.com mailto:duping868@sina.com sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1245 introduction he development of china’s compulsory education has achieved remarkable results. however, the academic development of rural students still lags behind that of urban students (zhu, li & song, 2017; peng, 2014; qi & zheng, 2019). access to education is dependent on the path (chen, 2008). the gap in the compulsory education stage will cause huge differences in the enrollment rate and academic development of urban and rural students in the subsequent learning stage (zheng, sun & lu, 2019; zhang, 2019), and ultimately affect the overall level of social human capital accumulation (wang et al., 2018). therefore, it is crucial to reveal the reasons behind the gap in academic development of urban and rural students in the compulsory education stage. studies have pointed out that the quality of rural teachers is much lower than that of urban teachers is the key reason for the gap between urban and rural students’ academic development (qi & zheng, 2019; zong et al., 2018). therefore, the chinese government has invested a lot of resources in extensive teacher training programs to improve the overall quality of rural teachers. so, does rural teacher training really improve the quality of rural education and thereby narrow the gap with urban education development? in this paper, based on the ceps baseline survey data, we used unconditional quantile regression and oaxaca-blinder decomposition technology to explore the above problems. literature review the relationship between teacher training and student academic development studies have found that on-the-job training can help teachers improve their teaching practice (ross & bruce, 2007), and enhance their sense of self-efficacy (liu, ma & kang, 2020), thereby improving their professional development level and students’ academic performance. for example, angrist and lavy (2001) pointed out that in 1995 several public schools in jerusalem received an education and training fund dedicated to improving teachers’ reading, math, and english teaching skills, while teachers in other schools were not subject to this project. based on this, they used the technique of double difference to find that teacher training could improve the mathematics and reading performance of elementary school students. in addition, the authors believed that teacher training is more cost-effective for improving student performance than adjusting class size or teaching hours. zhou and yang (2019) used ceps data to find that china’s rural teacher training improves students’ academic performance, and the abovementioned positive effects were more pronounced among boys and lower-grade students. nevertheless, some studies based on randomized controlled trials, quasiexperimental design, and training program evaluation have found that teacher training t sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1246 has no significant effect on student performance. for example, jacob and lefgren (2004) used the breakpoint regression method for the educational reform implemented by the chicago public school system in 1996 1 and found that teacher training had no obvious effect on improving the mathematics and reading performance of primary school students. moreover, this result exists steadily among students of different abilities, genders, races, and family incomes. however, the authors believed that the target group of this educational reform was schools with high levels of poverty and extremely backward student academic development, and the lack of structure and poor quality of training activities may be the reasons for the ineffectiveness of training. zhang, lai and pang (2013) conducted a randomized controlled trial of training intervention for english teachers in schools for children of migrant workers in beijing. the results showed that short-term and high-intensity on-the-job training had no significant impact on the teaching level of english teachers and the english performance of students. by evaluating the effectiveness of large-scale rural teacher training programs in china, loyalka et al. (2019) found that teachers’ knowledge and teaching habits, students’ academic performance, psychological factors in specific subjects, or dropout behavior are not affected by this training project. furthermore, most of the existing studies reveal the relationship between teacher training and student academic development in an average sense. the key assumption is that there is no difference in the effect of teacher training for students with better and poorer grades in the class (lounkeaw, 2013). however, students with poor grades tend to learn passively, while students with excellent grades learn more actively (qing, 2009). then when participating in training squeezes the time allocation of teachers in teaching, preparing lessons, and tutoring students (zhou & yang, 2019), the performance of students with poor grades may further decline and it is more difficult to benefit from teacher training, while students with good grades are more likely to benefit from teacher training. may be undisturbed and benefit from teacher training. therefore, in the sense of super-average, it is still worth in-depth to reveal the relationship between teacher training and student academic development more accurately. the training status of urban and rural teachers since the 21st century, china’s teacher training has made great progress (pang et al., 2020). however, practical problems still exist in the training of rural teachers, such as lack of training funds and opportunities, formalized training process and low quality of training (zhao & xie, 2019). on the one hand, a large number of rural schools are experiencing inadequate implementation of teacher training funding guarantee policies, which to a certain extent limits the training opportunities for rural teachers. for example, a number of national and regional surveys have shown that many rural schools have not fully implemented the requirement that 5% of the public funds for elementary and middle school teachers should be used for teacher training (wu & qin, 2020; ministry of education of china, 2019). on the other hand, the training activities received by rural teachers may be of poor quality, lack of appropriate training content, difficult to meet the characteristics of sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1247 rural schools, and out of touch with their professional development needs (pang et al., 2020; chen & wang, 2013). therefore, the training opportunities and quality of rural teachers may not be as good as urban teachers. if it can be proved that teacher training has a boosting effect on students’ academic development, we have reason to speculate that the gap in training opportunities and training quality between urban and rural teachers may be an important reason for the gap in the academic development of chinese urban and rural students. based on the above literature review, we proposed the following hypotheses to be verified: hypothesis 1: the academic development of rural students lags behind that of urban students significantly. hypothesis 2: teacher training has a boosting effect on students’ academic development, but this effect is heterogeneous among students with different academic foundations. hypothesis 3: the gap in teacher training between urban and rural areas is an important reason for the differences in student performance between urban and rural areas. research design data sources the data comes from the china education panel survey (ceps) implemented by the china survey and data center of renmin university of china from 2013 to 2014. the ceps was a large-scale follow-up survey project with national representativeness. taking the two cohorts of the seventh and ninth grades as the starting point for the survey, 28 counties (districts), 112 schools, 438 classes, and 19,487 students were randomly selected across china as the survey subjects. it collected information on family and school resources, teacher training status, students’ academic performance, and basic characteristics of students, families and schools, which meet our research needs. after deleting a small number of invalid samples and samples with missing values in key variables, the subsequent analysis of the student sample size is 10,628, including 5,743 urban samples and 4,885 rural samples. variable selection  urban-rural variables based on the information provided by the principal’s questionnaire, we defined schools located in the central city, fringe urban areas, and urban-rural junctions of cities/counties as “urban schools”, and schools located in towns and rural areas as “rural schools”. in table 1, there are 3,065, 2,487, 2,678, and 2,398 students in seventh grade urban students, seventh grade rural students, ninth grade urban students, and ninth grade rural students, respectively. sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1248 table 1. descriptive statistics of main variables. dimension variable name seventh grade ninth grade city sample rural sample mean difference city sample rural sample mean difference independent variable teacher training frequency 22.973 15.545 7.428*** 20.501 15.844 4.658*** dependent variable cognitive performance weighted language performance 45.535 35.754 9.781*** 45.254 35.595 9.659*** cognitive performance weighted mathematics performance 39.418 31.922 7.496*** 39.245 31.624 7.620*** cognitive performance weighted english performance 46.946 38.241 8.705*** 46.644 38.617 8.027*** student level face variable student gender 0.528 0.532 0.004 0.502 0.490 0.012 is it an only child 0.524 0.263 0.261*** 0.549 0.271 0.278*** have you received preschool education 0.843 0.743 0.100*** 0.816 0.727 0.089*** cognitive performance 44.021 39.069 4.952*** 45.719 37.743 7.976*** family layer face variable family financial situation-poor 16.25% 28.31% / 15.23% 25.38% / family financial statusaverage 76.74% 67.42% / 77.91% 70.41% / family financial statusrich 7.00% 4.27% / 6.86% 4.20% / maximum years of education for parents 11.563 9.689 1.874*** 11.414 9.344 2.070*** school level face variable school rankingmedium and below 15.08% 29.25% / 13.00% 28.78% / school ranking-upper middle 50.70% 70.75% / 48.59% 71.22% / school ranking-best 34.22% 0 / 38.41% 0 / proportion of undergraduate teachers 0.808 0.668 0.139*** 0.813 0.648 0.165*** proportion of teachers graduated from normal majors or colleges 0.897 0.875 0.022*** 0.897 0.857 0.040*** sample size 3,065 2,487 / 2,678 2,398 / note: *p < 0.1, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01. except for the variables of “family economic status” and “school ranking” which are in percentage form, other variables are in mean value form.  student performance the dependent variables were the students’ chinese, math, and english scores. in order to increase the comparability of academic performance in different schools and regions, we used the regional and school-comparable student cognitive performance data collected by the ceps project team. first, generate the school-level average cognitive performance index, then weight the students’ performance in the school, and finally obtain the variables of the three science achievements. in table 1, in the sample of students in the two grades, the average scores of rural students were significantly lower than those sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1249 of urban students; in terms of subject, the gap was the largest in chinese, followed by english, and the smallest in mathematics.  teacher training the core explanatory variable was teacher training. it came from the frequency information of various teacher training conducted by schools provided by the principal questionnaire, which was a continuous variable. table 1 shows that the frequency of teacher training in rural areas was significantly lower than that in urban areas.  control variable this study contains three groups of control variables at the student level, family level and school level. student-level variables included gender (0 = female, 1 = male), only child (0 = no, 1 = yes), preschool education (0 = no, 1 = yes), and student cognitive test scores. family-level variables included family economic status (1 = poverty, 2 = average, 3 = abundant) and the parent’s highest level of education. school-level variables included school rankings (1 = medium and below, 2 = upper-middle, 3 = best), the proportion of teachers with a bachelor’s degree, and the proportion of teachers who graduated from teachers’ colleges or majors. table 1 shows that compared with urban students, the proportion of only-children, the proportion of preschool education and cognitive performance among rural students were significantly lower; parents’ educational level was significantly lower; family economic conditions were generally worse; schools ranked lower; the proportion of teachers with a bachelor’s degree and the proportion of teachers who graduated from teachers’ majors or colleges were significantly lower. research methodology unconditional quantile regression to investigate the impact of teacher training on the performance of urban and rural students at different points of student performance distribution, we adopted unconditional quantile regression (uqr) to conduct research. following is an example of chinese score. uqr mainly uses the re-centered influence function (rif) of distribution statistics for data conversion (firpo, fortin & lemieux, 2009). for the unconditional quantile (qτ) of the dependent variable student’s chinese score, fscore(qτ)=τ0fscore(qτ) is the marginal density function of the student’s score distribution, and i(•) is the indicator function. its rif can be recorded as: (1) the average value of rif is equal to the corresponding target statistic, namely e[rif(score,qτ)|x]=qτ(score). then the marginal effect of uqr is expressed as: sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1250 (2) uqr can be regressed on any quantile. due to space limitations, the follow-up analysis only presents the estimated results of the effect of teacher training on urban and rural student performance at the 30th, 50th, and 70th points of the student performance distribution. oaxaca-blinder decomposition with the help of ob decomposition (blinder, 1973; oaxaca, 1973), we focused on the decomposition of the performance gap between urban and rural students in teacher training. we take the chinese score as an example to detail the decomposition process. ∆ is the urban-rural gap of students’ language performance, and its ob decomposition form is as follows: (3) and represent the average level of teacher training frequency in the urban sample and the rural sample, respectively, and represent the estimated value of the coefficient when the urban sample and the rural sample are used to estimate the influence of teacher training on student performance. therefore, the difference in the average chinese performance of urban and rural students can be attributed to two parts: one part is due to the difference in the mean of teacher training frequency between urban and rural students, namely ( )• , also known as the endowment effect; the other part the difference between the estimated coefficients derived from teacher training affecting the performance of urban and rural students, namely ( )• , is also called the coefficient effect. the endowment effect and coefficient effect of teacher training correspond to different policy improvement ideas. the significant endowment effect indicates that the urban-rural gap in teacher training opportunities is an important reason for the urbanrural gap in student performance; then follow-up policies need to increase the training opportunities for rural teachers in order to narrow the urban-rural education gap. a significant coefficient effect indicates that the urban-rural gap between teacher training quality and student resource conversion rate is an important reason for the urban-rural gap in student performance; then follow-up policies need to improve the quality of rural teacher training and the resource conversion rate of rural students to achieve educational balance. sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1251 figure 1. the distribution of chinese scores of urban and rural students in seventh graders. figure 2. distribution of mathematics scores of urban and rural students in seventh graders. figure 3. distribution of english scores of urban and rural students in seventh graders. sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1252 figure 4. the distribution of chinese scores of ninth grade urban and rural students. figure 5. distribution of mathematics scores of urban and rural students in ninth graders. figure 6. the distribution of english scores of ninth grade urban and rural students. sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1253 figure 7. the urban-rural gap in the performance of seventh grade students at different quantile. figure 8. the urban-rural gap between grade nine students at different quantile. results the status quo of the gap between urban and rural students’ performance this section reveals the performance distribution of urban and rural students (figures 1 to 6) and the performance gap between urban and rural students at different points of sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1254 the performance distribution (figures 7 and 8). the data shows that in the two grades, compared with urban students, the distribution of the three subjects of rural students is significantly leftward, indicating those rural students’ performance in chinese, mathematics, and english lags behind that of urban students as a whole. so, the hypothesis 1 was confirmed. at the same time, the urban-rural gap in student performance at different quantile showed similar characteristics in both grades. as follows: first, urban students at different quantile have significantly higher scores in chinese, mathematics, and english than the corresponding rural students. second, the performance gap between urban and rural students presents a “ceiling effect”, that is, with the increase of the quintile, the urban and rural gaps in the three subject performances of students have shown a significant expansion trend. third, there is subject heterogeneity in the degree of the urban-rural gap in student performance; the gap between urban and rural students in different quantile in language subjects (chinese and english) is generally greater than the gap in mathematics. these findings indicated that the performance gap between urban and rural students is more mainly reflected in the student groups with good performance and language subjects. therefore, it is extremely important to examine the differences in the impact of teacher training on urban and rural student performance in different disciplines and different points of student performance distribution. the influence of teacher training on student performance in urban and rural areas this section used uqr technology to estimate the effect of teacher training on students’ chinese, mathematics, and english performance at different points of the score distribution in samples of all students, urban students, and rural students. the results are shown in table 2. based on the full sample, the following results appeared robustly in different grades and different subjects: students with different quantile of performance distribution have improved their academic performance due to teacher training, and with the increase of quantile, the effect of teacher training on student performance continued to increase. the possible reason is that, compared with students with poor performance, those with good performance generally performed better in learning habits and abilities characterized by learning initiative, participation, and interest. moreover, the resource conversion rate of the various element inputs they face was higher (jiang, 2017). when being taught by teacher training at the same time, students with good performance are better able to absorb and internalize the teaching improvement obtained through training into higher academic performance, and thus get more benefits from teacher training. next, we subdivided the sample of urban and rural students. the results showed that among urban students, teacher training benefited all students, but the degree of benefit varied with the difference in student performance. specifically, compared with students with lower-middle grades, students with middle and above grades have achieved a greater degree of improvement in performance due to teacher training. sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1255 table 2. uqr estimation results of the effect of teacher training on student performance. full sample urban sample rural sample q30 q50 q70 q30 q50 q70 q30 q50 q70 chinese 7 th grader 0.042 *** 0.111 *** 0.159 *** 0.117 *** 0.205 *** 0.147 *** 0.012 0.168 *** 0.122 *** (9.23) (25.90) (18.48) (16.95) (32.01) (13.75) (0.80) (9.54) (8.58) 9 th grader 0.022 *** 0.123 *** 0.177 *** 0.134 *** 0.203 *** 0.233 *** -0.063 *** 0.119 *** 0.123 *** (3.76) (22.91) (17.96) (13.49) (22.64) (19.23) (-4.76) (7.22) (7.79) math 7 th grader 0.044 *** 0.075 *** 0.133 *** 0.082 *** 0.155 *** 0.137 *** -0.012 0.068 *** 0.056 *** (11.35) (25.99) (18.10) (16.85) (28.53) (14.32) (-0.82) (6.37) (6.39) 9 th grader 0.032 *** 0.068 *** 0.131 *** 0.080 *** 0.143 *** 0.192 *** -0.045 *** 0.057 *** 0.056 *** (7.27) (22.67) (16.16) (15.37) (20.59) (15.23) (-3.41) (5.25) (6.43) english 7 th grader 0.049 *** 0.090 *** 0.143 *** 0.094 *** 0.157 *** 0.167 *** -0.046 *** 0.087 *** 0.075 *** (11.17) (26.02) (18.39) (16.06) (24.93) (14.68) (-3.06) (7.36) (6.69) 9 th grader 0.023 *** 0.080 *** 0.145 *** 0.087 *** 0.165 *** 0.167 *** -0.031 ** 0.046 *** 0.060 *** (5.75) (22.72) (18.75) (13.90) (23.51) (12.58) (-2.41) (4.99) (6.29) note: * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01. the t value is in parentheses. each coefficient in the table comes from an independent model. due to space limitations, the estimated results of the control variables are not presented in the table. the above results robustly exist in different grades and different subjects, and are similar to the estimated results based on the sample of all students. in the sample of rural students, teacher training can only benefit students with intermediate and above grades. students with intermediate and lower grades cannot be improved by teacher training. what’s more, students with poor grades in the ninth grade will have a significant decline in all three subjects due to teacher training. this is because rural students with low-to-middle grades are the worst-developed group in china’s entire education system. they generally lack learning initiative, and the learning process is more dependent on the teacher’s constant supervision (qing, 2009). however, training may bring conflicts between working and teaching to teachers, reduce the time allocation for teaching and class preparation, and the attention and urge to students. in the end, the academic performance of students with low grades is difficult to benefit from teacher training. for urban students at the lower-middle level, their academic performance, learning ability and habits are generally better than those of the correspondingly ranked students in rural areas; in addition, the parents of urban students are more likely to have higher education levels and educational participation levels; and therefore, the children can be guided after class, and ultimately they have not been negatively affected by teacher training. therefore, the negative relationship between teacher training and student performance is mainly reflected in the rural student groups with poor persun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1256 formance. in fact, jacob and lefgren (2004) based on data from usa schools that are highly impoverished and whose student performance was extremely low, found that teacher training could not improve student performance, and the results would not change due to differences in students’ previous academic foundation. this finding better supports the reliability of the conclusions of this study for rural student groups with poor performance. further, horizontally compare the urban-rural gap in the effect of teacher training on the improvement of student performance. the results found that in different grades and different disciplines, the effect of improving the performance of rural students due to teacher training was significantly smaller than that of urban students; this phenomenon steadily exists at different quantile of the distribution of student performance. there are two possible explanations for this. (i) the training opportunities and quality of rural teachers are not as good as that of urban teachers. (ii) compared with urban students, rural students have a poorer academic foundation and ability; therefore, the resource conversion rate is lower. these all may limit the effectiveness of teacher training in rural areas. in sum, teacher training could help improve the academic performance of urban students with different performance levels and rural students with middle and above performance levels. however, it could not bring a positive impact on rural students with lower-middle performance levels. in addition, the performance improvement effect of urban teacher training was higher than the corresponding effect of rural teachers. so far, hypothesis 2 has been confirmed. therefore, it can be speculated that the urban-rural gap in teacher training will cause the gap in academic performance of urban and rural students. the influence of teacher training on the achievement gap between urban and rural students this section used both uqr and ob decomposition techniques. decomposes the performance gap between urban and rural students, and mainly presents the explanation strength of the urban-rural gap in teacher training. the results are shown in table 3. the decomposition results of the seventh grade showed that in different subjects and different quantile, teacher training could explain the urban-rural gap in student performance to a certain extent. as the quantile increases, the explanatory power of the endowment effect of teacher training showed a trend of first increasing and then decreasing, but the fluctuation range was relatively slow and always maintained above 10%. at the same time, the explanatory power of the coefficient effect of teacher training decreased rapidly from more than 20% of the low quantile to less than 10% of the high quantile. furthermore, comparing the relative importance of the two effects of teacher training at different quantile of performance distribution, it is found that: (i) for urban and rural students whose performance is below average, the performance gap could easily be explained by the coefficient effect of teacher training; (ii) for urban and rural sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1257 table 3. decomposition results of teacher training on the urban-rural gap in student performance. seventh grade ninth grade q30 q50 q70 q30 q50 q70 chinese endowment effect estimated value 0.935*** 1.629*** 1.101*** 0.636*** 0.958*** 1.060*** percentage 12.05% 18.49% 10.25% 7.08% 8.91% 9.90% coefficient effect estimated value 1.724*** 0.948*** 0.380 3.098*** 1.497*** 1.760*** percentage 22.21% 10.76% 3.54% 34.48% 13.92% 16.44% math endowment effect estimated value 0.641*** 1.147*** 1.041*** 0.387*** 0.647*** 0.893*** percentage 11.42% 19.75% 12.00% 6.18% 10.35% 10.71% coefficient effect estimated value 1.531*** 1.336*** 0.877*** 1.963*** 1.363*** 1.949*** percentage 27.28% 23.00% 10.11% 31.33% 21.81% 23.38% english endowment effect estimated value 0.742*** 1.201*** 1.252*** 0.425*** 0.758*** 0.778*** percentage 12.02% 17.49% 11.36% 8.28% 11.30% 8.86% coefficient effect estimated value 2.239*** 1.104*** 1.014*** 1.945*** 1.873*** 1.422*** percentage 36.28% 16.08% 9.20% 37.88% 27.92% 16.20% notes: (1) the above decomposition process also control the variables at the school level, the family level variables and school level variables, space is limited, the results are not eleven out . (2) the endowment effect percentage in the table refers to the ratio of the explanatory strength of the endowment effect of teacher training to the explanatory strength of the endowment effect of all variables included in the model, and the coefficient effect percentage refers to the explanatory strength of the coefficient effect of teacher training and the model includes the ratio of explanatory strengths of the coefficient effects of all variables. students with intermediate and above grades, their performance gap was suitable to be explained by the endowment effect of teacher training. similarly, the decomposition results of the ninth grade showed that both endowment and coefficient effect of teacher training in different subjects and different quantile could explain the urban-rural gap in student performance to a certain extent. but relatively, the explanatory strength of the coefficient effect always dominated at different quantile. therefore, hypothesis 3 is confirmed. in addition, comparing the results of the seventh and ninth grades, we found that the greater urban-rural gap in the performance of ninth grade students was explained by the coefficient effect of teacher training, and the explanatory effect of the endowment effect of teacher training was relatively small. if the coefficient effect of teacher training was understood as the difference in the efficiency of urban and rural students’ conversion of the positive effects of teacher training into their own performance improvement, it meant that the resource conversion rate of rural students was lower than that of urban students. the possible explanation is that capacity formation is cumulative. as the grade increases, the differences in the accumulation of learning foundation in the early stage are gradually showed up, and will affect the subsequent academic development. sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1258 the above results indicated that the training frequency of rural teachers was significantly lower than that of urban teachers; the efficiency of transforming rural teacher training into student performance was not as efficient as the corresponding situation in the city; these were the potential reasons why rural students’ academic performance significantly lags behind urban students. in fact, the training frequency of urban teachers in grade seven (22.973 times) was significantly higher than that of rural teachers (15.545 times). the training frequency of urban teachers in grade 9 (20.501 times) was significantly higher than that of rural teachers (15.844 times). moreover, the conversion rate of teacher training was comprehensively affected by the quality of training and the ability of students. therefore, in order to reduce the performance gap between urban and rural students, it is necessary to increase the training opportunities for rural teachers, improve the quality of rural teacher training, and improve the early learning ability of rural students. in order to achieve a balanced development of urban and rural education and ensure the quality of teachers’ inputs, the family’s inputs, which are closely related to the formation of students’ abilities, cannot be ignored. conclusion and suggestion based on ceps data, this study examined the relationship between teacher training and student performance and its impact on the urban-rural gap in student performance. we found that: first, in the entire academic performance distribution, rural students lagged behind that of urban students, and this gap was more obvious at high quantile and in language subjects. second, teacher training helped improve the performance of students with different academic levels in cities and rural students with middle and above levels, but it could not improve the performance of rural students with middle and below levels. in addition, the overall effect of teacher training on urban students was significantly higher than that of rural students. third, the urban-rural gap in teacher training explained the urban-rural gap in student performance distribution to a certain extent. the endowment effect and coefficient effect of teacher training were both important reasons for the urban-rural gap in student performance, but the relative size of the two varied with grades and academic performance. therefore, the findings of this study have enlightenment to formulate education policies that narrow the development gap between urban and rural students. first, innovate and improve rural teacher training policies and systems, and provide rural teachers with more high-quality training activities. this study found that only when rural teachers obtain the “dual guarantee” of training opportunities and quality, can they contribute to the balanced development of urban and rural education. however, in reality, many rural schools had not fully implemented the teacher training funding guarantee policy, which limited the frequency of rural teacher training (chen & wang, 2013). some rural teachers reported that the training content was too theoretical, the teaching format was superficial, and the guiding role was very limited (pang, et al., 2020). therefore, it is necessary to fully implement the provisions on the proportion of rural school teacher training funds to public funds; increase financial support for rural teacher training projects; and provide rural teachers with more training opportunities. sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1259 meanwhile, training activities should effectively address the characteristics of rural schools and teachers, and increase the training of local knowledge and the psychological problems of rural left-behind children and their ability to improve the applicability of training. second, effectively strengthen parental participation and popularize rural preschool education to help rural students lay a solid academic foundation and increase their resource conversion rate. we found that the coefficient effect of teacher training could significantly explain the performance gap between urban and rural students at different quantile of the distribution of student performance in different grades. to a certain extent, it reflected that the resource conversion rate of rural students was significantly behind that of urban students, which was an essential reason why they have been behind urban students for a long time. the disadvantage of rural students in the resource conversion rate is caused by the students’ poor academic foundation, lack of family resources and low level of parental participation. therefore, in the short term, school administrators should encourage “family and pre-school education together”, especially emphasizing, accepting and guiding the participation of parents of students with poor academic performance. in the long run, education reform needs to pay attention to the importance of early education for rural students. popularize rural preschool education, extend the period of rural preschool education, improve the quality of care and education, and ensure that rural students have a solid knowledge reserve to improve the efficiency of their resource input conversion. finally, for student groups with different characteristics, differentiated teacher training intervention programs need to be adopted to more effectively narrow the urbanrural education gap. this study found that for students with middle and above levels in the lower grades, the part of the performance gap explained by the teacher training endowment effect was greater than the explanatory power of the coefficient effect. the opposite was true for senior students and students whose grades are below average. therefore, for the former type of rural students, teachers can directly provide more high-quality training opportunities, and at the same time, gradually increase the student’s resource conversion rate. for the latter type of rural students, before increasing the frequency of high-quality teacher training, it is more necessary to focus on improving the student’s resource conversion rate. the above-mentioned differentiated teacher training intervention programs can bring more obvious effects to improving the education gap between urban and rural areas. in addition, senior rural students with poor performance may be negatively affected by teacher training, which reduces teaching time or loses teacher supervision. and they are at the critical stage of the entrance examination, so they can make full use of the network platform and innovate training models under the current background of “internet + education” to improve the time efficiency of these teachers’ participation in training. note: 1. in 1996, according to the standard that the proportion of students meeting the national reading standard in schools was less than 15%, cps selected 71 elementary schools out of 489 elementary schools for intervention. its main purpose is to provide these schools with professional funds sun & du. teacher training in educational gap between urban and rural students. bece, vol.9, no. 2, 2021 1260 for teacher training and enhancement of teacher professional development. references angrist, j.d., & lavy, v. 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(2022). does housework help improve academic performance? an empirical analysis on the influence of participation in housework on academic performance of primary and middle school students. best evidence in chinese education, 10(1):1283-1301. keywords: participation in housework, education on hard-working spirit, student academic achievement, coarsened exact matching, reducing burden and increasing efficiency about authors: xuechun wang, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, 122 ninghai road, nanjing 210024, china, e-mail: wxc3a@qq.com shike zhou, educational measurement and evaluation, jiangsu academy of educational sciences, china. e-mail: jyszsk@163.com correspondence to: jijun yao, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, 122 ninghai road, nanjing 210024, china, e-mail: yaojijun_njnu@163.com funding: jiangsu university advantage discipline construction project funding project (papd) conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:wxc3a@qq.com mailto:jyszsk@163.com mailto:yaojijun_njnu@163.com wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1285 introduction ncouraging students to perform housework fits well with the goals of china’s education. but does time spent on housework limit students’ study time, thus being harmful to academic achievement? chinese education policy has long emphasized “learning from practice”, and housework is an important form of rigorous work. whereas the existing nature of chinese education requires students to perform mountains of homework, parents tend to protect their children from household work so that they may have more time for academic study. this paper addresses this issue by examining the meaning of housework education, and the effects of housework performance on student academic achievement. in china, the significance of housework education was early recognized and has been supported by policies promoting a spirit of hard work, an important domain of the great chinese educator cai yuanpei’s “educating five domains simultaneously” (tang, 2009). these five domains are: military national education (focusing on the cultivation of the five martial ethics of wisdom, faith, benevolence, courage, and strictness); materialistic education (advocating a close relationship between education and national economic life); civic moral education (advocating love for the motherland and its people, love of labor, love of science, and care for public property); worldview education (forming students’ correct positions, viewpoints, and methods), aesthetic education (training students’ ability to recognize, love, and create beauty), meanwhile, at the beginning of the founding of new china, the common program of the chinese people’s political consultative conference listed “love of labor” as one of the “five national merits.” in 1950, junrui qian, vice minister of education, clearly pointed out in the guidelines for current educational construction that the central policy of the new democratic education was to serve workers and peasants and develop production and construction (he, 2009). since then, with education for hard-working spirit being raised to unprecedented new heights on the political, economic and epistemological range, teaching children how to perform housework has been gradually incorporated into the school’s formal teaching plan (lao, 1998), and has become an important way to shape students’ character and the key to their all-round development (li & qu, 2018). since the reform and opening up, the political connotation of education for hard-working spirit has been weakened, but is still considered an essential way to educate people. in recent years, the authorities at all levels have issued a series of policy documents to highlight the role of education on hard-working spirit. in march and july 2020, the central committee of the communist party of china, the state council and the ministry of education respectively issued the opinions on comprehensively strengthening labor education in colleges, primary and junior high schools in the new era (hereafter referred to as the “opinions”) and the guidelines for labor education in colleges and universities (hereafter referred to as the “outline”), the status of education for the hard-working spirit has been pushed to new levels. in sharp contrast with this policy emphasis, however, the current situation of housework education is not satisfactory. for instance, wang and xu (2020) conducted questionnaire surveys and on-site interviews with 4,224 students in 6 provinces and cities in the east, central and west part of china. only 6.6% of the basic education schools set up housework courses, and the higher the school level, the lower the devele wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1286 opment of housework education as well as the satisfaction of students with participation in housework. the proportion of students who never participate in housework in primary school, junior high school and high school accounted for 13.8%, 26.7% and 41.7% respectively (wang & xu, 2020). bao (2013) found that although 83.1% of parents are aware of the necessity of letting their children participate in housework, only 41.8% of them would really require their children to perform it (bao, 2013). in many cases, apart from “spoiling” their children, the reason parents are reluctant to allow their children to participate more in housework is that they pay more attention to their children’s academic performance. to that end, many parents tend to impose greater academic stress on their children through various means (goh & kuczynski, 2014). spare time of young people in china will thus be spent on extracurricular activities, with only limited time devoted to practical educational activities, let alone autonomously planned activity (wang & chen, 2015). changing this situation will likely ensure the implementation of relevant policies and more supportive guidance. moreover, one question that parents are generally concerned about needs to be answered: will housework affect children’s academic performance? literature review in fact, the academic circle has long been involved in the issue of housework and youth development. embodied cognition theory suggests that the body, brain, and environment are unified. this in turn suggests that significant physical activity can improve learning experiences and academic performance (wang & ye, 2018). studies underscore this conclusion with respect to language learning (lan, chen & li, et al., 2015; mcclelland, pitt & stein, 2015; su & ye, 2013) and mathematics learning (ruiter, loyens & paas, 2015; smith, king & hoyte j, 2014). marx believed that hard work satisfies the needs of individual survival and contained the main force for helping mankind overcome difficulties and nature. in the process of doing housework, human spiritual development is closely linked with education for hard-working spirit (huang, 2004), which is identified by some far-reaching empirical studies. in 1989, jacqueline j. goodnow, a senior professor in the faculty of behavioral sciences at macquarie university in australia, interviewed 45 mothers with children aged 9-11 and found that in addition to cultivating children’s sense of responsibility, participation in housework played a vital role in children’s socialization, and that different ways of distributing housework had different effects on family relations (goodnow, 1989). harvard university professor robert waldinger in his 20-year grant study argued that people who had housework experience in childhood, even simple housework experience, tended to have more happiness in future life than those without housework experience (george, 2012). because of this, many countries attach great importance to children’s housework and have developed education on hard working spirit methods with various cultural characteristics (li, 1983; gu, 2018; fu & zhou, 2005; tan, 2019). relevant studies have indicated that frequent participation in housework is not only conducive to the improvement of students’ academic performance, but also has a positive impact on the development of children’s character, habits and non-cognitive abilities. in contrast, lack of housework may bring about many negative effects such as arrogance, laziness, cognitive bias, etc. (gu, 2021). however, many foreign studies have suggested that in families with wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1287 low economic background, housework may not have a positive effect on the growth of children, and have the possibility of making children become “child laborers”. in 1990, based on data from the national household and household survey sampson lee blair, a professor in the department of sociology at the university of oklahoma, conducted a series of surveys on children involved in domestic labor under different circumstances and claimed that children in “dual-career families” are especially likely to be more and more served as a source of “alternative labor,” which would not only reduce the differences between the role of adults and children in the family, but also have a negative impact on children’s happiness and growth (blair, 1992). so far, most domestic housework education research is based on theoretical discussions, most of which have focused on the impact of housework education on students’ developments and the ways to strengthen and encourage its performance (chen & lu, 2021; xiong, 2021; yuan & li, 2021; yin, 2021). despite a few rigorous empirical studies, many improvements can be made in terms of data quality, method application, and robustness of conclusions to provide greater support for policies aimed at improving housework education. our research, therefore, provides more complete empirical analysis aimed at answering the following questions. firstly, what is the current status of primary and junior high school students in housework? secondly, how does participation in housework affect the academic performance of primary and junior high school students? thirdly, what are the factors that influence primary and junior high school students to participate in housework? finally, a discussion will be given to investigate what measures should be taken to drive primary and junior high school students to participate in housework to promote their overall development. research design and methods data source and sample description this study selects data from the 2020 monitoring of students’ academic quality in basic education in jiangsu province, which is implemented every two years. the subjects of the 2020 test were students in the fifth and ninth grades. in addition to an academic test, the survey collects relevant information about school leaders, teachers, parents, and students through questionnaires. through two-stage stratified sampling, the 2020 survey includes a total of 214,205 fifth-grade students and 147,805 ninth-grade students, a sufficient data source for this study. to ensure the data validity, cases that failed to provide important information or that had obvious response abnormalities were eliminated. our resulting subsample contains 103,507 primary school and 100,998 junior high school students. variable selection and description the variables of this study are described in table 1. the dependent variable wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1288 table 1. variable description. variable name variable type data type variable description housework participation frequency core explanatory variables dichotomous variables infrequent=0; regular=1 gender control variable dichotomous variables male=1; female=0 only-child dichotomous variables only child=1; non-only child=0 urban/ rural area dichotomous variables city=1; countryside=0 father’s education continuous variable junior high school and below=9 years; high school (vocational high school, technical secondary school or technical school)=12; university=16 years; postgraduate and above=19 mother’s education continuous variable father's occupation continuous variable assign expert values to different occupations mother's occupation continuous variable family's economic status continuous variable standardized score of household economic situation central region of jiangsu dummy variable central region of jiangsu=1；others=0 southern region of jiangsu dummy variable southern region of jiangsu=1；others=0 student’s residence dichotomous variables on campus=1； off campus=0 academic burden continuous variable the sum of the time on homework and the time on supplementary lessons academic performance (total) explained variable continuous variable primary school: the average score of total scores in chinese, mathematics, and english; junior high school students: the average score of total scores in chinese, mathematics, english, physics, chemistry, and biology. the dependent variable of this study is the student’s academic performance. primary school test scores include three subjects: chinese, mathematics, and english, while junior high school test scores include six subjects: chinese, mathematics, english, physics, chemistry, and biology. in processing the original scores, we used multiple imputation (mi) to estimate missing item values. the raida criterion will assume that a set of test data only contains random errors, then calculate and process them to obtain the standard deviation, and determine an interval with a certain probability. it is believed that any error exceeding this interval is not a random error but a gross error, which should be eliminated (zhang & yuan, 1997). finally, the mean value of the multiple interpolation results is calculated to obtain the final result of the interpolation. core independent variables in this provincial survey, students were asked “how often did you do housework in the last month?” their responses were measured on a four-point scale ranging from “never” to “always.” items were ranked on a scale, ranging from “never”, “occasionally”, “very often”, to “always”. because we planned to adopt a matching method to eliminate the influence of sample selection bias and improve the accuracy of analysis, we recoded this item into a dichotomous variable for which responses of “never” and “occasionally” were treated as never doing housework and responses of “occasionally” and wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1289 table 2. descriptive statistics for variables. primary school junior high school min max mean sd mean sd housework participation freq. 0.769 0.422 0.463 0.499 0 1 gender 0.519 0.500 0.518 0.500 0 1 only-child 0.369 0.483 0.466 0.499 0 1 urban/rural area 0.704 0.457 0.703 0.457 0 1 father’s education 12.987 3.232 11.678 2.854 9 19 mother's education 13.164 3.334 11.359 2.795 9 19 father's occupation 44.311 20.800 38.874 19.672 0 69 mother's occupation 34.515 23.867 30.831 21.209 0 69 family's economic status 0.422 0.137 0.428 0.130 0 1 central region of jiangsu 0.165 0.371 0.161 0.368 0 1 southern region of jiangsu 0.588 0.492 0.575 0.494 0 1 on/off campus 0.031 0.172 0.140 0.346 0 1 academic burden 3.107 1.871 4.008 2.029 0 9 academic performance (total) 519.083 53.088 512.708 59.704 265.900/276.210 684.220/691.630 “always” were treated as always doing so. this allowed intervention and control groups to be constructed and analyzed with the matching method. control variables variables were included to control for salient student characteristics such as gender, family background, academic burden, residence (on/off campus), and urbanicity. student family background was estimated based on five variables: father’s education level, mother’s education level, father’s occupation, mother’s occupation, and family economic status. parent education was assigned a value of 1 for junior high or lower, 2 for high school, 3 for university degree, and 4 for post graduate degree. (regression treats 9, 12, 16, and 19 the same as 1, 2, 3, and 4.) in terms of parent occupations, we refer to the research of li chunling, lu xueyi, etc., (2005) and use the expert assignment method to assign values to the parents’ occupations using professional reputation scores. the specific method ranks the professional prestige of various occupations on a zero to 100 scale. the values in our subsample range from zero to 69. as for family economic status, the family economic conditions are characterized by investigating the amount of family possessions. taking into account the differences between urban and rural areas, we also include dummy variables of urban and rural areas in the model. table 2 reports descriptive statistics for the variables in this study. the table indicates that the proportion of primary students who often participate in housework in the sample is 76.9%, and the proportion of junior high school students who often participate in housework is 46.3%. the average academic burden of junior high school students is 4 hours, while for primary school students, it is 3 hours. the average academic scores of primary and junior high school students were 519.08 and 512.71 respectively. wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1290 model setting this research aims to explore the extent to which the frequency of participation in housework can affect students’ academic achievement. but because characteristics such as family economic background can affect the analysis results or lead to biased estimates, matching methods are used to eliminate sample selection bias to solve this problem. however, since the commonly used propensity score matching (psm) has to pass the balance test and the common support domain test, it has higher requirements on the data and often fails to match (rosenbaum & rubin, 1983). as far as this study is concerned, the pre-phase analysis indicated that it was impossible to use the psm method to eliminate possible sample selection bias because it failed to pass the relevant test. in response to this problem, we use the coarsened exact matching (cem) method to improve the accuracy of the analysis. cem’s essence is to control the difference between the treatment group and the control group before treatment by matching samples, so that the covariate empirical distribution of the treatment group and the control group are closer. when using the cem method, the maximum imbalance between the treatment group and the control group can be selected by the researcher in advance, and the variables are grouped according to the researcher’s criteria. as such, while retaining basic information, the efficiency of matching is improved, and both the degree of model dependence and the estimation error of average treatment effect are reduced. in this way, the data can be limited within the scope of common support, which conforms to the principle of consistency and is less sensitive to measurement errors. this method has a very important feature, that is, monotonic imbalance boundary, which means based on the criteria for grouping variables in advance, it can ensure matching to improve the balance of the sample, and thus limit the degree of model dependence and the estimation error of average treatment effect. so there is no need to check the balance of covariates after matching, and adjusting the imbalance of one variable will not affect the imbalance of any other variables. cem can yield a weight variable (weight) during the matching process without requiring the two groups before and after the matching to be numerically equal. using cem can solve sample selection bias while retaining the original samples to the greatest extent, and improve the accuracy of the model for the analysis. (iacus et al., 2011; chen & gu, 2019) therefore, this study calculates the weights (cem_weights) through the panexact matching method, and includes them in the regression model, so as to control selection bias and reduce the imbalance of feature variables between groups. the characteristic variables used for coarsened exact matching are gender, only-child, urban/rural area, parents’ maximum years of education, parents’ occupational prestige, family economic background level, on/off campus, and student’s academic burden. the specific model is shown in equation (1), where avegradesi is the average academic performance score of the i-th student, β0 is the intercept of the model, lao2i is whether the ith student often participates in housework, and xi is the control variable. β1 and β2 are the regression coefficients of each variable, and εi is the residual. avegradesi=β0 + β1lao2i + β2xi + εi[cem_weights] (1) wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1291 table 3. least squares regression results (dependent variable: academic performance). variable model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 ps jhs ps jhs ps jhs ps jhs housework participation freq. 12.381*** -6.653*** 12.546*** -3.103*** 11.196*** -1.327*** 12.446*** -0.777** (0.414) (0.376) (0.399) (0.382) (0.390) (0.372) (0.393) (0.372) gender -6.911*** -10.089*** -5.465*** -8.289*** -5.114*** -7.902*** (0.317) (0.377) (0.311) (0.367) (0.313) (0.365) only-child 22.299*** 16.714*** 18.284*** 9.302*** 17.390*** 9.605*** (0.328) (0.388) (0.327) (0.389) (0.329) (0.388) urban/ rural area 16.249*** 16.559*** 9.828*** 7.800*** 8.156*** 6.168*** (0.367) (0.421) (0.374) (0.428) (0.381) (0.438) central region of jiangsu 20.025*** 4.225*** 16.573*** 3.138*** 15.869*** 4.932*** (0.525) (0.607) (0.522) (0.594) (0.528) (0.614) southern region of jiangsu 12.982*** 3.246*** 8.224*** (0.246) 6.592*** -1.080** (0.413) (0.469) (0.409) (0.463) (0.413) (0.489) father's education 4.259*** 4.765*** 4.089*** 4.659*** (0.075) (0.097) (0.075) (0.097) mother's education -1.626*** 0.641*** -1.650*** 0.554*** (0.072) (0.102) (0.073) (0.101) father's occupation 0.034*** 0.071*** 0.017* 0.066*** (0.009) (0.012) (0.009) (0.012) mother's occupation 0.086*** 0.104*** 0.078*** 0.079*** (0.008) (0.010) (0.008) (0.010) family's economic status 67.842*** 47.598*** 62.050*** 42.534*** (1.328) (1.659) (1.351) (1.662) on/off campus -18.254*** 9.412*** (1.078) (0.614) academic burden 2.957*** 3.162*** (0.092) (0.100) constant 509.563 *** 515.789 *** 483.359 *** 498.413 *** 426.728 *** 419.638 *** 425.482 *** 411.846 *** (0.372) (0.257) (0.554) (0.534) (0.878) (1.002) (0.887) (1.039) sample size 103507 100,998 98,130 95,719 88,805 89,426 86,454 88,848 adjusted r2 0.010 0.003 0.11 0.05 0.209 0.154 0.222 0.165 f 895.55 313.24 1,955.68 865.05 2053.55 1565.6 1831.57 1422.80 note: ps: primary school. jhs: junior high school. 1. the standard error of the regression coefficient is in parentheses; 2. significance level：*p<0.1，**p<0.05，***p<0.01 regression results ols regression results wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1292 this research first uses the least squares regression to obtain a benchmark estimate of the impact of students’ participation in housework on their academic achievement. the results in table 3 show that after controlling students’ personal characteristics, family background, residency (on/off campus), and the burden of schoolwork, a significant positive correlation exists among primary school students between housework participation and academic performance. among junior high students, however, this relationship is significant negative. instead, there is a significant positive correlation among junior high students between mother’s schooling years, on/off campus residency, the burden of schoolwork, and academic performance. it can be seen from model 4 that compared with the pupils who do not often participate in housework; pupils with frequent housework participation score an average of 12.45 points higher in academic performance. from model 3 and model 4, it is found that the father’s education level, parents’ professional background, and family economic background, all have a significant positive impact on children’s academic performance in both elementary and junior high school and family economic background factors have the greatest impact. it is worth noting that although the mother’s education level has a significant impact on primary and junior high school students, its direction on primary school students’ academic performance is negative, that is, mother’s high educational background is not conducive to the improvement of the primary and junior high school students’ academic performance. regression results after controlling the selection bias because of the influence of sample selection bias, the results of the benchmark regression may have biased estimates. therefore, this study uses coarsened exact matching technology to improve the estimation accuracy of the model. the l1 value (multivariate imbalance measure) generated by the coarsened exact matching indicates the degree of imbalance of the data. l1 ranges from 0 to 1, with larger values indicating greater imbalance. researchers can judge the matching effect according to the changes in l1 value. the more l1 drops, the better the matching effect (iacus, et al., 2012). table 4 shows that after coarsened exact matching, 24,117 cases from the primary school sample remained valid as did 43,514 cases from the junior high sample, accounting for 23.3% and 43.1% of the original samples respectively. the l1 value decreased from 0.87 and 0.67 to 0.52 and 0.34, respectively. this shows that while obtaining a better matching effect, more samples are retained in the study (see table 4). the obtained weights (cem_weights) are brought into the regression model for calculation, and the regression results are shown in table 5. after controlling sample selection bias, doing housework frequently still has a significant positive impact on academic performance among primary school students. while for junior high school students, the correlation between participating in the physical housework frequently and academic performance has changed from negative to positive. specifically, in the explained variable of student academic performance, the differences caused by other control variables that affect whether students often participate in housework dropped by 1-2 points, indicating that the coarsened exact matching technique has corrected the biased estimate of least squares method well. of particular interest, the regression coefficient of primary school students’ academic performance and the frequency of participation in housework become 12.18, while that of junior high wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1293 table 4. coarsened exact matching results (dependent variable: academic performance). primary school junior high school infrequently participate in housework frequently participate in housework total infrequently participate in housework frequently participate in housework total total sample 23,917 79,590 103,507 54,224 46,774 100,998 matched sample 8,097 16,020 24,117 22,504 21,010 43,514 unmatched sample 15,820 63,570 79,390 31,720 25,764 57,484 before matching l1 0.87 0.67 after matching l1 0.52 0.34 school students is 1.27. among the control variables, for both primary school and junior high school students, girls, only-children, and students from urban area have higher academic performance scores than boys, non-only children, and students from rural area. regional factors and living on or off campus have different effects on elementary school students and junior high school students. the former only significantly predicts the academic performance of elementary school students, while the latter only significantly predicts the academic performance of junior high school students. it is also worth noting that mother’s education level is the only factor in the student’s family background that has a significant negative impact on the pupil’s academic achievement while other students’ family background factors have a positive effect. discussion “frequent” housework appears to be positively related to student academic performance. the study uses the ols regression model to make regression analysis on the various factors affecting student performance, and follows this with cem matching to control for possible errors caused by sample selection bias. the matching results show that frequent participation in housework has a significant positive impact on the academic achievements of primary and junior high school students, but a difference exists between elementary school students and junior high school students. this result is mutually confirmed with the researches of wang (wang & xu, 2020), gu (gu, 2021), fang (fang & cao, 2021) and others. but actually, we don’t know what “frequent” means in terms of hours, this result is based on our own criteria for dividing this frequency of housework participating. and maybe extreme amounts of housework participation might be detrimental. fang’s research also shows that the demarcation point is one hour as for the effect of housework on junior high school students’ academic performance. wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1294 table 5. regression results after weighted coarsened exact matching (dependent variable: academic performance). primary school junior high school housework participation freq. 12.178*** 1.272** (0.620) (0.540) gender -5.694*** -7.616*** (0.591) (0.549) only-child 15.219*** 9.273*** (0.696) (0.609) urban / rural area 5.147*** 3.519*** (0.764) (0.650) central region of jiangsu 19.331*** 5.084*** (1.234) (0.994) southern region of jiangsu 6.135*** -2.639*** (0.834) (0.773) father's education 4.239*** 4.316*** (0.220) (0.207) mother's education -1.456*** 0.762*** (0.209) (0.216) father's occupation 0.009 0.095*** (0.021) (0.023) mother's occupation 0.078*** 0.117*** (0.018) (0.020) family's economic status 75.963*** 59.698*** (3.406) (3.062) on/off campus -9.135 12.369*** (6.143) (1.028) academic burden 4.020*** 3.564*** (0.228) (0.183) constant 422.436*** 405.332*** (1.627) (1.684) sample size 22,909 41,184 adjusted r2 0.255 0.151 f 603.47 563.77 note: 1. the standard error of the regression coefficient is in parentheses; 2. significance level: *p<0.1, **p<0.05, ***p<0.01 doing housework more than one hour will have a negative impact on students’ academic achievement (fang & cao, 2021). this is also a good area for further research. based on our results, the reason why housework is conducive to the improvement of academic performance is that doing housework may affect the development of students’ cognitive abilities such as thinking, logic and problem solving. primary school students, for instance, may rely more on perceptual experience to complete learning tasks (schmidt et al., 2019). housework may thus help them understand what they have learned more concretely through hands-on practice (anna, 2017). for junior high school wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1295 table 6. binary logistics regression results (dependent variable: the frequency of participation in housework). primary school junior high school b t p or 95%ci b t p or 95%ci gender 0.135 *** -8.221 0.000 0.874 0.167 0.103 0.273 *** 19.761 0.000 1.314 0.246 0.300 onlychild 0.081 *** -4.673 0.000 0.922 0.115 0.047 0.213 *** 14.616 0.000 0.808 0.242 0.185 urban / rural area 0.022 -1.122 0.262 0.979 0.060 0.016 0.125 *** -7.822 0.000 0.882 0.160 0.094 central region of jiangsu 0.056 ** 2.061 0.039 1.058 0.003 0.109 0.180 *** 7.904 0.000 1.197 0.135 0.224 southern region of jiangsu 0.085 *** -4.070 0.000 0.918 0.126 0.044 0.210 *** 11.530 0.000 0.813 0.242 0.171 father's schooling years 0.023 *** 6.272 0.000 1.023 0.016 0.030 0.016 *** -4.395 0.000 0.984 0.023 0.009 mother's schooling years 0.019 *** 5.355 0.000 1.018 0.012 0.025 0.012 *** 3.328 0.001 1.012 0.005 0.020 father's occupation 0.001 * 1.821 0.069 1.001 0.000 0.002 0.004 *** -9.263 0.000 0.996 0.005 0.003 mother's occupation 0.001 *** 2.912 0.004 1.001 0.000 0.002 0.001 * 1.736 0.083 1.000 0.000 0.001 family's economic status 0.098 1.495 0.135 1.103 0.031 0.228 0.166 *** -2.808 0.005 0.847 0.282 0.050 on/off campus 0.016 0.312 0.755 1.016 0.085 0.117 0.231 *** 10.411 0.000 1.260 0.188 0.275 academic burden 0.163 *** 32.328 0.000 0.850 0.173 0.153 0.072 *** 19.139 0.000 0.930 0.080 0.065 note: 1) the standard error of the regression coefficient is in parentheses; 2) significance level: *p<0.1, **p<0.05, ***p<0.01 students (who have more difficulties in schoolwork and more pressure from academic competition), the academic impact of participation in housework appears to involve a more complicated mechanism, so there may be no simple linear positive correlation between the two variables. our findings lend confidence however to the assumption that “frequent” housework will not hurt their academic performance. primary and junior high school students’ participation in housework may be insufficient, as the burden of schoolwork has a significant “crowding out” effect on housework participation wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1296 based on the 2020 monitoring of students’ academic quality in basic education in jiangsu province, the study found that more than 50% of junior high school students and about 30% of elementary school students in jiangsu province did not often participate in doing housework, leading one to suspect that their engagement in housework may be insufficient, especially junior high school students. what are the factors that hinder elementary and junior high school students from participating in housework? by using the frequency of participation in housework as the dependent variable, and the relevant influencing factors as the independent variables, we construct a binary logistics model, and get the regression results in table 6. this result clearly shows that for both primary and junior high school students, excessive academic burden is the key factor to prevent the students from doing much housework. there is a significant negative correlation between the schoolwork burden of students and their engagement in housework. this means that the heavier the schoolwork burden, the less time students can spend on housework, therefore the schoolwork burden has a significant “crowding out” effect on housework participation. other factors affecting students’ participation in housework our analyses suggest that factors such as gender, only-child, region, urban and rural areas, and family background all have an impact on primary and junior high school students’ housework participation and academic performance. among these, the influence of father’s education level on children’s housework participation and academic performance is quite thought-provoking. the above results show that, for primary school students, the higher the father’s education level and occupation, the higher primary school students’ frequency of participation in housework, but for junior high school students, the higher the father’s education level and occupation, the lower the frequency of participation in housework. we believe that it may precisely reflect the current status of the father’s role in family education. on one hand, a large number of studies have found that there is still a widespread phenomenon in chinese families of “men managing external affairs and women internal”, which means that in family education, fathers often play the role of providing more generous social resources to the family through “outside” work and social activities. on the other hand, because the academic pressure at the junior high school stage is much greater than that at the primary school stage, in the sequence of family resource input, most families tend to focus on aspects that are conducive to the improvement of academic performance at the junior high school stage. in this process, fathers with higher academic qualifications and higher professional levels tend to access more social capital to increase time and energy investment in children and academic performance, thereby forming a “crowding out” effect on housework education. this will undoubtedly have an adverse effect on housework participation in the junior high school stage. in short, the analysis results in table 6 show that from primary school to junior high school, the change in the focus of family social resource input is more accomplished by the change of the father’s role. in the junior high school, the father (who represents family resources) turns more preference towards improving children’s academic performance, which has a negative impact on children’s housework wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1297 participation (yao & chen, 2020; wang, zhao & meng, 2015; zhao, wang & liu, 2013). research limitations and prospects housework is an important way to shape personality as well as character, and boost the all-round development of primary and junior high school students. in fact, whether housework can improve academic performance or not, it should be given more attention and appreciation. the focus in this study has been put on the impact of housework on academic performance, for the reason that only a few studies on this issue have been made in china. besides, if the positive effect of housework on academic performance can be shown, the worries of schools and parents will be relieved, and more parents may realize the importance and value of housework and be willing to let their children to perform it. as far as the present research is concerned, the impact of housework on students’ character and personality is not involved, and the discussion on how housework can influence students’ development has not been fully investigated. it is argued that this may be more important than the relationship between housework and academic performance, which should be addressed in future research. conclusion and suggestion the conclusions of this study are more robust and accurate because more detailed and larger scientific data were employed by cem. the results have shown that the current situation of chinese primary and junior high school students’ participation in housework is not ideal, with 23.1% of elementary school students and 53.7% of junior high school students participating in housework infrequently. in terms of the impact of housework on academic performance, after coarsened exact matching, if the students had the similar individual characteristics, family background, and the environment, then primary school students who frequently participate in housework had an average academic score of 12.178 points higher than those who do not often participate in housework; the academic performance of junior high school students was about 1.272 points higher. this shows that frequent participation in housework has a positive effect on the improvement of students’ academic performance. further analysis showed that the student’s academic burden had an obvious “crowding out” effect on their participation in housework, and during which process, parents’ anxiety about schoolwork is a key factor affecting their children’s participation in housework. based on the above findings, we hold that to further strengthen the housework education of primary and secondary school students, joint efforts should be made by the society, schools, and parents together to improve students’ personalities through housework education and thus achieve the overall development of students. strengthen publicity and guidance to enhance people’s awareness of the importance of housework education. wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1298 on the one hand, researchers need to provide more reliable evidence to clarify the influencing factors, mechanism of action, and effective implementation path of housework education. on the other hand, the education authorities and schools should further increase publicity and guidance with various channels of communication to clarify the importance of housework education, and help parents raise their awareness of housework education, reduce or eliminate their excessive academic anxiety, and thus actively implement family housework education. in this process, great attention should be paid to how to transfer the academic research results, and guide the parents to change their education concepts and educational models with scientific evidence. reduce the burden of schoolwork effectively and relieve its squeeze on housework. a major problem found in current family’s education on hard working spirit was that the overburden of schoolwork would encroach on the time of doing housework. to solve this problem, educational viewpoints should be changed, moreover, how to reduce the excessive academic burden of students effectively is also a key issue. this means that schools should improve teaching efficiency, strengthen homework management, cut down ineffective or noneffective repetitive exercises, and explore the assignment of practical homework to give back after-class time to the students. on the government level, it must reinforce the management of after-school tutoring classes, take actions to combat irregular school-running behaviors, which is focused on blowing up excessive anxiety, and guide teaching and training institutions to offer students more practical housework education courses in order to help schools and families make progress in housework education and promote students’ overall development. make full use of various education on hard working spirit resources to provide children with diversified opportunities of housework education. chinese famous educator xingzhi tao once said, “the life you live is the education you receive. if you live a lavish life like a young master, even if you read books about hard working every day, you are not considered to be educated by hard working.” (dong, 1991) only by practicing the life of housework can we implement housework education truly and effectively. because life covers a wide range of areas, housework education requires the joint efforts of families, schools, and society to provide students with life-oriented, experiential, and interesting housework education resources and opportunities to take part in housework while creating a social atmosphere in which housework is glorious. in this process, more bases should be constructed to experience housework and do social practice by the government and society, and more housework courses should be set up by the school. in addition, students should be encouraged to engage in more housework by the family. only with the concerted efforts of all parties can we offer more chances of housework education to primary and secondary school students. wang et al. does housework help improve academic performance? 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bece, vol.10, no. 1, 2022 1301 ity theory. psychology and the improvement of innovative ability-the 16th national conference on psychology, 2. received: 29 november 2021 revised: 08 december 2021 accepted: 29 december 2021 orignialarticle-jijunyao-bece_title_jan2022 originalarticle-jijunyao--bece_maintextjan2022 bece. newsletter vol.13, no.2, 2023 1721 after-school service in chinese primary schools in the context of the implementation of the double reduction policy: the current state, problems, and countermeasures by shi, d. s., li, l., zhao, s. n., & chu, l. correspondence to: lin chu, beijing union university, china. e-mail: editorialoffice@bonoi.org n february 2017, the ministry of education of china issued the guiding opinions on optimizing after-school service for primary and secondary school students. the state council released the opinions on further reducing the burden of homework and off-campus training for compulsory education students (also referred to as the double reduction policy) in july 2021. the release of the policy sparked wide concern over after-school service for schoolchildren. it is believed that after-school service has the potential to increase educational capacities of the school, reduce parents’ burden, and promote all-round development of students. nevertheless, a number of issues need to be addressed in current after-school service in chinese schools. this study conducted an in-depth investigation into the implementation of after-school service in primary schools of h city in the wake of the release of the double reduction policy. h city is a border city in yunnan province, comprised of nine counties and one city district. from november 2021 to january 2022, the research team visited seven primary schools in the city, including four urban and three rural schools, and held five thematic seminars and gathered data on after-school service in these schools. in the meantime, it also carried out a larger-scale questionnaire survey in 16 urban and 410 rural primary schools selected by stratified sampling and distributed 3,969 teacher and 44,656 parent questionnaires. furthermore, the research team interviewed 5 primary school principals, over 50 primary school teachers, more than 50 parents, and over 20 pupils. analysis results of the data from the questionnaires and interviews show that after-school service is available to all students from all primary schools in the city and teachers are fully aware of relevant policies; that current after-school service is rich in educational contents, well satisfying heterogenous needs of students in different grades; that after-school service in the majority of the schools is well-organized and has engaged the attention of multiple out-of-school agents; and that positive effects of after-school service mark the successful execution of the double reduction policy. at the i mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.13, no.2, 2023 1722 same time, problems with current after-school service for pupils should also be noted: (1) considerable gaps in the understanding of after-school service between teachers and parents; (2) disparities in the quality of after-school service among different schools and low participation of pupils; (3) the lack of sustainable support; (4) an appropriate evaluation mechanism to be developed to clarify the division of responsibility. source: china educational technology, 2022; 2022(11):17-31. the impact of teacher leadership on classroom culture construction: the role of the new education initiative min wang school of education and psychology, minnan normal university, zhangzhou 363000, fujian, china abstract: classroom culture is of vital significance for the accomplishment of educational objectives. this study is an examination of the differences in the impact of teacher leadership on classroom culture construction between schools within and outside the new education initiative (nei) network. its research findings reveal that teachers at the nei schools outperformed their counterparts at non-nei schools in the seven dimensions of classroom culture construction. other factors related to the teacher’ performance in this regard is also discussed. best evidence in chinese education 2025; 19(2):1937-1939 doi: 10.15354/bece.25.ar146 how to cite: wang, m. (2025). the impact of teacher leadership on classroom culture construction: the role of the new education initiative. best evidence in chinese education, 2025, 19(2):1937-1939. keywords: teacher leadership, classroom culture, new education initiative about the author: min wang, school of education and psychology, minnan normal university, zhangzhou 363000, fujian, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org correspondence to: min wang at minnan normal university in china. conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1938 introduction lassroom culture, as a latent form of education, plays a crucial role in reaching the goals of education. the classroom’s physical space and rules and norms, as well as dynamic elements like the teacher-student relationship, learning climate, and general ethos, can all manifest its culture. teacher leadership has a significant impact on the construction of classroom culture. this study investigates the effects of teacher leadership on classroom culture in schools implementing the new education initiative (nei) and those not within the nei network. classroom culture, as a latent form of education, plays a crucial role in reaching the goals of education. the classroom’s physical space and rules and norms, as well as dynamic elements like the teacher-student relationship, learning climate, and general ethos, can all manifest its culture. teacher leadership has a significant impact on the construction of classroom culture. this study investigates the effects of teacher leadership on classroom culture in schools implementing the new education initiative (nei) and those not within the nei network. research methods using methods including the questionnaire survey, interview, and classroom observation, the study looks at the differences in classroom culture construction between nei and non-nei schools. the research subjects were grades 3-5 teachers from five regions across china: central, eastern, southern, western, and northern china. a questionnaire was designed to investigate the teachers’ roles in classroom culture construction in seven dimensions: distinctive symbols, classroom environment creation, festival culture, spiritual guidance, learning outcomes representation, artefacts display, and cultural construction accomplishments. a total of 650 questionnaires were distributed and 586 valid ones retrieved, including 201 from teachers at nei schools and 385 from those at non-nei schools. software spss 24.0 was used to conduct descriptive statistics, t-tests, and correlation analysis to compare the differences in the performance in classroom culture construction between the two groups. © 2025 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. c http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1939 research findings teachers at nei schools outperformed their counterparts at non-nei schools in classroom culture construction in all the seven dimensions. in the dimension of distinctive symbols, teachers at nei schools (m= 4.41, sd= 0.95) scored higher than those at non-nei schools (m= 3.70, sd= 1.27), with statistical significance (t= 7.62, p< 0.001). the former scored significantly higher than the latter in the dimensions of festival culture (t= 6.02, p< 0.001) and spiritual guidance (t = 3.65, p< 0.001). in the dimension of cultural construction accomplishments, the former (m=4.07, sd=0.97) also had better performance than the latter (m=3.81, sd=0.93), with statistical significance (t= 3.14, p< 0.05). the overall score of the former (m= 4.23, sd= 0.73) is significantly higher than that of the latter (m= 3.90, sd= 0.77), with statistical significance (t= 5.19, p<0.001). factor like the education level, being a classroom teacher or not, and the school location could significantly affect the teacher’s performance in classroom culture construction. among teachers from nei schools, those with a bachelor’s degree performed better than their peers graduated from junior colleges. being a classroom teacher was also an advantage in this regard. on average, urban schools outperformed their rural counterparts in each of the seven dimensions. the correlation analysis reveals that professional attitudes, classroom activity design, and teaching strategies of the teacher were closely connected with the outcomes of classroom culture construction. this indicates that educational ideas and teaching behaviors of the teacher have a significant impact on classroom culture. to sum up, the nei program is effective in enhancing classroom culture through the teachers’ leadership. the chinese version of this article has been published in life education, 2025; 2025(1), 80-89. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 汪敏. (2025). 教师领导力对教室文化建设的影响研究——以“新教育实验”为例. 生活教育， 2025(1), 80-89. received: january 20, 2025 revised: february 20, 2025 accepted: march 01, 2025 bece. newsletter vol.13, no.2, 2023 1723 who benefits more from online learning: an empirical study on online knowledge sharing behavior in postgraduates by sun, c. y., liu, j. a., & xu, y. r. correspondence to: ji’an liu, university of chinese academy of sciences, china. e-mail: jian.liu@ucas.ac.cn n the digital era, online knowledge sharing is a crucial link in individual development. postgraduates are potentially core members of the future knowledge society. the research into the factors influencing online knowledge sharing behavior of postgraduates can provide implications for promoting equality in their utilization of digital dividends. is there a “secondlevel digital divide” among postgraduates? if yes, which of them benefit more from it? despite the restriction of covid-19 prevention and control, this study attempted to gather data via both online and offline channels. researchers encouraged postgraduates to respond to a questionnaire that would take them 8-12 minutes to complete, both by posting it on campus forums in chinese universities as well as on those popular virtual academic community platforms such as zhihu and economic management and by distributing it offline in classrooms of general graduate courses and laboratories. respondents were asked to complete the information literacy scale, the online knowledge sharing behavior scale, and the background information sheet (items presented in random order). from april to june 2021, 642 responses were obtained, of which 501 were valid, constituting 78.04% of the total responses. the average age of the respondents was 25.56 years old, and the sample had balanced distribution in all categories and showed good representativeness. research conclusions include that: (i) the individual ability factor (information literacy) has a significant impact on the online knowledge sharing behavior of postgraduates, with a greater effect on the quantity of online knowledge sharing than on its quality; (ii) structural factors (gender, school type, urban or rural origin, paternal occupation, paternal education level) also have prominent effects on online knowledge sharing behavior of postgraduates, with a stronger impact on the quality of online knowledge sharing than on its quantity; (iii) structural factors influence various dimensions of information literacy of graduate students differently, with the greatest impact on their information discrimination competence; (iv) the effects of structural i mailto:jian.liu@ucas.ac.cn vol.13, no.2, 2023 1724 factors on online knowledge sharing behavior of postgraduates are partially mediated by the individual ability factor, as individuals who are more advantaged in terms of structural factors show higher levels of information literacy and thus have more active and higher-quality online knowledge sharing behaviors. source: journal of east china normal university, 2023; 2023(2):25-37. bece. newsletter vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1897 the association between teacher-student relationships and aggressive behavior of primary school students: the roles of student self-esteem and parent-child cohesion by yu, b., guo, c., miao, h., & peng, y. correspondence to: cheng guo, southwest university, china. e-mail: guochen@swu.edu.cn rimary education is a crucial stage for developing desirable moral character and preventing misconduct, such as aggressive behavior, in children. based on a questionnaire survey of more than 5,000 primary school students, this article aims to examine the relation between teacher-student relationships and aggressive behavior of primary school students, as well as the roles of student self-esteem and parent-child cohesion in this relation. recommendations for prevention and intervention of aggressive behavior in pupils are also suggested. research findings:  desirable teacher-student relationships can help inhibit aggressive behavior in primary school students.  better teacher-student relationships predict higher levels of self-esteem in pupils, which contributes to alleviating their aggressive behavior.  higher degrees of parent-child cohesion are related to closer teacherstudent relationships, which helps prevent aggressive behavior in pupils.  strong parent-child cohesion and good teacher-student relationships correlate with increased levels of self-esteem and lower incidence of aggressive behavior in pupils. recommendations proposed by the authors include:  the teacher should provide more support and concerns to students to foster and maintain good relations with them.  parents give better play to the protective role of close parent-child relations, raising the quality of parent-child relationships.  the teacher and parents pay attention to boosting students’ self-esteem.  the school and parents strengthen school-home co-education to support healthy growth of the children. source: psychological development and education, 2024; 41(1):99-108. p mailto:guochen@swu.edu.cn bece. newsletter vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1913 can adequate sleep promote non-cognitive development in primary and secondary school students? an empirical analysis based on a survey of 153,901 students by ge, d., yao, j., & zhou, s. correspondence to: jijun yao, nanjing normal university, china. e-mail: yaojijun_njnu@163.com leep, one of the most fundamental physiological activities of human beings, is crucial for physical and mental health of the individual. adequate sleep is even more important for adolescents, who are in a critical stage of physical and intellectual growth, than adults. according to existing research, sleep deprivation is pervasive among chinese teenagers and shows a tendency of further exacerbation. this study is an empirical analysis of the effects of sleep duration on the non-cognitive ability in teenagers with a large sample of 153,901 primary and secondary school students, using the ego depletion model, multiple linear regression, and propensity score matching. research findings: • sleep duration had a positive correlation with non-cognitive ability in primary and secondary students. primary school students with at least 10 hours of sleep every day and secondary school students with no less than nine hours of sleep scored higher in the five domains of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which were used as indicators of their noncognitive ability. • the average sizes of experimental effects among primary school students with at least 10 hours of sleep are 0.140-0.177 for openness, 0.167-0.201 for conscientiousness, 0.160-0.196 for extraversion, 0.110-0.138 for agreeableness, and 0.154-0.192 for neuroticism. with secondary school students with no less than nine hours of sleep, these figures are 0.274-0.315, 0.195-0.228, 0.330-0.382, and 0.273-0.338. the research findings of the study indicate that a circular on improving sleep management in primary and secondary school students, released by the ministry of education of china, proposes scientific sleep durations for the two groups. legitimate sleep durations (10 hours for primary school students and nine hours for their secondary counterparts) are beneficial for their s mailto:yaojijun_njnu@163.com vol.18, no.2, 2024, bece 1914 non-cognitive development. adequate sleep is essential for the all-round development of teenagers. source: educational science research, 2024; 2024(5):35-43. bece. newsletter vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2007 parent-child interaction, parental academic support, and juvenile deviance: an empirical analysis based on data from the china education panel survey by dou, y., zhang, h., & zhang, m. correspondence to: meng zhang, people’s public security university of china, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org he home is the first social setting for a child. recent years have seen extensive research on the relationship between family influences and child deviant behavior. nevertheless, how the two proximal family factors, parent-child interaction and parental academic support, influence juvenile deviance remains unclear. using panel data from the china education panel survey (ceps) 2014–2015, this study seeks to explore the specific mechanisms by which parent-child interaction and parental academic support influence juvenile deviance. research findings: • positive parent-child interaction means increased parental care and strengthened family emotional bonds, which help alleviate negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, and stress in minors. this, in turn, can encourage them to focus more on legitimate activities and largely diminish the need for seeking emotional support and satisfaction from delinquent peers, thereby reducing the opportunities of engaging in deviant activity. however, the frequency of parent-child interaction is not directly linked to the minor’s deviant behavior; rather, it is their emotional state that matters the most in the regulation of their acts. • the increase in parental academic support can result in enhanced awareness of prime objectives in the schooling stage in minors, and consequently, they will become more devoted to legitimate activities, such as learning, academic life planning, voluntary efforts, and more. on the other hand, excessive emphasis on schoolwork from parents may bring unnecessary mental pressures to minors, resulting in unwanted consequences. • concentration willingness, deriving from the individual’s desire for social recognition of their success, plays a significant role in preventing their engagement with deviant peers and their own deviant behavior. t mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2008 • minors’ deviant behavior is the result of multiple factors, among which, peer deviance is the most pronounced one. suggestions: • in home lives, it is important for parents to help their children develop knowledge of personal emotions and act as role models in emotional regulation. it is their responsibility to aid the latter in combating negative emotions. • parents should adopt a balanced approach to academic support for children and be mindful of the harms of the “tigermom” style of home education. • in providing academic support to their children, parents should focus on cultivate their concentration willingness, encouraging in them the heartfelt pursuit of meaningful life goals. • communities, schools, and families should collaborate to create a healthy peer interaction environment for minors and do everything possible to halt their communication with delinquent peers. source: journal of shanghai educational research, 2025; 2025(04):44-51. bece. newsletter vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1987 the effects of school governance participation on creativity in basic education students by ma, s. & chu, h. correspondence to: siteng ma, capital university of economics and business, china. e-mail: bnumsteng@163.com ostering students’ creativity is a crucial step in the implementation of the national innovation-driven development strategy. the school environment, particularly the opportunity for the students to participate in school governance, has profound impacts on creative skill development in the students. currently, there is no conclusive conceptualization of student participation in school governance, and the mechanism of its influence on students’ creativity remains unclear. to address the gap in the literature, this study adopts the mixed-method research design to analyze the dimensions of student participation in school governance as well as its effects on students’ creativity. research results: • a model for student participation in school governance in the chinese context was advanced, which includes three dimensions: free expression, involvement in the school agenda, and deliberative discussion. • the level of the students’ participation in school governance positively predicts their creative skill development. • students’ intrinsic motivation and creative self-efficacy are positively related to their creativity, and their participation in school governance is effective in boosting their intrinsic motivation and creative self-efficacy. implications for school teaching and management practices aimed at improving students’ creativity: • afford students freedom of expression. this means the teacher should not have any preconceived expectations of the students’ answers or give any pre-determined responses to their varied expressions. • increase students’ involvement in school agendas. students should be encouraged to actively engage in school or class-level agendas, which necessitates institutional improvements, such as establishing platforms for student representatives to participate in f vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1988 school decision-making and creating mechanisms via which students can influence school development. • fostering a school culture of consultation and discussion. full exchanges of ideas between teachers and students, as well as between students themselves, can generate new perspectives and facilitate the achievement of consensus. • nurturing students' intrinsic motivation and creative self-efficacy in routine teaching and management practices. the school and teachers should encourage students to actively explore the meaning of schooling for the real world and stimulate their interest in learning. source: journal of east china normal university, 2025; 43(03):110-123. bece. newsletter vol.19, no.1, 2025, bece 1929 teacher-student relationships and pupil math anxiety: a longitudinal study by ma, m., lei, y., & zhang, l. correspondence to: li zhang, central university of finance and economics, china. e-mail: lilyking_0717@126.com he teacher-student relationship plays a supporting role in student learning. are there any mutual influences between the teacherstudent relationship and student math anxiety? this study aims to examine the longitudinal interaction between the teacher-student relationship and math anxiety in primary school students with a sample of 221 pupils aged 9 and 10 from x school in chongqing city in china. the study went through two sessions of investigation with an interval of one year. cross-lagged panel analysis is conducted using the data from the two sessions of investigation. after controlling for variables including sex, age, math test results, learning anxiety, and social anxiety of the student, the study finds that there exist longitudinal, mutual influences between positive teacher-student relationships and pupil math anxiety. specifically, positive teacher-student relationships are negatively correlated with math anxiety in pupils; the current math anxiety of the pupil significantly negatively predicts their positive relationships with future math teachers. meanwhile, despite that positive teacher-student relationships cannot directly predict the future anxiety level of the student; they are indirectly and inversely related to the latter via the mediation of positive coping strategies. source: psychological development and education, 2025; 2025(3):377-385. t mailto:lilyking_0717@126.com bece. newsletter vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1811 how proactive personality impacts knowledge sharing among primary and secondary teachers: the roles of work engagement and organizational innovative climate by zheng, j., gao, y., & fu, x. correspondence to: jianjun zheng, university of chinese academy of social sciences, china. e-mail: zhengjj-cass@sina.com nowledge sharing is an important means for knowledge generation, accumulation, and innovation of schools and plays a significant role in alleviating teachers’ work pressures and upgrading their professional competence. personality traits of teachers are key factors relating to their psychology and attitudes towards knowledge sharing. this article draws on the job demands-resources theory to examine how proactive personality affects knowledge sharing among primary and secondary teachers and identify the mediating effect of teacher work engagement and the moderating effect of the organizational innovative climate. the purpose of the study is to provide guidance for schools’ knowledge management and equalization of educational resources. research findings show that: i. proactive personality poses a positive impact on teacher knowledge sharing behavior. teacher work engagement mediates the relation between proactive personality and knowledge sharing behavior. teachers with highly proactive personality are more likely to meet job demands by integrating personal and organizational resources and increase engagement in work, consequently enhancing knowledge sharing behavior. ii. the organizational innovative climate can effectively moderate the relation between work engagement and knowledge sharing in teachers. to be more concrete, the positive effects of work engagement on knowledge sharing tend to strengthen as the organizational innovative climate intensifies. in other words, the organizational innovative climate generates more resources necessitated by teachers’ knowledge sharing activities. in addition, the mediating effect of work engagement on the relation between work engagement and knowledge sharing in teachers is significantly moderated by the organizational innovative climate. k mailto:zhengjj-cass@sina.com vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1812 the article suggests that primary and secondary schools should emphasize the importance of proactive personality of teachers in the functioning of personal work resources in their education and instruction management; that schools should give teachers who exhibit more proactive behavior positive feedback and incentives to encourage front-line teachers to integrate their professional development with the improvement of education quality of the school; and that they should create an ideal climate to promote inter-teacher exchange and sharing of teaching expertise and techniques. source: teacher education research, 2023;35(03):66-73. bece. newsletter vol.14, no.2, 2023 1776 longitudinal associations between physical and relational victimization and student academic achievement in early adolescence: a cross-lagged panel study by li, t., ma, y., song, r., & chen, l. correspondence to: liang chen, shandong normal university, shandong, china. e-mail: chen_liang1010@126.com cademic adjustments and peer relationships are two crucial aspects of adolescent school adaptation. peer victimization is a risk factor in student academic achievement; at the same time, poor academic performance can potentially cause peer victimization. with peer victimization, individuals experience aggressions from peers, which can be physical or relational. physical victimization refers to their being physically attacked by peers, such as being hit, pushed, and kicked; in relational victimization, they are subjected to non-physical attacks, such as social exclusion and rumor dissemination. this study adopted cross-lagged panel research design, using selfreported physical and relational victimization as the indicator of peer victimization and terminal examination results as that of academic performance, to examine the interplay of peer victimization and academic achievement in adolescents between the fifth and eighth grades. research results showed that: (i) relational victimization occurring in the fifth grade significantly and negatively predicted student academic performance; (ii) the sixth and seventh grade academic achievement significantly and negatively predicted physical and relational victimization in the ensuing year, with no noticeable difference in its effects on the two forms of peer victimization; (iii) there was no prominent gender difference in the longitudinal associations between academic results and the two forms of peer victimization; (iv) the effect of academic performance on physical victimization varied in different phases, tending to aggravate with age. the article proposed academic level-specific suggestions for peer victimization mitigation. in the primary stage, the focus should be placed on detecting peer victimization (especially relational victimization) and administering timely intervention to avoid the vicious cycle of academic adjustment difficulty and peer victimization in pupils. in the junior secondary stage, educators must instruct students not to judge peers by their current academic results and help low-performing students to establish positive peer relationships and gain positive peer experience in order to protect low-achieving a mailto:chen_liang1010@126.com vol.14, no.2, 2023 1777 teenagers from physical and relational harm induced by academic underperformance. source: psychological development and education, 2023; 2023(4):559-567. bece. newsletter vol.17, no.1, 2024, bece 1853 factors influencing teacher satisfaction with human-machine collaborative teaching: a study based on structural equations and fuzzy-sets qualitative comparative analysis by fang, x., xu, l., & jiang, p. correspondence to: xu fang, nantong university, china. e-mail: blueskyxfang@126.com uman-machine collaboration, as an important application of intelligent technology, is of vital significance for the advancement of digital transformation in education. amid the progress in human-machine collaborative teaching, its practical effects and factors influencing teacher satisfaction with it are questions pending in-depth investigation. this study established a model of the factors relating to teacher satisfaction with humanmachine collaborative teaching, based on the expectancy confirmation theory, motivation theory and information system success model, in combination with the analysis of interviews. the empirical research results showed: • amusement perception was the necessary factor in the teacher’s continuance intention to adopt human-machine collaborative teaching. the information quality and system quality of humanmachine collaborative teaching were core factors for the teacher’s continuance intention to use it. • among the four factors relating to teacher satisfaction with human-machine collaborative teaching, namely the expectancy confirmation, amusement perception, information quality, and system quality, the expectancy confirmation had the greatest effect on it, whereas the amusement perception posed the slightest effect. • among the three factors relating to the perception of the usefulness of human-machine collaborative teaching, namely the expectancy confirmation, information quality, and system quality, the expectancy confirmation had the greatest effect on it, while the information quality exerted the minimal effect. based on research findings, the article makes suggestions as follows. • innovate the human-machine collaborative teaching modality by integrating machine intelligence into classroom teaching to inh mailto:blueskyxfang@126.com vol.17, no.1, 2024, bece 1854 crease teacher-student, inter-student, and human-machine interaction. • enhance the mutual support between teachers and machines to realize technology-enabled, individualized instruction and boost the professional level of teachers. • increase intelligent instruction literacy of the teacher to fully leverage the high efficiency of artificial intelligence technology and infuse ai into day-to-day teaching. • establish partnerships between schools and ai experts to effectively implement relevant human-machine collaboration technologies in teaching and engage external ai specialists to provide teachers with targeted training to improve the outcomes of human-machine collaborative teaching source: journal of distance education, 2024; 41(6):71-83. bece. newsletter vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1955 the impact of the parenting style on adolescent empathetic ability: a comparative analysis based on data from sses 2019 by li, y., tang, y., & huang, z. correspondence to: zhongjing huang, east china normal university, china. email: zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn eveloping social and emotional skills in citizens plays a vital role in promoting their democratic participation in societal construction. currently, there is a dearth of cross-cultural studies on the relationship between adolescent empathy and parenting styles. drawing on data of american, canadian, south korean, and chinese students from sses 2019, this article gives overviews of adolescent empathetic ability in two cultural circles, north american (western) and east asian (eastern), and conducts a comparative analysis, using the method of descriptive statistics. it also explores the cultural differences in the relationship between the parenting style and adolescent empathetic ability through linear regression. research findings:  in all regions chosen, girls, on average, had higher levels of empathy than boys. there were greater gender differences in empathy ability among north american adolescents than among east asian ones.  east asian adolescents had higher levels of empathy, on average, than their north american counterparts, exhibiting more prominent age differences.  understanding-listening parenting had a significantly positive impact on empathy ability of adolescents in both eastern and western cultural circles, with the impact from mothers being more significant.  harsh-punitive parenting had varied, significant impacts on empathy ability of adolescents from the east asian cultural circle, but with insignificant impacts on that of north american teenagers. the research findings highlight the influence of the cultural background on empathetic ability development in adolescents, implying the positive role of the confucian tradition in the east asian cultural circle, which has an exceptional emphasis on filial piety, in fostering empathy in adolescents. therefore, it is important to consider the locally distinctive cultural d mailto:zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1956 features in developing empathy in adolescents, rather than blindly adopting foreign parenting styles. source: journal of comparative education, 2025; 2025(1):100-112. bece. newsletter vol.14, no.2, 2023 1778 effects of home-school partnerships on the academic performance of urban and rural junior secondary school students by li, j. & hu, y. correspondence to: yongmei hu, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: huym0718@bnu.edu.cn he analyses of factors in the disparity between urban and rural compulsory education are beneficial for developing a more balanced and highquality education, improving social mobility of rural youngsters, and halting intergenerational transmission of poverty among rural families. it is well acknowledged that family capital is the most significant contributing factor in the academic performance gap between urban and rural students, outweighing school resources, particularly the quality of teachers. this study is a discourse on the two forms of home-school partnership, namely, the family-school communication and parental voluntary participation in school activities as well as their effects on the academic achievements of urban and rural middle school students. it was based on large-scale survey data and adopted the hierarchical linear model and the oaxaca-blinder decomposition method in the analysis. the research findings indicate that: (i) parents of urban middle school students experience higher levels of family-school communication and voluntary involvement in school activities than their rural counterparts; (ii) family-school communication poses substantially positive effects on school results of urban junior secondary school students, but has no impact on those of rural middle school students; (iii) there is an inverted u shape relation between the frequency of parental participation in school activities and student academic results, with the optimal frequency being higher for urban parents than for their rural counterparts; (iv) the family-school communication is a significant factor in the academic achievement disparity between urban and rural middle school students, whereas it has not been remarkably affected by parental voluntary participation in school activities. based on the research results, the study recommends that the amount of parental participation in school activities be reasonably controlled with focus on its quality rather than formality. meanwhile, help parents of rural middle school students to improve the effectiveness of their communication with schools. rural parents’ rights to involvement in child school education should be respected and recognized. in addition, it is necessary to provide rut mailto:huym0718@bnu.edu.cn vol.14, no.2, 2023 1779 ral teachers with specialized training on home-school partnership to enhance their awareness of family-school co-education and skills in communicating with parents of their students. source: journal of educational science of hunan normal university, 2023; 22(1):111-122. transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations: an empirical analysis based on the china family panel survey qingfeng cai, 1 guanchen wu,1 wuyuan chen 2 1. xiamen university, school of economics, xiamen 361005, fujian, china. 2. xiamen university, institute of education, xiamen 361005, fujian, china abstract: based on data from the china statistical yearbook and china family panel survey (cfps), this article investigated the influence of regional transportation infrastructure development on family education expectations. research results show that there is a significant positive correlation between transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations and that the improvement of transportation infrastructure can enhance the family’s willingness to engage their children in higher education. according to the results of influencing mechanism analysis, transportation infrastructure development affects family education expectations by increasing family income and changing family reproduction concepts and educational ideas. in addition, the impact of transportation infrastructure construction on family education expectations is heterogeneous: the positive correlation between them is particularly significant in rural areas with less developed transportation infrastructure, in areas with low average education level of parents and slow information communication, and among families of lower social classes; however, the relationship between the two variables is not prominent in urban areas, in areas where information communication is fast and parents have a higher average education level, and among families with higher social classes. these research findings offer the nation and government new implications for better promoting poverty alleviation through education and rural revitalization in underdeveloped areas. best evidence in chinese education 2022; 12(2):1643-1651. cai et al. (fujian). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations. bece, vol.12, no.2, 2022 1644 doi: 10.15354/bece.22.ab017 how to cite: cai, q., wu, g., & chen, w. (2022). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations: an empirical analysis based on the china family panel survey. best evidence in chinese education, 12(2):1643-1651. keywords: transportation infrastructure, family educational expectation, heterogeneity analysis correspondence to: wuyuan chen, xiamen university, institute of education, xiamen 361005, fujian, china. email: skc@xmu.edu.cn conflict of interests: none. © 2022 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:skc@xmu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ cai et al. (fujian). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1645 introduction as a prerequisite for the social and economic development of a region or nation, the development of transportation infrastructure lays a crucial foundation for the regional resource exchange, information communication, opportunity sharing and advantages complementation, which also profoundly affect regional education resource availability and family educational ideas. improved transportation infrastructure help boost the income of local families, as a result, raising family educational expectations; at the meantime, it bolsters the inter-regional flow of people and cultural exchange, popularizes urban culture, transforms the backward educational ideas in underdeveloped areas, and thus heightens local families’ awareness of the importance of education, family education expectations refer to parents’ expectations of their children’s future education level and academic attainment, which are a key representation of the family’s educational outlook. generally speaking, the impact of family educational expectations on child educational achievement is mainly reflected in two aspects: positive family educational expectations increase parental investment in child education, including increased money input in as well as time and energy devotion to children’s learning; at the same time, there exists rosenthal effect in family educational expectations (rosenthal effect means that expectations of others will produce an “aspiration effect” on individuals, thus promoting the actualization of individual goals). in this context, this article utilized data from the china family panel survey (cfps) and china statistical yearbook to establish panel data which contain 17073 subjects to examine the influence of transportation infrastructure development on family educational expectations as well as the influencing mechanisms. research design sources of data the study sourced data from the china statistical yearbook 2014-2018 issued by china’s national bureau of statistics and the cfps 2014, 2016 and 2018 undertaken by institute of social science survey of peking university. the china statistical yearbook contains basic data of china’s economy, transportation, and population. the cfps samples come from 25 provincial administrative regions, with a target sample size of 16,000 households. the survey subjects include all family members of the sampled households, and data on family educational expectations, family economic circumstances, parents’ education levels and other related aspects are collected. the determination of variables the predicted variable: family educational expectations cai et al. (fujian). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1646 family educational expectations are the dependent variable in this study. the corresponding question in the cfps questionnaire is “what is the minimum level of education you expect from your kids?” the value of this variable ranges from 0 to 7. the bigger the value, the higher the family educational expectations it represents, with 0 = “no education expectation for kids,” 1= “the primary school,” 2 = “the junior secondary school,” 3 = “the senior secondary school/ secondary technical school/ secondary vocational school,” 4 = “the junior college,” 5= “the bachelor’s degree,” 6 = “the master’s degree,” and 7 = “the doctor’s degree.” the core explanatory variable: the index of transportation infrastructure this study chose railway transport as the index to measure the development level of transportation infrastructure in an area, because compared with other transport modes, railway transport has its unique advantages such as the large delivery capacity, costeffectiveness, long travel distance, wide coverage, independence from weather conditions, etc., which can promote the inter-regional exchange of labor and information and bolster local social and economic development. control variables based on the previous research literature and the available data from the cfps, this article used the education levels of the father and mother and family book collection to represent the family cultural capital; the family’s monthly post and telecommunication expenses as the proxy variable to represent the home social capital; per capita household income and household assets to represent home economic capital. child characteristics include child gender, age, and being the only child of the family or not. regional characteristics include the logarithm of the per capita gdp of each province every year along with the core explanatory variable of the regional transportation infrastructure development level. the research model the following model was constructed to explore the causal relationship between transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations: edui,t = α+βtrai,t+δxi,t+εi,t in this equation, subscript i denotes the sampled individual, and edui,t represents the parental educational expectation for i in the year of t; trai,t represents the development level of transportation infrastructure in province i in the year of t; xi denotes the family background, child characteristic, regional characteristic, and other control variables; εi,t means the residual. the directivity and significance of coefficient β are the main focus in the model. as the predicted variable in this model is an ordinal categorical variable cai et al. (fujian). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1647 with a value range of 0-7, this paper chose to use an ordinal logistic model to perform regression after controlling for the fixed effects. analyses of empirical research findings findings from main empirical models estimate results of the variable of family educational expectations demonstrate that the higher the level of transportation infrastructure and the gdp of a province, the higher the family educational expectations there. however, when the variable of household economic capital is added into the model, the variable of the gdp of each province loses its statistical significance, which indicates that the gdp of each province affects family educational expectations mainly through its effect on the economic capital of local families. the regression results show that: (1) the coefficient of the core explanatory variable the development level of transportation infrastructure in all models is significantly positive, indicating that the development of transportation infrastructure plays a substantial role in raising the educational expectations of local families, as it has been a driving force to the social, economic, and cultural advance in the region. it prompts families to change their educational ideas and improves outcomes of family educational input, and as a result, parents have higher requirements and expectations for children’s education attainment. (2) the richer the family capital, the higher the family educational expectations for its kids. (3) the coefficient of the variable of child gender is significantly positive. boys are likely to receive higher family educational expectations, indicating that gender discrimination still exists in children’s education. (4) the coefficient of the variable of being the only child of the family or not is significantly positive, signaling that parents have higher educational expectations for the only child than for children with siblings. whichever model it is, the advance in transportation infrastructure increases the number of parents who expect their children to obtain doctor’s, master's, or bachelor's degrees, and reduces the number of parents who limit their educational expectations for children to the junior college or below. in other words, the development of transportation infrastructure can significantly boost parents’ willingness to engage their children in higher education. the robustness check altering the index of transportation infrastructure to test the robustness of the above results, the development level of highways was used as the index to measure the level of regional transportation infrastructure and performed the regression of the main empirical models again; an additional indicator of transportation infrastructure was produced by combining the standardized railway density and per capita railway kilometers and the coefficient of the explanatory variable was estimated again. the regression results show that the symbol and significance of the explanatory cai et al. (fujian). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1648 variable remain unchanged, whether the development level of highways or the reconstructed railway-based index is used to replace the original index of transportation infrastructure, which indicates that improved transportation infrastructure can significantly raise educational expectations of local families. using the ordinal probit model the ordinal probit model was used to conduct regression in order to further verify the stability of the regression results of the ordinal logit model. the regression results show that the symbols and significance of the coefficient of the variable of transportation infrastructure have not changed propensity score matching this study used the propensity score matching (psm) method to address the endogeneity issue that may be caused by the sample self-selection bias: (1) the sample was divided into areas with developed transportation infrastructure (n=8964) and areas with ordinary transportation infrastructure (n=8109). the former was set as the experimental group and the latter as the control group. (2) the control variables in the main regression model 5 were used as the predictor variables to predict the probability of the family residing in an area with developed transportation infrastructure and the propensity scores were calculated. (3) one to one matching, one to four matching and one to four radius matching was performed on sample respectively. the results of propensity score matching show that the standardized deviation of variables is substantially reduced, the absolute deviation of all variables is less than 5%, and the t-test results of most variables do not contradict the assumption that there are no systematic differences between the experimental group and the control group, indicating that the matching result is good. the sample regression results based on psm show that the symbols and significance of explanatory variables are consistent with those in previous analysis, that is, the improvement of transportation infrastructure can significantly heighten the educational expectations of local families. therefore, the conclusion of this article is robust and reliable. analyses of influencing mechanisms the effect of family income a three-step mediation analysis was undertaken: (i) to regress the effect of transportation infrastructure on family educational expectations with the results showing that the influence of transportation infrastructure on family educational expectations remains prominently positive when the control variable of family income is not included in the model; (ii) to regress the effect of transportation infrastructure on per capita household income with the results displaying that the improvement of transportation infrastructure can significantly bolster local family income; (iii) to refer to the regression results of the main empirical models which have proved that both household income and transportation infrastructure are positively correlated with family education expectations. the cai et al. (fujian). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1649 above analysis indicates that household income can mediate the effect of transportation infrastructure on family educational expectations. in other words, the improvement of transportation infrastructure can heighten educational expectations of local families by promoting the increase of family income. the effect of cultural concepts the advance in transportation infrastructure not only has a positive impact on the regional economy, but also speeds up inter-regional information communication, expand people’s travelling spheres, and thus boost inter-regional cultural exchange. as a result, some new concepts and thoughts are introduced into the lives of residents, gradually transforming the local culture and residents’ ideas. further, the change in regional cultural background and family cultural capital significantly modifies family educational expectations. further heterogeneity analyses the foregoing analyses focus on the influence of transportation infrastructure on family educational expectations and its mechanism --transportation infrastructure enhances the educational expectations of local families by promoting the economic development of areas within its coverage and changing the family educational concepts. to go further, is there any heterogeneity in the effect of transportation infrastructure on family education expectations? to address this question, this study performed a heterogeneity analysis in the four dimensions: urban and rural division, internet penetration, parental education level, and family social capital, with reference to previous research on this topic. the urban vs. rural heterogeneity regression analyses were carried out on rural and urban households separately and demonstrated that the improvement of transportation infrastructure has a significant positive effect on educational expectations of rural families but has no significant impact on educational expectations of their urban counterparts. disparities in education level among parents to investigate the differences in the impact of the advance in transportation infrastructure on parents with varying education levels, this paper divides the whole sample into two groups: families with high education levels (n = 8,566) and with low education levels (n = 8,507), according to the median of the average education level of parents in a family and conducted regression on them separately. the regression results reveal that improved transportation infrastructure is positively related to educational expectations of parents with lower education levels but has no significant influence on educational expectations of those with higher education levels. the divide in the internet use cai et al. (fujian). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1650 this article chose the internet penetration rate of each region in every year as the proxy variable of information communication speed and divided the sample into the fast information communication group (n = 9,006) and the slow information communication group (n = 8,067) in accordance with the median of the internet penetration rate. according to the results of group regression, the coefficients of the variable of transport infrastructure in both the two groups are positive and significant at the 1% level. by comparing the coefficients of the two groups, it is easy to find that the positive impact of transportation infrastructure advancement on family educational expectations is stronger in the slow information communication group. disparities in social capital to investigate the heterogeneous effects of the improvement of transportation infrastructure on educational expectations of families with differential social capital, this study divided the sample into two subsamples: higher social class families and lower social class families and conducted group regression. the results show that the development level of transportation infrastructure is positively correlated with educational expectations of lower social class families but has no significant impact on educational expectations of higher social class families. conclusions through the ordinal logit model analysis of data from the cfps, the article drew the following conclusions: (i) the more developed the regional transportation infrastructure, the higher the family educational expectations. the improved transportation infrastructure results in stronger intention of families to engage children in higher education. (ii) the advanced transportation infrastructure positively affects family educational expectations by increasing local household income and transforming parents’ family reproduction concepts and educational ideas. (iii) the improvement of transportation infrastructure in underdeveloped rural areas can significantly heighten educational expectations of local families but that in cities has no prominent influence on educational expectations of urban families. (iv) the advance in transportation infrastructure imposes a significant positive impact on family educational expectations in both fast and slow information communication regions, with a stronger impact on the latter. (v) upgrading transportation infrastructure leads to higher educational expectations in families with lower parental education levels and less social capital but has no remarkable influence on educational expectations of families with higher parental education levels and rich social capital. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university, 2022, 40(8):96-114. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 蔡庆丰, 吴冠琛 & 陈武元. 交通基础设施改善会提升家庭教育期望吗？基于“中国家庭追踪 调查”的实证分析. 华东师范大学学报, 2022, 40(8):96-114. cai et al. (fujian). transportation infrastructure and family educational expectations. bece, vol.12, no. 2, 2022 1651 received: 30 september 2022 revised: 11 october 2022 accepted: 05 november 2022 3absbract-wuyuanchen-bece_titlenov_2022 3absbract-wuyuanchen-bece_maintextnov2022 bece. newsletter vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1902 intergenerational transmission of violence – the influence of parental abuse on child bullying perpetration: an analysis based on the latent growth model by tan, d., ding, w., song, s., wu, w. & lin, x. correspondence to: wan ding, zhejiang normal university, china. e-mail: dingwan@zjnu.edu.cn chool bullying has been a concerning issue in many countries around the world. bullying victimization can pose severe damage to the physical and mental health of primary and secondary school students or may even cause them psychological disorders and anti-social behaviors in adulthood. the examination of the regularities and factors related to bullying behavior of primary school students is conducive to the prevention and mitigation of the incidence of their bullying perpetration after they grow into adolescents. this study seeks to investigate the longitudinal effects of parental physical and psychological abuse on child bullying perpetration in the chinese context as well as the heterogeneity of these effects. research findings:  parental physical and psychological abuse has the potential to increase the child’ bullying behaviors, including physical, verbal, and relational bullying. the negative effect of parental psychological abuse can be delayed and become increasingly pronounced over time. meanwhile, there is no significant gender difference in the effect of parental physical and psychological abuse on child bully perpetration, indicating the universality of its harm among children of both sexes.  the incidence of physical, verbal, and relational bullying shows a declining tendency in primary school students as their grades advance, as the child gradually realizes the immorality and harm of bullying behavior, and in the meantime, moral education and anti-bullying education contribute to reducing child bullying perpetration and victimization. prior research suggests that physical bullying behavior progressively diminishes to zero as the child gets older, and that relational bullying behavior tends to increase in children in early adolescence, whereas this study finds that both physical and relational bullying perpetration decline with the growth of the child’s age. s mailto:dingwan@zjnu.edu.cn vol.18, no.1, 2024, bece 1903  the initial level of bullying perpetration is significantly higher among boys than girls, albeit there is no gender difference in the growth rate between the three types of bullying behaviors. parental physical and psychological maltreatment compromise the school’s effort to reduce the incidents of the three types of bullying among pupils. the study emphasizes that parents should actively engage in training on home education to improve their relationships with children and provide a healthy growth environment for them. source: psychological development and education, 2024; 2024(3):410-419. bece. newsletter vol.16, no.1, 2024, bece 1825 screen exposure, parental mediation and media addiction in preschool children by zhang, q. correspondence to: qing zhang, communication university of china, china. email: sunny322@vip.126.com he intensifying medialization of society has exacerbated the issue of child media addiction. research has shown that media addiction can cause a variety of physical and mental problems such as obesity, myopia, sleep difficulty, and anxiety. media addiction in preschool children is likely to impose a persistent negative impact on their lifetime development. early intervention in child media behavior proves to be more effective than that occurs in later stages of their lives. this study conducted an online questionnaire survey of 2046 parents of preschool children aged between three and six to investigate the relations between child screen exposure, parental mediation, and child media addiction. research findings: • among children of parents polled, 58.7% were exposed to screen for over one hour every day, and 28.3% have become addicted to the use of media. mobile screen (smartphones and tablets) was the primary vehicle for preschool children’s access to media. watching short videos has become the second most popular activity in screen use among preschool children. • parental mediation was implemented in three forms: restrictive mediation, active mediation, and co-use. all of them had impacts on screen time of preschool children, whereas only parent-child co-use exhibited significant intervention effects on child media addiction. • media addiction in preschool children intensified as their screen time increased. according to the media sensory curation theory, preschool children use media to meet their sensory needs, as opposed to adults’ and adolescents’ purposes for using media – to acquire information, reach emotional communication, develop relationships, etc. suggestions: • parents should view child media use objectively. the benefits of screen media as convenient, content-rich, highly interactive tools should be fully utilized to support high-quality development of preschool children. • parents should pay attention to improving their own media literacy and their education on child media use. t mailto:sunny322@vip.126.com vol.16, no.1, 2024, bece 1826 • preschool children media addiction intervention requires joint efforts of all parties of society to ensure child healthy growth, such as governmental supervision, community support, media platform self-regulation, kindergarten guidance, and parental mediation. source: studies in preschool education, 2023; 2023(11):42-54. bece. newsletter vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1871 the relation between adolescents’ weight and peer effects in the classroom setting: an empirical analysis by du, s., cheng, g., & yu, w. correspondence to: gang cheng, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: cg@bnu.edu.cn ince the beginning of the 21st century, obesity among adolescents has become an increasingly serious issue in china. it impedes the development of human capital of the individual, as well as threatening socioeconomic development by inducing exorbitant health expenditure. among the many factors contributing to this issue is the school environment, particularly the classroom setting, and the basic building block of school education. this article is an investigation of the relationship between adolescents’ weight and peer effects in the classroom setting, based on relevant data from the china education panel survey. research findings show that: • there existed significant peer effects in adolescent weight within a class. the average bmi and rates of overweight and obesity in peers were positively related to the weight of each individual teenager. • the individual’s perception of weight moderated peer effects in weight. overestimating one’s own weight remarkably diminished the peer effects, while underestimating it did not. to positively leverage peer effects in adolescent weight, the study proposes suggestions as follows: (i) increase investment in teenager health education to advance the action plan for health education of chinese primary and secondary school students by improving tangible and soft environments for the school-based health education; (ii) focus the content of health education on plural hazards of overweight and obesity and help students develop legitimate perception of weight, healthy conception of body image, and systematic knowledge about health management; (iii) pay due regard to students’ social experience while introducing the notion of bmi and ensure them a harmonious and friendly school climate in implementing the health education monitoring mechanism. source: journal of east china normal university, 2023; 41(12):85-99. s mailto:cg@bnu.edu.cn bece. newsletter vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1983 the role of general artificial intelligence in digital literacy training: an empirical study based on the information technology course by zhu, s., li, j., kuang, x., & bai, j. correspondence to: jiayuan li, central china normal university, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org he digital transformation of human society is accelerating as a result of the introduction of new-generation information technology (it) like artificial intelligence (ai) and big data, and digital literacy has become an essential skill in the digital era. in this context, digital literacy training is deemed a crucial component of modern basic education. however, current digital literacy education in many schools remains focused on the operational use of digital tools with disregard for the human-machine-collaborationassisted autonomous learning, which is highly advocated in the intelligent era. this dampens digital literacy development in students. meanwhile, researchers found that generative artificial intelligence (gai) has the potential to create flexible, open, and inclusive human-machine collaboration environments, facilitating students’ self-organized learning. based on the self-organized learning theory, this article advances the gaisoles (generative ai-based self-organized learning environments), an instructional model for fostering students’ digital literacy, with a quasi-experimental study conducted with the information technology classes to verify the effects of the model on student digital literacy development. research results: • the basic components of the gaisoles model include: a pivotal objective directed at digital literacy cultivation in students; a smart classroom setting, i.e., the self-organized learning environment (sole); and collaboration between the teacher, students, and gai. • the gaisoles model is effective in raising the it awareness, improving computational thinking ability, encouraging digital learning, and increasing digital creativity in the students. • the gaisoles model has no significant positive effects on the students’ senses of responsibility for an ethical digital society. as gai tools may algorithmically avoid ethically controversial issues when used by the students in search for digital materials, the latter can be deprived of the opportunities to develop genuine t vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1984 understanding of the values, ethics, and behavioral norms that should be followed in digital activities. the study makes the following suggestions: (i) prioritizing ethical use of technology to build controllable large models for education; (ii) increasing education on basic digital knowledge and skills to avoid illegitimate reliance on gai tools; (iii) providing gai-assisted teaching training for teachers. source: china educational technology, 2025; 2025(02):75-83. bece. newsletter vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1960 can home education guiding services enhance educational involvement of parents of left-behind children? an empirical analysis based on evidence from hubei province by lei, w. & zhang, z. correspondence to: wanpeng lei, central china normal university, china. email: 2466691134@qq.com mid its economic development and social structural transformation, china has seen an ongoing flow of its rural population into urban areas, instigating the issues of left-behind children and their education. according to relevant field studies, the dearth of home education and weak connections with the school are pervasive in households with left-behind children. this has raised the concern for the inadequate educational involvement of parents of this group in academia. this article is an examination of the effects of home education guiding services on educational involvement of parents of left-behind children from the perspective of family capability development, aiming to provide implications for improving home education guidance for migrant worker parents. research findings:  home education guiding services can significantly enhance educational involvement of parents of left-behind children. they have the potential to improve the quality and outcomes of home education of migrant worker households by providing professional guiding services to parents of left-behind children and boosting their capability in child education.  there is heterogeneity in the effects of home education guiding services on educational involvement of parents of left-behind children in different circumstances. (i) parents of left-behind children at the junior secondary level benefit more from home education guiding services in their in-home education involvement, whereas those of leftbehind children at the primary level benefit more from these services in their out-of-home education involvement. (ii) home education guiding services generate the most significant positive outcomes for households with both parents being migrant works in terms of inhome education involvement. regarding out-of-home education involvement, households with the mother being the migrant worker benefit most from these services. (iii) home education guiding sera mailto:2466691134@qq.com vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1961 vices are more beneficial for parents with medium and lower education levels in their in-home education involvement, while parents with medium and higher education levels benefit more from these services in their out-of-home education involvement. the study proposes the following suggestions: first, give full play to the central role of the school in providing home education guiding services and ensure the basic educational involvement of parents of left-behind children; second, offer targeted guiding services in accordance with the individually different home education needs of left-behind children households; third, enhance the professionalism of home education guiding services to strengthen the family capability and educational involvement of migrant worker parents. source: chinese journal of distance education, 2024; 44(12):24-35. bece. newsletter vol.8, no.2, 2021 1143 super high schools: improving or reducing the educational quality of high schools in different provinces? by guo, c., xu z., & zhang, s. correspondence to: guo, c., institute of economics of education, peking university, beijing, china 100871. email: cbguoguoguo@pku.edu.cn ith the extremely high enrollment rate and the high rate of being admitted by peking university and tsinghua university, to some extent, super high school is usually considered as the opportunity to realize the intergenerational social mobility upwards. however, it could cause serious damage to the ecology of the high schools’ education within the region, aggravating the exam-oriented education phenomenon in high school education, exacerbating the disadvantages of education inequity, etc., as a result, it has become a hot topic in all sectors of the society in recent years. recently, a study published in educational research, based on the data from the freshmen in university a between 2007 and 2017, defined a super high school as a school whose admission rate for university a exceeds 2 standard deviations of the provincial average, measuring the degree of super high schools’ monopoly in each province by constructing an educational monopoly index, and evaluated the quality of upper secondary education by using the college entrance examination scores for sciences fixed by the first batch of universities enrolling senior high school students，and the college entrance examination scores for sciences fixed by peking university and the university of science and technology of china. the researchers used the two-way fixed-effect model to analyze the status quo and the trends of the educational monopoly in china’s super high schools and based on this, probe into the effect of educational monopoly on the quality of upper secondary education in different provinces. the results show the following:  over the past few years, 34% of the freshmen from university a averagely come from super high schools, which indicating a serious educational monopoly phenomenon.  in the mainland, the data of 26 provinces shows the educational monopoly at a moderate level or above; while in the western provinces, the situation of one certain high school always possesses the strongest status of university admission; as for those provinces with developed education w mailto:cbguoguoguo@pku.edu.cn vol.8, no.2, 2021 1144 and economy or a large population, a situation of tripartite confrontation will emerge.  the educational monopoly indexes tend to rank oppositely to the college entrance examination scores for sciences fixed by the first batch of universities enrolling senior high school students, which indicates that the increased educational monopoly by super high schools will significantly reduce the educational quality of local upper secondary education. to break the educational monopoly, besides improving educational quality and promoting the balanced and high-quality development of regional education, it is strongly recommended to improving the educational quality of disadvantaged senior high schools, guiding junior high school students and their parents to choose senior high schools rationally, and accurately and effectively consummating the special policies for college admissions, on the condition of strictly prohibiting the cross-regional enrollment of super high schools. the suggestions are as follow:  educational administrative departments must truly eliminate “schools in schools” and strictly prohibit public schools from enrolling students across cities and counties in the name of private schools.  comprehensively evaluate the quality of high school education and promote the diversified development of high schools.  consolidate the team construction of disadvantaged high school teachers to retain the good teachers and recruit new teachers.  guide students and parents to choose schools rationally, and encourage parents to choose the most appropriate education for their children.  further increase the number of students enrolled in various special programs to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of policies. source: educational research, 2021; 42(4):37-51. bece. newsletter vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1815 neighborhood effects, family capital, and adolescents’ compulsory education outcomes by fang, c. correspondence to: chao fang, nanjing university of finance and economics, china. e-mail: 99288137@qq.com he state council of china’s release of the “decision on intensifying the reform of urban housing system” in 1994 initiated the market-oriented reform of housing for urban residents. the reform has caused the increased disparities between different types of communities. education production functions establishes the peer effect (community group effect) as one the four factors in student development. despite extant extensive studies on the relationships between neighborhood effects and family capital and adolescent academic performance, there remains room for further research on this topic. this article is an empirical analysis of the impact of neighborhood effects and family capital on teenagers’ compulsory education outcomes, based on the china education panel survey’s data from academic years of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015. research findings include that: i. neighborhood effects and family capital have positive impacts on teenagers’ compulsory education outcomes. observable factors such as family financial and cultural capital play dominant roles in the disparities in student academic outcomes at the compulsory education level. ii. the conditional quantile regression results showed that there was an nshape relation between heterogeneous characteristics of neighborhood effects and the increase in cognitive quantiles. among adolescents with similar observable characteristics, factors such as advantaged neighborhood effects as a result of residence in a private property community and disadvantaged family background aggravated the inequality in compulsory education outcomes on the range of low to high cognitive quantiles. disparities in compulsory education outcomes induced by community-related neighborhood effects bore an explicit feature of the “sticky floor effect.” individual-, family-, community-, and schoolrelated explanatory variables also contributed to the gaps in compulsory education outcomes at differential cognitive quantiles. iii. neighborhood effects of the private property community had the potential to increase adolescents’ cognitive ability by 0.047-0.061 standard points. analytical results of heterogeneous characteristics of neighborhood effects drew a consistent conclusion with the conditional quantile t mailto:99288137@qq.com vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1816 regression on the impact of neighborhood effects on compulsory education outcomes at different cognitive quantiles. the study puts forward recommendations as follows.  under the principal of “enrollment in the nearest school,” the educational authorities should promote the implementation of multi-school district policy, which will increase the number of schools each neighborhood can reach and boost the opportunities for teenagers from underprivileged families to access highquality compulsory education.  utilize peer effects and neighborhood effects to support disadvantaged adolescents in advancing their academic level and improving their education outcomes.  education departments should formulate and execute the teacherrotation system within the school district to alleviate the disparities in compulsory education outcomes caused by uneven distribution of high-quality educational resources between schools. source: education & economy, 2023; 39(03):35-44. bece. newsletter vol.16, no.1, 2024, bece 1824 promoting student interdisciplinary learning: mechanisms, the learning environment design model, and empirical research by wan, k. & rao, a. correspondence to: kun wan, shangrao normal university, china. e-mail: 1570576198@qq.com nterdisciplinary learning has become a highly recommended learning approach in chinese compulsory education. nevertheless, there exist a variety of problems with the current implementation of interdisciplinary learning, such as misconception of the approach and a lack of purposeful design. this study analyzed the mechanisms for promoting student interdisciplinary learning, constructed a model for interdisciplinary learning environment design, and conducted practical research based on the model. mechanisms for promoting student interdisciplinary learning (i) in interdisciplinary learning, students must go through structured activities to develop higher-order thinking skills and realize deep learning. (ii) the primary purpose of interdisciplinary learning is to conflate knowledge from distinct disciplines and then for students to generate new knowledge after the processes of assimilation, internalization, and reconstruction. (iii) image thinking and imaginative thinking entailed in interdisciplinary learning are beneficial for students integrating and establish associations between knowledge of multiple disciplines. research findings based on the model for interdisciplinary learning environment design  the model could effectively reduce students’ extraneous and intrinsic cognitive loads, increase their germane cognitive load, enhance their flow experience, and boost their higher-order thinking skills.  in interdisciplinary learning, flow experience had positive effects on students’ higher-order thinking skills development; the extraneous cognitive load negatively affected student flow experience; the germane cognitive load had a positively impact on student flow experience.  in interdisciplinary learning, mutual impacts existed between student cognitive loads, flow experience, and higher-order thinking skills. source: china educational technology, 2023; 2023(8):59-63. i mailto:1570576198@qq.com bece. newsletter vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1958 can human-machine collaborative learning based on generative artificial intelligence improve student learning outcomes? a meta-analysis of 20 experimental and quasi-experimental studies by he, w., zhao, s., abulaiti, w., ta, w., & xu, e. correspondence to: weigang ta, xinjiang normal university, china, e-mail: taweigang@126.com s a result of the application of artificial intelligence (ai) in education, human-machine collaborative learning emerged as a novel learning modality, attracting much attention in academia. the advent of generative ai (gen ai) gave new impetus to this modality. nevertheless, there are debates on the effectiveness of gen ai-based human-machine collaborative learning. this article synthesizes the findings of 20 experimental and quasiexperimental studies, using the meta-analytical techniques, and examines the impact of moderating variables, such as the disciplinary domain, type of knowledge, duration of intervention, on the outcomes of gen ai-based human-machine collaborative learning. research findings:  compared with traditional learning methods, gen ai-based humanmachine collaborative learning is more effective in enhancing student outcomes. specifically, gen ai’s potent capability of generating content, translating language, understanding contexts, and replicating scenarios, as well as providing instant feedback in customized interaction, can help serve the different needs of various learners and alleviate their cognitive anxiety. also, gen ai has the potential to assist learners in enacting brainstorming-based, human-machine collaborative knowledge generation by providing simulated scenarios.  the analysis of moderating variables reveals that gen ai-based humanmachine collaborative learning is exceptionally effective in the study of procedural knowledge in the domain of social sciences; that its effects are less significant in experiments with enduring durations of intervention; that practices like group learning, defining al’s roles in humanmachine interaction, and adopting the flipped classroom have significantly positive impacts on the modality’s outcomes; and that there are no significant inter-group differences in the disciplinary domain, type of knowledge, and learning pattern. a mailto:taweigang@126.com vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1959 this study demonstrates the positive effects of gen ai-based humanmachine collaborative learning on student outcomes, providing implications for the development of pathways for implementing this modality. future researchers need to pay more attention to improving the pertinence of the modality’s design, increasing the weight of communal learning, and enhancing the precision of al’s roles. source: open education research, 2024; 30(05):101-111. bece. newsletter vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2053 the roles of the peer, teacher-student, and family relationships in promoting student social and emotional development by huang, z. & li, j. correspondence to: zhongjing huang, east china normal university, china. email: zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn ocial and emotional skills are crucial for interpersonal interactions. peer, teacher-student, and family relationships are core factors in the socialization of adolescents, constituting important components of the educational environment that influences their social and emotional development. based on the data of chinese students from the second round of the oecd survey on social and emotional skills (sses), this study examines the effects of peer, teacher-student, and family relationships on the development of social and emotional skills in chinese students, using the method of hierarchical linear modeling (hlm). it aims to provide evidence-based insights for the future cultivation of social and emotional skills among chinese teenagers. research findings: • the overall level of social and emotional development among chinese students was relatively high, but with variations in individual skills in the five domains. there were significant variations in the levels of social and emotional skills among students of different gender, from varied socioeconomic status (ses) backgrounds, and from distinct classroom environments. • the peer, teacher-student, and family relationships were significant predictors of the levels of students’ social and emotional skills, despite that the impact of the family relationship was relatively weaker. • the effects of the peer, teacher-student, and family relationships on adolescent social and emotional development varied between different age groups. the impact of teachers on students’ social and emotional skills grew stronger with the increase in students’ age. • the effects of the three relationships also differed across various domains of social and emotional skills. recommendations: • pay attention to the differences in social and emotional development among individuals and provide targeted training programs. • foster supportive interpersonal relationships on the campus that facilitate student social and emotional development. s mailto:zjhuang@dedu.ecnu.edu.cn vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2054 • enhance the quality of home education to give solid backing for teenage non-cognitive development. • leverage the positive effects of peer, teacher-student, and family relationships on student social and emotional development by fully considering the characteristics of their impacts in various education phases and in different domains of skills. source: research in educational development, 2025; 45(10): 16-27. bece. newsletter vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1991 homework loads and creativity development in chinese primary and secondary school students: an empirical analysis based on the sses data by qian, j, li, q., & shi, y. correspondence to: jia qian, central china normal university, china. e-mail: qianjia@ccnu.edu.cn rawing on data from the oecd’s survey of social and emotional skills (sses), the study seeks to investigate the relationship between homework loads and creativity development in chinese primary and secondary school students, with the purpose of providing evidence for scientific implementation of the double reduction policy. research findings: • there was an inverted u-shape relationship between student homework loads and creativity. as their weekly homework time increases, the students’ creativity initially strengthened, followed by degrading with the inflection point at 8.377 hours. moderate amounts of homework can foster creativity, whereas excessive workload, which may lead to sleep deprivation, emotional stress, etc., can stifle it. • there were significant group differences in the relationship in question. the negative consequences of homework burden were more pronounced among junior secondary students and secondary girl students; the students with higher family socioeconomic status (ses) and experiencing higher teacher expectations were more creative. • the mediating and moderating mechanisms: inordinate homework loads indirectly eroded creativity by lowering sleep quality and increasing negative emotions; academic anxiety weakened the positive effect of homework on creativity. the study suggests: • scientifically stratifying assignments. the principle of “less is more” does not apply to homework assignment. to optimize the effects of homework, the teacher needs to reduce the workloads for students feeling overburdened while assigning legitimate extra tasks to high potential ones. • considering non-cognitive factors. improving homework design (e.g., adding open-ended tasks) and offering emotional support d vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1992 (e.g., alleviating academic anxiety) are among effective approaches to releasing students’ creativity. source: education research and experiment, 2025; 2025(01):103-113. bece. newsletter vol.14, no.2, 2023 1775 global competence of students in pisa highperforming regions: the impact of individual and school factors by liu, b. & huang, q. correspondence to: qinhui huang, the chinese university of hong kong, hong kong, china. e-mail: huangqh@link.cuhk.edu.hk midst the constant progression of globalization, it is of great significance to cultivate talents with global competence and ample knowledge about international affairs in order for the nation to seize development opportunities and react properly to global challenges. there has been increasing research on the possibility of fostering student global competence in the school setting. using data of four high-performing countries and regions in the pisa global competence survey 2018, this study analyzed the effects of school and personal factors on student global competence as well as the influence of school factors on the relation between student personal factors and global competence development. the research findings reveal that:  family socioeconomic status (ses), multilingual capability, and reading interest of students positively predict their global competence to varying degrees.  the average escs level of the school positively predicts global competence of students of all four countries and regions, multicultural events and globalized curricula have no significant impact on student global competence, and teacher multicultural belief negatively predicts global competence of singaporean students.  the average escs level of the school only has a significantly negative moderating effect on the relationship between hong kong students’ reading interest and global competence, and teacher multicultural belief can positively moderate the relation between family ses and global competence of canadian students. the study suggests that schools should offer students from diverse backgrounds equal opportunities for global competence training, place premiums on improving students’ foreign language proficiency, and work to create a reading-valued campus culture; and that they should encourage international peer communication, organize intercultural activities, improve the depth and breadth of globalized curricula, and provide teachers with professional training on global competence education. source: journal of east china normal university (education science edition), 2023; 41(2):38-529. a mailto:huangqh@link.cuhk.edu.hk bece. newsletter vol.19, no.1, 2025, bece 1934 causes and impacts of test anxiety of chinese primary school students: an analysis based on data from the sses 2019 by he, p. & qing, c. correspondence to: can qing, east china normal university, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org est anxiety is a negative emotion mainly elicited in the assessment scenarios. effective intervention on text anxiety of primary and secondary school students is crucial for safeguarding their mental health. this study examines the state, impacts, and causes of test anxiety of chinese primary school students, drawing on data from the survey on social and emotional skills (sses) 2019 sponsored by the organization of economic cooperation and development. research findings: • more than 30% of the primary school students surveyed suffered from test anxiety with the lack of confidence in their test ability being the chief symptom. • test anxiety had adverse effects on student academic results with the most significant negative effect on their reading performance. • teachers’ and parents’ academic expectations were positively correlated with test anxiety in pupils and were the leading cause of it. suggestions: • the school should improve its evaluation system by lowering the frequency and difficulty of tests and providing mental health education and counseling service to pupils. • parents need to upgrade their notions of education to focus on the all-round development of their children rather than their test scores and academic rankings. • it is important for the school, family, and community to work together to create plural education channels, providing students with diverse learning opportunities and resources. source: journal of china examinations, 2024; 2024(6):90-99. t mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org bece. newsletter vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1989 the effect of perceived parental trust and perceived teacher trust on learning powers in junior secondary students: the mediating role of self-esteem by fu, g. correspondence to: gan fu, yancheng teachers university, china. e-mail: psyfgan@ 163.com arents and teachers are “significant others” in the academic lives of secondary school students, and trust from the former can help enhance motivation levels and develop positive self-understanding in the latter. drawing on psychological capital theory and self-worth theory, this study conducts an in-depth investigation of the effect of perceived parental trust and teacher trust on learning powers in junior secondary students as well as factors influencing the effect. research findings: • perceived trust was a significantly positive predictor of student learning powers. the students’ perception of trust from their parents and teachers could heighten their self-efficacy and initiative in learning. • self-esteem had a mediating effect on the relationship between perceived trust and learning powers in the students. boosting self-esteem could enhance the students’ learning powers by contributing to the development of initiative, self-regulation, emotional management, and mental resilience in this group. • perceived teacher trust had a more significantly positive effect on learning powers than perceived parental trust in the secondary school students. while their perception of parental trust was favorable for the heightening of their self-valuation and selfefficacy and positively impacted their learning powers, trust from the teachers posed a more direct influence on their learning powers by impacting their self-esteem and self-concept because this group tend to idolize their teachers. educational implications: • it is important for teachers to put ample trust in their students to increase their psychological capital, which will, in turn, raise their learning powers. to this end, teachers need to cultivate a real enthusiasm for the teaching profession, endeavor to create a p vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1990 classroom atmosphere full of trust, and pay respect to the individuality of each student. • parents should adopt scientific parenting styles to assist with learning power development in their children. it is important for them to foster the children’ self-worth in day-to-day lives, to protect their self-esteem by reducing social comparison and helping them identifying personal strengths, and to pay attention to selfeducation to sustain effective communication with their children. source: journal of education science of hunan normal university, 2025; 24(02):114122. bece. newsletter vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1969 the effects of metacognitive scaffolding on scientific concept learning in senior primary students in the context of virtual scientific inquiry: an empirical study by shan, m., xu, r., shangguan, c., & zheng, y. correspondence to: meixian shan, nanjing university of posts and telecommunications, china. e-mail: mxshan@163.com cientific concept study is an essential component of science education. a virtual scientific inquiry platform is an effective device for facilitating students grasping scientific concepts through inquiry-based learning. in a virtual scientific inquiry setting, metacognitive scaffolding that integrates the “predict-observe-explain” (poe) strategy can play an exceptionally significant role, given the absence of face-to-face tutoring from the teacher. adopting experimental research design, this study seeks to investigate the effects of metacognitive scaffolding on scientific concept learning in senior primary school students in the context of virtual scientific inquiry. research findings:  in all regions chosen, girls, on average, had higher levels of empathy than boys. there were greater gender differences in empathy ability among north american adolescents than among east asian ones.  metacognitive scaffolding can significantly enhance the capacity of senior primary students for scientific concept understanding and transfer, but without noticeable effects on their capacity for concept recognition.  metacognitive scaffolding is effective in improving students’ confidence judgements in scientific concept learning, indicating it can boost their self-efficacy by encouraging selfmonitoring and reflection.  metacognitive scaffolding can improve students’ performance in scientific concept transfer by supporting their confidence judgements in this area. path analysis results reveal that metacognitive scaffolding significantly positively predicts students’ confidence judgements, which in turn, significantly positively predicts their performance in knowledge transfer. suggestions: s mailto:mxshan@163.com vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1970  plan learning tasks with explicit objectives and support student self-monitoring and reflection at the initial stage of scientific concept study.  increase guidance and feedback for students to assist with their self-regulation and reflection at the stage of conceptual understanding.  devise diverse learning scenarios to foster students’ capacity for knowledge transfer at the stage of conceptual transfer. metacognitive scaffolding can aid students in identifying and applying concepts previously learned to new scenarios by offering prompts and directions.  encourage students to conduct self-evaluation and reflect on their performance and perceptions of various learning experiences to further enhance their confidence judgements. source: china educational technology, 2024; 2024(12):73-80. bece. newsletter vol.17, no.1, 2024, bece 1858 how the quality of education process affects the quality of education outcomes: the effects of learning engagement on academic achievements in primary school students by zhu, x. & hang, r. correspondence to: xinzhuo zhu, huazhong university of science and technology, china. e-mail: 57097061@qq.com he evaluation of education quality is an essential component of the educational system, guiding the development of education and instruction. in recent years, the chinese government has released a series of policy papers in an effort to develop a more scientific educational evaluation system. 2020’s “the overall plan for intensifying the new era’s education evaluation reform” emphasizes the importance of modifying the evaluation of education outcomes, strengthening the evaluation of education process, exploring value-added evaluation, and optimizing comprehensive evaluation. the evaluation of education outcomes aims to measure the students’ fulfillment of educational objectives, whereas the evaluation of education process is more focused on the quality of educational and instructional processes. this article seeks to investigate learning engagement of primary school students using the self-developed “primary student learning engagement questionnaire” and create the model of the relation between learning engagement and academic achievements in primary school students to explore the effects of the quality of education process on the quality of education outcomes in primary education. research findings include: • learning engagement of students is significantly and positively related to their academic performance. student learning engagement concerns the amount of effort the student puts into their curricular study, informing the quality of education process. student academic achievements reflect the quality of education outcomes. therefore, the quality of education process has a positive impact on the quality of education outcomes. • engagement attitudes are crucial to student learning, determining their engagement behavior, duration, and strategies. positive engagement attitudes relate to positive mindset, satisfactory experience, and pro-active behavior in learning, serving as the primary determinant of students’ effective, sustainable learning involvet mailto:57097061@qq.com vol.17, no.1, 2024, bece 1859 ment. students with positive engagement attitudes are more ready to devote time and energy to learning and explore various learning methods and strategies. • engagement behavior has a direct effect on student academic achievements; engagement attitudes, duration, and strategies indirectly affect student academic performance via substantive engagement behavior. therefore, to enhance the learning engagement of pupils, it is important for the school to create good learning atmospheres and for the teacher to adopt flexible teaching methods and intriguing teaching activities that are effective in encouraging positive engagement attitudes in them. also, it is advisable to give heavier weight to the evaluation of education process and pay more attention to student learning process and the development of their learning competences. source: china educational technology, 2023; 2023 (12):55-63. bece. newsletter vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2045 gender bias in educational investment among chinese rural families: an analysis based on data of rural multi-child households by yan, j. & xiao, t. correspondence to: tong xiao, capital university of economics and business, china. e-mail: xiao2011tong@126.com hinese women have traditionally had fewer educational opportunities than their male counterparts, which has resulted in measurable gender disparities in socioeconomic status (ses) between the two groups. despite that china’s implementation of the compulsory education law and family planning policy have effectively mitigated its gender inequality in education, educational expenses remain a heavy burden for multi-child households in rural areas, where gender differences in educational input persist due to financial constraints and traditional bias. this study seeks to investigate the gender gaps in investment in education among chinese rural families with multiple children and the underlying reasons, using data from the china household income project (chip) 2018. research findings:  there were significant gender gaps in educational investment among chinese rural households, and the gaps are heterogeneous in relation to birth order, with the largest ones occurring between the investment for the eldest sons and the eldest daughters. compared to the eldest son, the eldest daughter was more likely to be deprived of educational opportunities in order to ensure the educational needs of her younger siblings. yet, no significant difference in educational access existed between the youngest son and the youngest daughter.  the gender issue in educational investment was significantly more pronounced in regions with lower levels of public education expenditure and among rural families with low household incomes.  more noticeable gender disparities in educational investment existed in the regions with higher sex ratios at birth and stronger clan culture and among rural households with low-ses mothers, where the girls’ access to educational resources are more likely to be affected by birth order. c mailto:xiao2011tong@126.com vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2046 the study’ findings have implications for educational policies on alleviation of gender disparities by highlighting the importance of: (i) formulating more targeted educational subsidy strategies to ensure the rights to education of all rural children, regardless of their birth order; (ii) prioritizing funding for public education in underserved regions and providing low-cost, high-quality local schooling for rural families, particularly those impoverished ones; (iii) fostering legitimate values on education in the rural population to eliminate sextual discrimination in education and encouraging the establishment of girls’ schools in underdeveloped areas to counteract the influence of local traditions. source: consumer economics, 2025; 2025(01):1-16. bece. newsletter vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1962 how the classroom environment affects student creativity by zhang, y., liu, w., & zhou, j. correspondence to: jinyan zhou, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: zhoujinyan@bnu.edu.cn reativity is counted as “the central among core competences” by the education research community. according to the investment theory of creativity, a favorable environment is a vital factor in human creativity development. in the educational setting, the classroom environment plays a pivotal role in fostering the students’ creativity. based on data from a survey of creative behavior of primary school students in beijing city, this study seeks to explore the relationships between the classroom environment and student creativity development, as well as influencing factors for and heterogeneity in the relationships, using a regression model and a moderated mediation model. research findings:  positive teacher-student relationships, healthy peer relationships, motivational classroom instruction, active classroom engagement, teacher equal attention, and cooperative learning are the six core elements in the classroom environment that have significantly positive effects on student creative mentalities and creative qualities.  creative self-efficacy mediates the relationships between the classroom environment and student creative mentalities and creative qualities.  there is heterogeneity in the relationship between the classroom environment and creativity among students from distinct socioeconomic backgrounds. a classroom environment with healthy peer relationships, active student engagement, and cooperative learning has a greater positive impact on creativity development of high -socioeconomic-status (ses) students. creative self-efficacy exhibits a significantly greater mediating effect among high-ses students than low-ses ones.  suggestions:  enhance the teachers’ creative instruction skills and interpersonal communication ability to develop a student-centered, active classroom environment for assisting student creativity development.  create a climate of active learning in the classroom to boost students’ creative self-efficacy. c mailto:zhoujinyan@bnu.edu.cn vol.19, no.2, 2025, bece 1963  develop thorough knowledge of the psychology and learning states of low-ses students as well as their interests and strengths so as to provide them with tailored assistance in creativity development. source: journal of educational studies, 2024; 20(05):151-166. bece. newsletter vol.16, no.1, 2024, bece 1827 effects of home education guidance services and improvement measures: an analysis based on survey data of 1,850 families in hubei province by xiang, r. & lei, w. correspondence to: wanpeng lei, central china normal university, china. email: 2466691134@qq.com ome education guidance services play an important role in enhancing the quality of home education and supporting child healthy and holistic development. based on survey data of 1,850 families from eight cities and 18 counties in hubei province, this study examined the effects of home education guidance services on parental education literacy, parental education involvement, and child development. ordinary least squares regression (ols) and propensity score matching (psm) were used in the analysis. the purpose of this article was to provide implications for improving the effectiveness of home education guidance. research findings • home education guidance services had a significant positive impact on parental education literacy and its sub-dimensions, among which parental education knowledge was the most substantially and positively affected. in the meantime, the impact was heterogeneous among parents of children at differential education levels. • home education guidance services significantly and positively affected parental education involvement and its sub-dimensions, particularly parental oversight of child studies. there was heterogeneity in this effect among parents of children at differential education phases. • home education guidance services made no difference to child physical health and academic performance but had positive effects on child learning attitudes and behavior. in the meantime, home education guidance services prominently impacted child learning attitudes and behavior via the mediation of parental education literacy and involvement. suggestions for improving home education guidance services • optimize contents of home education guidance. developmental characteristics of distinct age groups of children must be taken into consideration in providing the services. educational, psychological, physiological, and nutritional knowledge should be incorporated in the home education guidance. developing internet-based digital services can help popularize the home education guidance. h mailto:2466691134@qq.com vol.16, no.1, 2024, bece 1828 • make the supply of home education guidance services pertain to specific needs. basic home education guidance for disadvantaged families must be prioritized. • it is important to establish a guaranteeing mechanism for sustainable provision of home education guidance services, which should be supported by governmental funding, professional personnel, and effective evaluation systems. source: journal of educational science of hunan normal university, 2023; 22(6):60-69. bece. newsletter vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1869 the relationship between achievement goal orientation and academic achievement in senior secondary school students: the mediating effect of self-regulated learning by sun, w., guo, k., zhao, x., zhang, j., luo, r., & si, j. correspondence to: jiwei si, shandong normal university. e-mail: sijiwei1974@126.com cademic achievement is not only an indicator of students’ learning outcomes but also a predictor of their future academic well-being, social adaptation, and career development. the achievement goal, as a basic component of the achievement motivation of the individual, has the potential to pose significant impacts on student academic performance. according to the achievement goal orientation theory, student achievement goals include the performance approach goal, performance avoidance goal mastery approach goal, and mastery avoidance goal. this article is a close examination of the relation between the achievement goal orientation and academic achievement in chinese senior secondary school students as well as the mediating effect of self-regulated learning on this relationship. the research is based on a longitudinal survey of academic results of 1,389 10th and 11th graders within six months. research findings: • the mastery approach and avoidance goals had significantly positive and direct effects on students’ immediate and ensuing academic results, as opposed to the significantly negative and direct effects of the performance avoidance goal. • the performance approach, mastery approach, and mastery avoidance goals could indirectly and positively predict students’ immediate and ensuing academic results via the mediation of student self-regulated learning. on the contrary, the performance avoidance goal could indirectly and negatively predict students’ immediate and ensuing academic results via the mediating effect of student self-regulated learning. the research demonstrates that there are variations in the effect on student academic results among distinct achievement goals. it provides empirical evidence to explorations of how to help high school students establish appropriate achievement goals and increase self-regulated learning capacities for improving their academic achievement. a mailto:sijiwei1974@126.com vol.17, no.2, 2024, bece 1870 source: psychological science, 2024; 17(1):78-86. bece. newsletter vol.16, no.1, 2024, bece 1829 effects of sleep quality on academic performance of children aged 10 to 12: the mediating role of updating ability by fang, h., zhu, x., & zhao, x. correspondence to: xin zhao, northwest normal university, china. e-mail: psyzhaoxin@nwnu.edu.cn esearch has shown that sleep quality can positively predict academic performance of the student. previous studies have focused on examining the correlation in secondary and tertiary education students, with little attention paid to that among primary school students. a recent cross-sectional study demonstrated that primary school students had higher risk of low sleep quality than other groups. through a mediation model, this study investigated the relation between sleep quality and academic achievement in primary school students and the mediating effect of updating ability on this relationship. research findings include: • sleep quality was positively correlated with academic performance and updating ability of primary school students; student updating ability was positively related to their academic achievement. that means the higher their sleep quality, the better their updating ability and academic results. high sleep quality is beneficial for the neurodevelopment, a key factor in cognitive maturation and academic success. • updating ability played a complete mediation role in the relation between sleep quality and academic performance in primary school students. desirable academic achievement is the result of the development of cognitive competences (such as attention, information process, and memory) and positive behavioral tendencies (concentration and impulsion suppression); good sleep is the precondition for sustaining updating ability of the individual. the article also set forth the limitations of this study: other key factors influencing student academic performance should have been controlled; the association between sleep quality and student academic achievement and the mechanism of impact were not fully confirmed; more paths affecting the relation between sleep quality and academic results need to be explored; aside from updating, the explanatory power of other executive functions for the relation in question also deserves investigation. source: journal of psychological science, 2023; 46(5):1090-1097. r mailto:psyzhaoxin@nwnu.edu.cn bece. newsletter vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1973 the effects of work hours and composition on novice teachers’ career adaptation: an empirical study from the perspective of work burdens by zhang, l. correspondence to: luo zhang, huazhong university of science and technology, china. e-mail: zl13348683651@163.com areer adaptation is a vital component of professional development for novice teachers and is critical to their quality of teaching. based on a questionnaire survey of 2590 chinese teachers at the basic education level, this study investigates the effects of work hours and composition on career adaptation in novice teachers, using latent profile analysis and the multiple linear regression model. research findings:  the novice teachers polled worked 9.335 hours every day on average, which significantly exceeds the statutory 8-hour limit, representing a heavy work burden.  there are primarily three types of work composition in novice teachers: teaching-focused, classroom duty-focused, and administration duty-involved. the majority of them were carrying out teaching-focused work. working time varies for the different types of work composition. teachingfocused novice teachers worked the shortest hours, and the classroom duty-focused ones worked the longest hours, with a gap of 1.6 hours.  novice teachers’ work hours were negatively related to their career adaptation. heavy work burdens contributed to the difficulty of career adaptation in this group.  the type of work composition served as a moderator for the negative effect of work hours on career adaptation in the novice teachers. teaching-focused work could weaken the negative effect, whereas administration duty-involved work could magnify the negative effect. classroom duty-focused work had no significant moderating effect. suggestions:  reduce novice teachers’ work hours to keep them within the 8-hour limit. c mailto:zl13348683651@163.com vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1974  optimize the work composition for novice teachers by increasing teaching engagement while reducing non-teaching involvement.  make the appointment of classroom teachers flexible by diversifying the appointment approaches to include “voluntary application,” “regular rotation,” and more. reduce minor duties on novice teachers during their service as classroom teachers. source: journal of educational studies, 2025; 21(01), 103-116. bece. newsletter vol.19, no.1, 2025, bece 1932 the effects of home education and educational aspirations on academic achievements in primary and secondary school students: an empirical analysis based on data from the china family panel studies by zhang, y., li, z., & huang, h. correspondence to: haoyan huang, university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: haoyan.huang@helsinki.fi his study investigates the effects of home education and educational aspirations on academic achievements in primary and secondary school students, as well as the moderating effect of the student’s age, with a sample of 833 students from the china family panel studies (cfps). research findings: • the predictive power of home education on student academic achievements declined as the students’ grades advanced from the primary to junior secondary level, whereas that of student educational aspirations on their academic performance exhibited a shift from being insignificant to significant. • student educational aspirations mediated the relationship between home education and student academic achievements, and the student’s age posed a moderating effect on this relationship. the positive effect of home education on student educational aspirations lessened and became insignificant as the students’ ages increased. recommendations: • the parents should give their children more emotional support and communication by listening to their authentic thinking as well as the challenges they encounter and assist them in developing problem-solving skills. • parental involvement should vary by the child’s education phase. direct involvement strategies like instruction and supervision may be more effective in assisting with the development of favorable learning habits and upgrading academic performance in primary school students. for secondary school students, parental involvement ought to focus on developing their positive mental qualities, enhancing their self-motivation in learning. t mailto:haoyan.huang@helsinki.fi vol.19, no.1, 2025, bece 1933 • home-school co-education should cater to the developmental needs of students of various ages. the primary teacher needs to improve the information sharing mechanism to realize the homeschool co-supervision of the students, whereas the junior secondary teacher should work with student parents to boost the children’s initiative in learning and their educational aspirations. source: educational measurement and evaluation, 2024; 2024(3):79-94. parental education level and child cognitive ability: an analysis based on evidence from the china education panel survey jindian liu,1,2 mingwang cheng,3 chunyan wu1 1. northwest a&f university, xianyang 712100, shaanxi, china 2. shaanxi normal university, xi’an 710062, shaanxi, china 3. tongji university, shanghai 200092, china abstract: drawing on the data from the china education panel survey, the article investigates the effects of parental education level on child cognitive ability using descriptive statistics and quantitative analysis. research findings of the study reveal that parental education level is significantly and positively related to child cognitive ability, with a greater impact on the cognitive ability of girls than boys, and that its effects on the child’s cognitive ability decline as the latter improves. the analysis of mediation effects shows that parental education level affects child cognitive ability via its impact on home educational expectations and investment. best evidence in chinese education 2025; 19(1):1923-1926 doi: 10.15354/bece.25.ar141 how to cite: liu, j., cheng, m., & wu, c. (2025). parental education level and child cognitive ability: an analysis based on evidence from the china education panel survey. best evidence in chinese education, 2025, 19(1):1923-1926. keywords: cognitive ability, parental education level, social mobility, social status, cultural capital liu. (china). parental education level and child cognitive ability. bece, vol.19, no.1, 2024 1924 about the author: jindian liu, college of economics & management, northwest a&f university, xianyang 712100, shaanxi, china; & teacher development research institute, teacher development college, shaanxi normal university, xi’an 710062, shaanxi, china mingwang cheng, school of economics & management, tongji university, shanghai 200092, china. e-mail: walkercheng@163.com chunyan wu, institute of higher education, northwest a&f university, xianyang 712100, shaanxi, china. correspondence to: mingwang cheng at tongji university in china. conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the authors affirm that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2025 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:walkercheng@163.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ liu. (china). parental education level and child cognitive ability. bece, vol.19, no.1, 2024 1925 introduction ased on the data from the china education panel survey (ceps), this study aims to examine the relationship between parental education level and child cognitive ability using the methods of descriptive statistics and quantitative analysis. also discussed are the gender and urban-rural differences in the relationship as well as other factors influencing it. the purpose of this article is to provide policy implications for managing the disparities in cognitive ability among children with parents of distinct education levels and for curbing the “matthew effect” in socioeconomic development. research methodology source of data this study sources data from the ceps. the survey establishes the 20132014 academic year as the baseline year, focusing on students in grades seven and nine. through stratified random sampling, a sample of approximate 20,000 students was selected from 438 classes in 112 schools in 28 county-level regions across china. the content of the survey spans information on the class, school, family, as well as students’ personal information and academic performance. after the handling of missing values, 13981 students were included as subjects in this study. analysis models and variables the study creates a multiple linear regression model for a thorough analysis of the effects of parental education level on child cognitive ability. in this model, the core explanatory variables are the parents’ years of education, including the maximum years of education of either parent, the average years of education of two parents, the years of education of the father, and the years of education of the mother. these variables are key indicators of parents’ education level, measured by the number of years. the child’s cognitive ability is the dependent variable, measured by the standardized scores from the 3pl cognitive ability test. for a more accurate estimate of the effect of parental education level on child cognitive ability, this study sets control variables, including the personal characteristics of the child (such as gender, age, ethnicity, and being the only child or not), family-related characteristics (such as the type of hukou, the number of books in the home, economic status, and after-school tutoring support), and school-related characteristics (such as school quality and class quality). in addition, the study introduces educational expectations b liu. (china). parental education level and child cognitive ability. bece, vol.19, no.1, 2024 1926 (such as parents’ expectation of child academic performance) and parentchild interaction as mediating variables to implement an analysis of potential mediation effects. research findings (i) there is a significant positive correlation between parental educational level and child cognitive ability. the child’s cognitive ability can improve by 0.019 points with one-year increase in the maximum years of education of either parent. that implies that better-educated parents are more likely to have children with greater cognitive ability and that the disparities in education level in parents may lead to the gaps in cognitive ability among their children. (ii) parental educational level affects child cognitive ability via educational expectations and investment. parental expectations of child academic performance and education level, the child’s own expectation of their education level, and parent-child companionship all have partial mediating effects with statistical significance. (iii) parents’ education level has a greater impact on the cognitive ability of girls than boys. urban parents’ education level, compared with that of their rural counterparts, has greater effects on child cognitive ability. the disparities in education level among urban parents can cause wider gaps in cognitive ability in their children. as the child’s cognitive ability enhances, the impact of parental education level on it will decline. that means the impact of parental education level on child cognitive ability is greater among children with lower cognitive ability. the chinese version of this article has been published in education and economy, 2024; 40(4):56-68. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 刘金典, 程名望, & 吴春燕. (2024). 父母受教育水平与子女认知能力—来自中国教育追踪调查的 经验证据. 教育与经济, 40(4):56-68. received: december 10, 2024 revised: december 19, 2024 accepted: january 09, 2025 bece. newsletter vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2001 meritocracy in education: bridging or widening educational inequality by cui, y. & zhao, q. correspondence to: qian zhao, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: editorial-office@bonoi.org eritocracy emphasizes that reward for and advancement of the individuals should be based on their effort and talent. it finds a strong echo in the chinese educational tradition, which places high value on the notion that “hard work pays off.” nevertheless, in the context of the exacerbation of structural social inequalities, a sizable number of studies find that meritocracy, in practice, is unable to promote fairness, but instead obscures the issue of uneven distribution of education resources, further widening the disparities in educational opportunities between students with different socioeconomic status (ses). based on data from the china family panel studies (cfps), this study is an empirical analysis of the effects of the meritocratic belief on access to educational opportunities in chinese adolescents, as well as its heterogeneous effects among students with distinct ses backgrounds. research findings: • the vast majority of the adolescents surveyed held a strong belief in meritocracy. • the meritocratic belief had significantly positive effects on access to educational opportunities in the adolescents. • there were class differences in the said effects between the adolescents. • the positive effects were the most substantial in high-ses teenagers. • the availability of education resources remained the pivotal factor in the disparity in educational opportunities. the study’s findings suggest the necessity of recognizing the heterogeneous impacts of meritocracy on various social strata and avoiding generalization of its role in educational equity. individual examples of low ses students achieving successful educational outcomes should not divert attention away from the educational challenges faced by this underprivileged group across the board. the optimization of the effect of the meritocratic belief on academic advancement in adolescents is contingent on structural improvement in education resource distribution. m mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2002 source: research in educational development, 2025; 45(06):28-36. bece. newsletter vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1977 teacher criticism and behavioral improvement intention of secondary school students: the effect of the closeness of teacher-student relationships by cheng, y., yan, l., & zhang, f. correspondence to: feng zhang, ningbo university, china. e-mail: zhangfeng@nbu.edu.cn his article examines the effects of the type of teacher criticism on behavioral improvement intention in junior and senior secondary students and the teacher-student relationship, as well as the effect of teacher-student closeness on the relationship between teacher criticism and student behavioral improvement intention.. research findings:  person criticism from the teacher has a negative effect on student perception of the closeness of teacher-student relationships in both junior and senior secondary school students and weakens their intention to improve their behavior. the closeness of the teacher-student relationship fully mediates the relation between person criticism and student behavioral improvement intention. this type of teacher criticism represents a negation of the student’s overall worth, conveying the feeling of aversion, which can easily trigger senses of unfairness and often culminates in emotional reaction and behavioral resistance from the student. furthermore, person criticism can lead to the formation of negative selfconcept in students. when receiving person criticism, the student tends to attribute their error to their deficits in competence, feeling helplessness. long-term exposure to person criticism reinforces the student’s self-negation, prompting their deliberate avoidance of growth opportunities. this finding suggests that person criticism is an inappropriate approach to correcting student behavior.  process criticism from the teacher can heighten the perception of teacher-student closeness in senior secondary students but weaken that in junior secondary students. the closeness of the teacher-student relationship also fully mediates the relationship between process criticism and student behavioral improvement intention. however, process critit mailto:zhangfeng@nbu.edu.cn vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1978 cism can strengthen senior secondary students’ behavioral improvement intention by increasing their perception of teacher-student closeness, whereas it can undermine junior secondary students’ behavioral improvement intention by diminishing their perception of teacher-student closeness. this may be because senior secondary students, who are in late adolescence, can distinguish between process and person criticism and comprehend goodwill behind the teacher’s criticism, thus able to transform criticism into motivation for improvement. contrarily, junior secondary students, due to their less mature mental development, tend to interpret every type of criticism as absolute negation, and thus develop resistance to the teacher’s instruction and alienation from the teacher. this finding implies that junior secondary teachers may face more challenges in correcting student behavior than their senior secondary counterparts. source: psychological development and education, 2025; 41(01), 42-51. the new education initiative: a transformative program for chinese basic education longjun zhou division of education and economy, china center, international education communication agency, the base, usa abstract: the new education initiative (nei), founded by professor yongxin zhu at soochow university in 2000, has had a widespread and enduring impact on chinese basic education. it has transformed the education ecosystem in many regions in china, with its theory and practice inspiring numerous teachers who have suffered excessive pressures under the teaching to test culture. this article is a review of the initiative’s background, evolution, and implimentation framework and summarizes its major achievements, in the hope of providing implications for future education development in china and beyond. best evidence in chinese education 2025; 19(2):1941-1953 doi: 10.15354/bece.25.re152 how to cite: zhou, l. (2025). the new education initiative: a transformative program for chinese basic education. best evidence in chinese education, 2025, 19(2):1941-1953. keywords: new education initiative, yongxin zhu, educational reform, nongovernmental educational organization, china zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1942 about the author: longjun zhou, division of education and economy, china center, international education communication agency, the base, usa. e-mail: 294437034@qq.com correspondence to: longjun zhou at division of education and economy, china center, international education communication agency, the base in usa. conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2025 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:294437034@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1943 he early 21st century witnessed worldwide waves of educational reform, which brought systemic transformations to education in multiple dimensions, such as educational philosophy, education policies, and application of educational technology. every country has launched its own reform initiatives, aiming to build a more open, inclusive, flexible, and innovative ecosystem of education to suit the needs of economic and social development in a fast-changing world (qian, 2000). like any other nation, china also saw a surge of innovative experiments in basic education, including but not limited to the new education initiative (nei) founded by professor yongxin zhu, a program championing personal growth and well-being (zhu, 2019a); the new basic education initiative led by professor lan ye, aiming to construct a student-centered basic education system (ye, 2006); dulangkou middle school’s classroom teaching reform, which emphasizes active exploration, cooperation, communication in learning (ruan, 2009); beijing national day school’s curriculum reform, pivoted around the concept of personalized education (he & wu, 2019); tsinghua university-affiliated elementary school’s thematic learning, seeking to engage students in interdisciplinary study and practical inquiry for the cultivation of all-round competence and innovative spirit (li, 2018). this article focuses on the nei, researching into its theoretical underpinnings, evolution, implementation framework, and major achievements, aiming to showcase its value and significance as an innovative educational experiment. the nie’s theoretical underpinnings western new education theories in 1859, spencer advanced the question of “what knowledge is the most valuable,” which sparked enduring research and debate on the worth of knowledge (spencer, 2007). as opposed to spencer’s proposition that learning itself is of most worth, whitehead asserted that education should be based on real-world lives. in his book the aims of education, whitehead (2014) writes, “there is only one subject matter for education, and that is life in all its manifestations.” based on russell’s statement that diversity is essential to happiness (russell, 2005), the former soviet union’s educationist sukhomlinsky (2010) proposes a pathway to acquiring happiness through education, arguing that education is to help individuals discover their better selves and identify their capacity for creative work, and to enable them to understand and feel human pride. inspired by the new philosophies of education, the renowned scottish educationist cecil reddie founded abbotsholme school in 1889, which t zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1944 advocates establishing a harmonious, mutually respectful relationship between adults and children, requiring teachers to provide students with an education that focuses on mentorship rather than control. from then on, a host of experimental schools emerged across europe, such as bedales school in southern england founded by john badley in 1893; westans school in winchester by renno hebe in 1897; the first rural boarding school in germany by hermann lietz in 1898; and the école des roches in france by edmond demolins in 1898. in 1921, the new education fellowship was established in calais, france, setting out the core tenets of the new education movement: (i) to center education around children with respect for their individuality and intrinsic potential; (ii) to promote social transformation through education. the establishment of the new education fellowship, with its articulation of fundamental principles, had a profound impact on the ensuing development of new education, fostered the exchange and popularization of new education ideas across the world, and accelerated modernization of education in many countries. also, the child-centered approach and the notion of social transformation through education advocated by the new education fellowship have been valuable academic resources for modern education research (wu, 2008). dissemination and development of the new education theory in china the dissemination of the new education theory in china began in the early 20th century. in 1912, my views on new education by yuanpei cai was published by the education magazine, marking the initiation of the introduction of the new education theory in china. in february 1919, the magazine new education was launched in shanghai, further promoting the new education theory in this country. in july of the same year, xingzhi tao delivered his famous speech titled “new education” at zhejiang first normal school, amplifying the concept of new education with more profound connotations. the proposition of “localizing new education in china” by zexuan zhuang in 1929 signals a major step forward in the development of the theory in china (wang, 2009). in integrating the new education theory with chinese traditional education culture and introducing it into china’s education system of that time, chinese educationists developed certain new concepts, such as “life-based education” by xingzhi tao, emphasizing close connection between education and life and placing equal weight on teaching, learning, and doing; and “vigorous education” by heqin chen, which stresses the dynamic, practical, and creative features of education (li, 2006). the nei, founded by yongxin zhu, inherits the western tradition of new education and chinese new education theories in the early 20th century, zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1945 with a comparable emphasis on the role of education in increasing children’ wellbeing, while also seeking to transform the existing education system and drive social advancement (zhu, 2021a). the evolution of the nei professor zhu and his team embarked on developing the nei in the late 20th century and officially launched it in 2000. the program was created and promoted by a group of reform-awareness educators with forward-looking vision of education, under the leadership of zhu. the maturation of the initiative is the result of the team’s relentless exploration and practice over the past two decades (zhu & wang, 2020). preparation phase (1986-1999) in 1986, zhu, after five years’ effort, published his book a study of chinese educational philosophy: achievements and contributions of chinese education sciences. this book seeks to summarize the essentials of traditional chinese educational theories through a meticulous review of classic works by ancient and modern educationists in order to provide implications for contemporary education practices (zhu, 1993). two years later, zhu published another monograph named predicaments and transcendence: a survey of contemporary chinese education, which delves into challenges facing the chinese education world to explore paths for successful transformation of chinese education (zhu, 1990). drawing on his research experience in japan, zhu, in 1990, edited contemporary japanese education series, which thoroughly analyze the characteristics of japanese education to offer valuable insights for chinese educational reform, showcasing the editor’s broad educational perspective (zhu & wang, 1992). in 1993, zhu introduced a few teaching reform initiatives when serving as the dean of academic affairs at soochow university, including “the must-reading list for university students”, “the primary and secondary majors system,” and “the credit accreditation system.” these reform moves garnered much attention and positive comments from the education community. based on his extensive theoretical and practical research in education and inspired by peter drucker’s management theory, zhu commenced his experiment in education innovation in 1999, laying groundwork for the development of the construct of the nei (zhu, 2019b). initial phase (1999-2002) zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1946 zhu’s work experience at hutangqiao elementary school in wujin, jiangsu, in 1999, where he acted as a mentor for novice teachers as well as a frontline teacher, prompted him to make further efforts to achieve his educational ideals. his my educational ideals, published in 2000, is an encapsulation of main ideas of the nei. its publication marked the official launch of the initiative (zhu, 2009). in 2002, the program’s cyber platform “education online” was set up, which soon gathered a host of school principals and teachers who share the same educational pursuits and dubbed themselves “a group of like-minded educational practitioners.” the platform provided them with opportunities for further professional growth. teacher users of “education online” shared their teaching experiences and challenges on the platform, where they could receive feedback and encouragement from peers. these first participants of the nei experienced substantial professional development and became a potent force for the advancement of the program (zhu, 2021a). expansion phase (2002-2013) the first nine-year new education experimental school was established in 2002. subsequently, the program rapidly developed into a nei network, numbering thousands of experimental schools. the initial nei implementation framework established by the earliest participants, which consists of “five basic concepts and six actions,” was progressively upgraded to become a more complete framework that features “an overarching goal, four changes, five propositions, and ten actions,” as a result of the expansion of nei teaching forces and strengthened nei research effort (zhu & wang, 2020). teacher professional development has been a crucial factor in the successful enactment of the nei implementation framework. the nei has developed a teacher growth model that supports the teachers’ identification with the teaching profession and career development. in this model, “professional reading, writing, and communication” are counted as the three essential elements, serving to be the steppingstones to their continuous career advancements and ongoing pursuit of excellence (zhu & yang, 2020). maturation phase (2013 to present) 2013’s establishment of the new education teacher development institute was a landmark event in the history of the nei (zhu & wang, 2020). the institute offer free courses, spanning general education and disciplinary knowledge training, to teachers at nei experimental schools or in the nei experimental zones, to give them systematic professional support. also, it regularly sponsors teacher training seminars, peer communication workshops, zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1947 and the “course demonstration week” to provide valuable opportunities for teachers to exchange and share expertise and experience (tao, 2004). to ensure the quality and effects of the nei program, the institute developed a third-party evaluation mechanism, which gives objective assessment and timely feedback on its progress, providing solid evidence for future work on its improvement. also, the institute has been committed to building an online resource bank to realize the wide sharing of curricular resources, aiming to build a mutually beneficial teaching community (zhu, 2021a). the nei implementation framework on the basis of their insights into the essence of education and comprehension of ideal education, zhu and his research team established “promoting personal growth and well-being of education actors” as the nei’s overarching goal, emphasizing that the aim of the nei is two-fold: to foster students’ all-round development, including academic success, physical and mental growth, and emotional and spiritual development; and to support teachers’ pursuit of job satisfaction and professional development to enable them live a fulfilling teaching life (nei research group & zhang, 2006a). as a result of their two-decades of persistent effort, the nei research community have developed the nei implementation framework (table 1), which encompasses the nei’s overarching goal, value orientations, basic principles, and core actions. this framework has served as a solid theoretical base for the nei’s introduction and implementation (nei research group & zhang, 2006b). the establishment of the nei’s overarching goal initially, the overarching goal of the nei was represented as “pursuing whole-person education and education for all.” in this expression, “education for all” points to the nei’s ideal of educational equity and its role as a champion of the right of every child to basic education; “whole-person education” manifests the nei’s adherence to education for all-round development in students, a practice aimed at promoting the individual’s physical, mental, spiritual growth though multi-dimensional education including moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, labor education, and more. at 2006’s sixth nei seminar, professor zhu proposed to upgrade the initial version of overarching goal to be “promoting personal growth and well-being of education actors,” a more incisive interpretation of the nei’s spirit (zhu, 2006). the new expression highlights the value placed on the well-being of the whole education community by the nei program. professor zhu emphasized the nei’s focus on student all-round development zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1948 and teacher professional development, which can be achieved through specific actions, such as building a reading-valued campus, encouraging teacher-student co-writing, and developing interest in the world beyond the campus, to name a few. the revised overarching goal clarifies the direction for nei’s future development. the advancement of the five propositions educational reform endeavors often begin with the development of transformative ideas. the five basic propositions in the nei implementation framework target the problems with the current education system, aiming to help frontline teachers to break away from outdated, unscientific educational notions (zhang, 2017). professor zhu rates the five propositions as the overriding elements in the theoretical framework of the nei. according to professor zhu’s elaboration of them, “teaching knowledge of high value to students’ lifelong growth” and “encouraging communication with noble minds in teachers and students” are about the nei’s ethical values, guiding educators to reach higher-order purpose of education, while “promoting mental health by creating successful experiences,” “pricing the student’s individuality as well as the school’s uniqueness,” and “having full confidence in the potential of teachers and students” comprise the psychological base of the nei, stressing the importance of unlocking the potential of teachers and students, cultivating upbeat mentalities in them, and ensuring their rights to individualized growth pathways (zhu, 2019a) the expansion of nei actions the content and numbers of nei actions have undergone amplification over the years, resulting in the present 10 ones in the nei framework. based on the five basic propositions, these actions are advanced to ensure the achievement of the overarching goal, i.e., promoting the personal growth and well-being of educators and learners. for example, the action of “forging a desirable classroom environment” aims to create an active, vital learning climate by organizing early-morning recitation, mid-day reading, and lateafternoon reflection of meaningful content that suit the children’s interest, and by encouraging students to document their growth stories through writing about classroom experiences. “cultivating a favorable habit every month” is intended to help students develop habits of lifelong benefits, such as exercising regularly, reading, and keeping diaries. “creating excellent curricula through research and development” is to motivate teachers to innovate their use of textbooks, in addition to executing the national, regional, and school-based curricula, to make best use of “great knowledge” zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1949 to assist the growth of students and themselves (nei research group & zhang, 2006b). research, practice, and communication the nei was first known as an education research effort and attracted much attention in the education world. in december 2003, the nei’s research project “introduction and practice of the new education theory” was included as a key project in the “10th five-year” national education science development plan, signaling that the nei has gained state-level recognition. in 2008, its research project “the new education initiative and competence-focused education strategies” was again selected as a key project by the “11th five-year” national education science development plan, which largely magnified its impact as a significant experiement in chinese educational reform (yao, 2012). under the auspices of the ministry of education of china, chinese society of education, chinese society for tao xingzhi studies, and other organizations, the nei’s research outcomes have been put into practice through various devices, such as multi-agency co-ordination, cross-regional collaboration, and project-based cooperation. particularly, the establishment of nei experimental zones gave new impetus to the nei’s development. nei experimental zones have been developed in rizhao city in shandong province, lanzhou city in gansu province, haimen district of nantong city in jiangsu province, jiangxian county in shanxi province, and many other regions. nei experiments in these regions have achieved remarkable results, with significant demonstration value for the program’s further expansion (zhu, 2017). to assist the nei’s advancement, institutions like the suzhou new education research institute and the jiangsu changming education foundation (new education foundation) have been successively set up, forming a comprehensive system supporting nei research, training, and development. these institutions are leading various dedicated research teams, such as new reading research and new life education research. they all work towards the continual advancement of the nei, though each with its own research area (zhu, 2021b) the nei community places high value on communication and exchanges in advancing their program. the first nei seminar took place in 2003 in kunshan yufeng experimental school, the first nei experimental school. subsequently, the nei seminar was held annually by the names of the “new education annual conference,” “nei international forum,” “sino-american nei forum,” etc. each seminar is centered on a distinct theme, such as “teacher-student co-reading, co-writing, and co-living,” or “writing the magnificent lives of teachers” and “campus culture, the soul of zhou. (usa). the new education initiative in china. bece, vol.19, no.2, 2025 1950 the school.” themes like these not only mirrored the work priorities of the nei program in different periods but also sparked meaningful conversations in the education world (zhu, 2021b). impacts and accolades as a result of more than two decades of persistent work, the nei has now become the most impactful non-governmental education reform program, with 196 county-level nei experimental zones and over 9,000 nei experimental schools, reaching approximately 8.9 million teachers and students (zhu, 2022). the program has made a significant change to the educational ecosystem and enhanced the overall quality of education in certain regions while also making distinctive contributions to the improvement of educational equity and access as well as high-quality development of education in china. on the other hand, the nei’s implementation has had challenges and difficulties in the context of china’s exam-focused culture, where the nei’s philosophy appears somewhat idealistic with its emphasis on the students’ holistic development as well as their individuality. moreover, regional disparities in educational resources, funding, and teaching quality also add complications to the spread of the nei. addressing these issues warrants not only innovative endeavors of the nei community but also backing from the government and society at large. on top of its reputation as a progressive educational program in china, the nei has also won high praise in the international education community. in april 2014, the world innovation summit for education (wise) listed the nei among the world’s top 15 educational programs in that year, in recognition of its effort to innovate education (zhu, 2021b). the yidan prize, known as the highest education accolade on earth, awarded its prize for education development 2022 to professor zhu for his work in improving teaching quality and transforming learning outcomes in china (zhu, 2022). this accolade is seen as praise for not only zhu’s creative work but also for the nei community’s contribution to education development. so far, zhu’s monographs on education have been translated into 28 languages and published in more than 40 countries in the world. these publications have facilitated the world’s understanding of the nei, serving as inspirations for his global peers in their educational reform endeavors. references zhou. 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(2004). empowering teachers and students with wisdom: yongxin zhu https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=6h6u53pwxnq2qkzdbaqvmbuzitxm_ri6-g5cetejk8b4mf-bvt6fafjkfynvyc_lbevyrudtvyqplsgq_rq-acsguzgklg71ui1xie1xdv2mbuo0z-5jsca1vxpvsyomedrikbhhmd4lnvq11fvml_8voomxjtverxffhvbb21ambvqbf99bbsckzg_wjurk1rbqatxowb4=&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=ch https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=6h6u53pwxnq2qkzdbaqvmbuzitxm_ri6-g5cetejk8b4mf-bvt6fafjkfynvyc_lbevyrudtvyqplsgq_rq-acsguzgklg71ui1xie1xdv2mbuo0z-5jsca1vxpvsyomedrikbhhmd4lnvq11fvml_8voomxjtverxffhvbb21ambvqbf99bbsckzg_wjurk1rbqatxowb4=&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=ch https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=6h6u53pwxnq2qkzdbaqvmbuzitxm_ri6-g5cetejk8b4mf-bvt6fafjkfynvyc_lbevyrudtvyqplsgq_rq-acsguzgklg71ui1xie1xdv2mbuo0z-5jsca1vxpvsyomedrikbhhmd4lnvq11fvml_8voomxjtverxffhvbb21ambvqbf99bbsckzg_wjurk1rbqatxowb4=&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=ch 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(2020). the new education initiative’s theory and practice of teacher development. teachers’ journal, 2020(3), 5-9. available at: https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstra ct?v=14cugbpfc1b3blmfqkghbget uek_pcdnnyvson47mwuk_wj3x310wpcwyg86y1w43nygjg3gjzltww1wh7rwlbykyvafcsivcdhb9sx3xtdnqlyl qggpkbfpo3wq8ezlag0mhjhtgtoc q9r4lig58pengaafqvu7rjzlcjkglho4 v75qkedrulhqhx5eejebfoky783e =&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=c hs received: january 10, 2025 revised: january 19, 2025 accepted: february 06, 2025 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.11.001 https://doi.org/10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2021.11.001 https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=dnphqyycduoed0mlqqalbvybbp82ok1konflbu1bt_z5v57qcmvhhsvimdrgjch2xmy86bxk996aqthghzp0eawbaik4q4kpl1fqbeoye8ef2hekny_03e-gpt79jept9d_dgnnz41k9enollp0jxmadptn4bhkb1p2xapsx_qbjpc-pphzcl390iircqcwnlm5rcshkx7c=&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=chs 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https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=14cugbpfc1b3blmfqkghbgetuek_pcdnnyvson47mwuk_wj3x31-0wpcwyg-86y1w43nygjg3gjzltww1wh7-rwlbykyvafcsivcdhb9sx3xtdnqlylqggpkbfpo3wq8ezlag0mhjhtgtocq9r4lig58pengaafqvu7rjzlcjkglho4v75qkedrulhqhx5eejebfoky783e=&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=chs https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=14cugbpfc1b3blmfqkghbgetuek_pcdnnyvson47mwuk_wj3x31-0wpcwyg-86y1w43nygjg3gjzltww1wh7-rwlbykyvafcsivcdhb9sx3xtdnqlylqggpkbfpo3wq8ezlag0mhjhtgtocq9r4lig58pengaafqvu7rjzlcjkglho4v75qkedrulhqhx5eejebfoky783e=&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=chs https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=14cugbpfc1b3blmfqkghbgetuek_pcdnnyvson47mwuk_wj3x31-0wpcwyg-86y1w43nygjg3gjzltww1wh7-rwlbykyvafcsivcdhb9sx3xtdnqlylqggpkbfpo3wq8ezlag0mhjhtgtocq9r4lig58pengaafqvu7rjzlcjkglho4v75qkedrulhqhx5eejebfoky783e=&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=chs https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=14cugbpfc1b3blmfqkghbgetuek_pcdnnyvson47mwuk_wj3x31-0wpcwyg-86y1w43nygjg3gjzltww1wh7-rwlbykyvafcsivcdhb9sx3xtdnqlylqggpkbfpo3wq8ezlag0mhjhtgtocq9r4lig58pengaafqvu7rjzlcjkglho4v75qkedrulhqhx5eejebfoky783e=&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=chs bece. newsletter vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1809 does virtual reality help reduce learners’ cognitive load? a meta-analysis based on 23 experimental and quasi-experimental studies by wang, g., song, j., & tian, l. correspondence to: guohua wang, henan normal university, china. e-mail: wgh19892008@126.com s educational technology advances, virtual reality (vr) has garnered widespread attention in academia. extensive empirical research has been undertaken on the effect of vr on cognitive load, despite no consistent conclusion having been reached. this article is a meta-analysis of 23 empirical studies, seeking to examine the impact of vr on cognitive load moderated by variables such as the discipline, education phase, and intervention duration. analysis results include:  overall, vr has a moderate mitigation effect on cognitive load.  there is no disciplinary difference in the effect of vr on cognitive load. the effect remains undetermined in the fields of medical education, natural science, and humanities.  the impact of vr on cognitive load remains basically constant in different intervention durations.  the higher the frequency of intervention, the weaker the impact of vr.  vr exhibits a significant mitigation effect on cognitive load under the task-driven teaching approach.  there is no prominent difference in the effects of differential types of vr, such as immersive vr and desktop vr, on cognitive load.  vr contributes to alleviating cognitive load in all application scenarios, with the most significant effect occurring in manipulative learning, followed by that in social and observational learning. based on the research findings, discussions are focused on the following aspects: i. vr facilitates learners processing information through multiple channels of senses, so expanding the restricted work memory capacities and lowering cognitive load. ii. vr poses the most significant effect on cognitive load in engineering disciplines, which requires visualized learning scenarios to support students’ hands-on manipulation and grasp of learning content. vr has the potential to make abstract concepts more concrete, encourage autonoa mailto:wgh19892008@126.com vol.15, no.2, 2023, bece 1810 mous inquiry and repetition of exercises in learners, thus reducing cognitive load. iii. regarding the intervention duration and frequency, vr can most effectively mitigate cognitive load when the application time is less than 30 minutes or when it is adopted in one single application. that is because the memory and metabolism of the hippocampus will be enhanced due to the novelty effect of vr, activating cognitive patterns and maximizing their use, and as a result, alleviating cognitive load. iv. task-driven teaching approaches emphasize learning through doing and the importance of the agency of students in learning. vr allows students a mixed scenario that combines virtual and real worlds, encouraging active exploration and problem solving in them. that assists in student knowledge construction and reducing cognitive load. v. the type of vr technology has little effect on vr’s impact on cognitive load. this finding may be due to the incomplete data and the high receptivity of technology on the part of the subjects in the experiments. vi. vr is more advantageous in manipulative learning settings because vrassisted simulation environments may facilitate students’ mastery of abstract concepts as well as supporting their repeated manipulation and timely acquisition of feedback, thus promoting personalized learning that helps lower cognitive load. source: open education research, 2023; 29(04):110-120. why principal positive leadership is important: it’s mediating effect on the relation between the school context and student academic achievement ru cai, 1 xinping zhang, 1 jijun yao, 1 shike zhou 2 1. nanjing normal university, nanjing 210097, china 2. jiangsu institute of education sciences, nanjing 210013, china abstract: “deficit remediation” as an educational governance paradigm has given rise to many problems, whereas principal positive leadership under the “strengths development” paradigm has the potential to give new impetus to school development. based on large-scale survey data within a provincial region, this study investigates how the school context and principal positive leadership impact student academic achievement using structural equation models. research findings show that principal positive leadership as a structural latent variable has positive impacts on student academic performance and significantly mediates the effects of the school context on student academic results; and that the patterns of the impacts of principal positive leadership differ according to the variations of the school’s autonomy in operation. best evidence in chinese education 2024; 16(2):1831-1835. doi: 10.15354/bece.24.ar111 how to cite: cai , r., zhang, x., yao, j., & zhou, s. (2024). why principal positive leadership is important: it’s mediating effect on the relation between the school context and student academic achievement. best evidence in chinese education, 16(2):1831-1835. keywords: teacher support, migrant children, learning satisfaction, academic adjustment, learning engagement cai et al. (nanjing, china). principal positive leadership and student achievements. bece, vol.16, no.2, 2024 1832 correspondence to: xinping zhang, school of educational sciences, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210097, china. e-mail: 403265357@qq.com conflict of interests: none. © 2024 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:403265357@qq.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ cai et al. (nanjing, china). principal positive leadership and student achievements. bece, vol.16, no. 2, 2024 1833 he study analyzes the significance of principal positive leadership for school effectiveness in the context of chinese education and systematically examines the relationships between the school context, principal positive leadership, and student academic achievement. it aims to delve into the roles of principal positive leadership to provide evidence and direction for policy making in modernizing school management systems and activating school vitality, as well as valuable insights into how to promote high-quality development of education and student academic progress. research hypotheses hypothesis one (h1): the school context is positively related to student academic performance. sub-hypotheses of h1 include: h1a: the school location is positively related to student academic achievement. h1b: the student family background is positively related to student academic performance. h1c: the school’s institutional advantages positively impact student academic achievement. hypothesis two (h2): the school context is positively related to principal positive leadership. sub-hypotheses of h2 include: h2a: the school location is positively related to principal positive leadership. h2b: the student family background is positively related to principal positive leadership. h2c: the school’s institutional advantages positively affect principal positive leadership. hypothesis three (h3): principal positive leadership positively impacts student academic achievement. hypothesis four (h4): principal positive leadership mediates the relation between the school context and student academic performance. sub-hypotheses of h4 include: h4a: principal positive leadership mediates the relation between the school location and student academic results. h4b: principal positive leadership mediates the relation between the student family background and student academic performance. h4c: principal positive leadership mediates the relation between the school’s autonomy in operation and student academic achievement. research methodology analytical models structural equation models were created to analyze the effects of principal positive leadership on the relation between the school context and student academic performance and examine its paths. student academic achievement serves as the dependent variable, used to measure the effectiveness of school leadership. the independent variable is the school context, including the school location, student family background, and school’s autonomy in operation. the intervening variable is principal positive leadership, measured by data generated with the principal positive leadership scale. t cai et al. (nanjing, china). principal positive leadership and student achievements. bece, vol.16, no. 2, 2024 1834 data sources this study is empirical research based on the data from 2020’s monitoring of academic quality of compulsory education students in jiangsu province. the project adopted twophase stratified random sampling. a total of 1,666 schools were included in the sample with 512 from northern jiangsu, 311 from central jiangsu, and 843 from southern jiangsu; with 1,521 being public schools and 145 private schools; and with 979 being urban schools, 539 township schools, and 148 rural schools. the diversity and distribution of the schools sampled are representative of the overall situation of schools in jiangsu province. measurement tools the principal positive leadership scale in use is adapted from cameron’s positive leadership scale (cameron, 2013) in combination of the actual circumstances of chinese schools. the basic structure of the adaptation remains consistent with that of the original to include four dimensions: creating a positive atmosphere, developing positive relationships, reaching positive communication, and constructing positive purpose. items related to principal leadership behavior, such as “principals,” “teachers,” “students,” “schools,” “teacher-student relationships,” and “understanding of the significance of school education for the national development” are added to cameron’s scale, which was originally developed to measure positive leadership in businesses. conclusions research findings show that the school context significantly impacts the effects of principal positive leadership on student academic achievement. the three forms of school context, namely, the school location, student family background, and school’s autonomy in operation, all potentially affect student academic progress via principal positive leadership. nevertheless, there are differences in their impacting paths for the relation between principal positive leadership and student academic performance; the school’s autonomy in operation in various forms plays differential roles in the influencing pattern. conclusions can be drawn as follows: (i) principal positive leadership is a construct consisting of high-order factors that pose significantly positive effects on student academic achievement; (ii) the school context is positively related to principal positive leadership; (iii) principal positive leadership significantly mediates the effect of the school context on student academic performance; (iv) the school’s autonomy in operation in various dimensions impacts principal positive leadership and student academic results via varying paths. cai et al. (nanjing, china). principal positive leadership and student achievements. bece, vol.16, no. 2, 2024 1835 references cameron, k. (2013). positive leadership: strategies for extraordinary performance. (chinese translation by xichao zhang & jing hu). beijing: science press. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university (education science edition), 2024; 42(2):92-108. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 蔡茹, 张新平, 姚继军 & 周世科. (2024). 校长积极领导力何以重要？— 论其在学校背景与学生成 绩之间的中介效应.华东师范大学学报(教育科学版. 教育研究), 42(2):92-108. received: 01 march2024 revised: 08 march 2024 accepted: 11 march 2024 ar-xinpingzhang-bece_title-march_2024 ar-xinpingzhang_bece-maintextmarch2024 bece. newsletter vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1975 the reduction in off-campus subject-based training providers and student school hours: an evaluation study of the double reduction policy by lu, w. & wei, y. correspondence to: yi wei, peking university, china. e-mail: ywei@ciefr.pku.edu.cn here is a consensus among chinese families that education is critical to the future success of their children. the parents begin enrolling them in a variety of supplementary tutoring and training programs when they are still low graders in order for them to excel in academic performance. as a result, children in china must not only study the demanding in-school curriculum but also suffer the burden of out-of-school training, which severely drains their time and energy. to alleviate the pressure on students and their families, the chinese government released the double reduction policy, with the regulation of the off-campus training market being one of its primary targets. this study is an investigation of the effect of the policy on the reduction in off-campus subject-based training providers and impact of the supplementary tutoring service cuts on student school hours, using the data of a largescale sample from an internet-based survey. research findings:  under the double reduction policy, the number of offline subject-based training institutions has been cut by 95.6%, and that of online ones by 87.1%.  the cost of out-of-school training service decreased by 40% on average. ongoing are the regulation of non-subject-based training institutions and the prevention of their conversion into subject-based training services.  the greater the reduction in subject-based training institutions in the vicinity of the school, the longer school hours the students have. this indicates the existence of mutual substitution between in-school and out-of-school education, and this substitution effect is more pronounced among disadvantaged student groups. it can be observed in many secondand third-tier cities, though not evident in the four first-tier cities (beijing, shanghai, guangzhou, and shenzhen). t mailto:ywei@ciefr.pku.edu.cn vol.20, no.1, 2025, bece 1976  the greater the cuts in subject-based training institutions in the vicinity of the school, the more likely the students complete their after-class assignments in the school. the reduction in subject-based training services has no impact on the total number of hours the student spends on after-class assignments. the policy implications of the study are summarized as follows: the double reduction policy induced large-scale closure of subject-based training institutions, which increased the students’ reliance on in-school education. hence, it is imperative to enhance the quality of school-based education, particularly the quality of after-school services, as the underprivileged groups are more susceptible to the impact of the reduction in off-campus tutoring service provision. source: journal of east china normal university (education science edition), 2025;43(01), 37-48. bece. newsletter vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 1999 senior secondary education of migrant children in china and impacts of high school entrance examination policies by li, c. & sun, z. correspondence to: zhijun sun, beijing normal university, china. e-mail: szhijun@bnu.edu.cn o realize the goal of universalizing senior secondary education in the country across the board, china must pay special attention to the issue in underdeveloped regions and among underprivileged groups. this study aims to delineate the developments in senior secondary education for migrant children (children of migrant workers) in china, based on data from the china migrants dynamic survey 2011-2018, and analyze the heterogenous impacts of migrant children-specific high school entrance examination policies in various provincial administrative regions, using the difference-in-differences method. research findings: • the high school enrollment rate in migrant children was noticeably lower than the national average, albeit the narrowing gap between the two. high school enrollment of this group underwent relatively greater growth rates between 2014-2017, with a slower one in 2018. • high school entrance examination policies of greater levels of openness had more significant positive impacts on the high school enrolment rate in migrant children. female migrant children, migrant children who moved to a different province than their native one, and those from low-income households were more sensitive to the influence of the entrance examination policies. implications for policy: • it is preferable for all provinces to formulate more open and inclusive high school enrolment policies for migrant children, depending on their actual educational capacities. the policy of tying post-junior secondary education to household registration (hukou) needs a substantive reform. regions with low inbound flows of migrant population should be able to allocate resources for senior secondary education based on the population of compulsory education residents, rather than on the population with local hukou. t mailto:szhijun@bnu.edu.cn vol.21, no.1, 2025, bece 2000 • the local government needs to increase funding for education to reduce the cost of high school education for migrant children and decrease the incidence of migrant children abandoning senior secondary education due to economic distress. • additional support should be provided to educationally disadvantaged migrant households to ensure the right of their school-age children to education and halt the intergenerational transmission of educational opportunity deprivation. source: journal of educational studies, 2025; 21(02):162-178. the relationship between internetbased entertainment and selfexpectations in education in adolescents: the moderating effect of parenting styles xiaobin he, 1 zhipeng liu, 1 chang wang2 1. school of social sciences, tsinghua university, beijing 100084, china. 2. school of marxism, tsinghua university, beijing 100084, china. abstract: drawing on personal and household data from the china family panel studies (cfps) 2020, the study aims to examine the relationship between internet-based entertainment and selfexpectations in education in adolescents, as well as analyzing the moderating effects of various parenting styles on this relationship. its research findings reveal that internet use for entertainment purposes, such as online gaming and short-video viewing, can markedly undermine educational aspirations in adolescents; and that parenting styles have no significant influence on the negative effect of frequent short-video viewing on educational aspirations in this group, whereas tolerant parenting can suppress the negative effect of frequent online gaming, as opposed to neglectful parenting. best evidence in chinese education 2025; 20(2):1979-1982 doi: 10.15354/bece.25.ar162 how to cite: he, x., liu, z., & wang, c. (2025). the relationship between internet-based entertainment and self-expectations in education in adolescents: the moderating effect of parenting styles. best evidence in chinese education, 2025, 20(2):1979-1982. keywords: internet, online game, short video, self-expectations in education, parenting style wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.20, no.2, 2025 1980 about the author: xiaobin he, school of social sciences, tsinghua university, beijing 100084, china. e-mail: xiaobinhe@tsinghua.edu.cn correspondence to: xiaobin he at tsinghua university in china. conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. research background and purpose nternet use has permeated many facets of adolescents’ life, posing a profound impact on their growth. there have been numerous studies on the short-term effects of internet use on physical and mental health, as well as academic performance, in adolescents, but with few addressing its long-term impacts. based on data from the china family panel studies (cfps) 2020, this study explores the relationship between internet-based entertainment and self-expectations in education in this group, as well as analyzing the moderating effects of various parenting styles on this relationship. research methodology variables  adolescent self-expectations in education are the dependent variable, measured by the self-reported “expected level of education” in the questionnaire, which was converted into a quantitative variable representing the expected years of education.  internet-based entertainment activities, including online gaming and short video viewing, are the independent variables. binary categorical variables were established based on the questionnaire items “do you play online games every day?” and "do you watch short videos every day?”  the parenting style is the moderating variable. the 14 indicators from the parenting style scale in the self-reporting questionnaire were converted into binary variables, and latent class analysis was adopted to categorize parenting styles into four types: neglectful, authoritarian, tolerant, and authoritative.  control variables include personal characteristics, such as gender, age, urban/rural identity, years of education completed, and academic ranking; family-related characteristics, such as home i mailto:xiaobinhe@tsinghua.edu.cn wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.20, no.2, 2025 1981 location, paternal educational level, and paternal occupational status; and school-related characteristics, such as school location, being in a key school or not, and being in a high-performing class or not. analysis methods multiple linear regression: to control for the effects of other variables on student selfexpectations in education, the study employs multiple linear regression analysis to examine the relationship between the independent variables and dependent variable. the regression models include: • model 1 for evaluating the effects of control variables on selfexpectations in education in adolescents; • models 2 and 3, where the independent variables, online gaming and short-video viewing, are incorporated into model 1, respectively. moderation analysis: to explore how different parenting styles influence the relationship between internet-based entertainment on self-expectations in education in adolescents, models 4 and 5 incorporate interaction terms of “online gaming on a daily basis” x “the parenting style experienced” and “short-video viewing on a daily basis” x “the parenting style experienced,” respectively. robustness test: to verify the robustness of the analysis results, a logit regression is conducted using a binary variable, “anticipating college attendance” vs. “not anticipating college attendance, derived from the variable of “adolescent self-expectations in education.” additionally, the bootstrap simulation method is employed to further test the statistical significance of the moderating effect of each parenting style on the negative impact of internet-based entertainment on student educational aspiration. research findings (i) internet-based entertainment, notably online gaming and shortvideo viewing, has negative effects on adolescent self-expectations in education. (ii) parenting styles can moderate the negative effects of online gaming on adolescent educational aspirations. specifically, neglectful parenting, characterized by indifference to children’s behavior and attitudes, tends to exacerbate the negative effect of online gaming, as opposed to tolerant parenting, which is effective in mitigating its adverse effect. wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.20, no.2, 2025 1982 (iii) the moderating effect of any of the four parenting styles on the negative impacts of short-video viewing is statistically insignificant, and robustness tests also do not show any unstable results, which may be due to the piecemeal and highly viral nature of short videos. © 2025 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of beijing university of technology (social sciences edition), 2025; 25(03):36-49. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 何晓斌, 刘志鹏, 王 畅. (2025). 不同家庭教养方式下互联网娱乐使用与青少年自我教育期待的实 证研究. 北京工业大学学报（社会科学版）5 月刊，25(03):36-49. received: june 05, 2025 revised: july 01, 2025 accepted: july 15, 2025 http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ bece. newsletter vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2047 parental and child educational expectations and adolescent academic burnout in low-income families by zhao, x. & wang, s. correspondence to: xinhui zhao, national academy of governance, china. email: editorial-office@bonoi.org his study seeks to examine the effect of the alignment or misalignment between parental and child educational expectations on teenage children’s academic burnout in low-income families, with a sample of 3342 adolescents aged 8–16 from the database of 2018’s “construction of the policy support system for disadvantaged families in china” project, which was sponsored by china’s ministry of civil affairs. research findings: • aligned low educational expectations between the parents and children significantly exacerbated academic burnout in the latter, while aligned high educational expectations between them or the children’s educational expectations exceeding those of their parents significantly alleviated academic burnout in the teenage children. this finding differs from the results of previous national studies, which suggest that only “aligned high educational expectations” are most beneficial for adolescent academic performance. it implies that with high educational aspirations, adolescents with disadvantaged backgrounds are still likely to achieve academic success. • the effect of the intergenerational alignment of educational expectations on child academic burnout was mediated by parental educational involvement. parental educational involvement could intensify the negative effect of “aligned low educational expectations” and boost the positive effect of “aligned high educational expectations.” yet, it had no mediation effect on the relationship between the “educational expectation divides” (no matter whose educational expectations were higher) and academic burnout in adolescents. this may be because parental educational involvement could be either inordinately high or low, unable to meet the children’s actual needs, as a result of parent-child discrepancies in educational expectations • grandparenting could mitigate the exacerbating effect of “aligned low educational expectations” on adolescent academic burnout (playing the role of resource compensation) but also weakens the promotive effect of “aligned high educational expectations" on parental involvement t mailto:editorial-office@bonoi.org vol.21, no.2, 2025, bece 2048 (playing the role of resource substitutes). given the adoption of grandparenting in 43.6% of the surveyed families, it is recommended to provide grandparents with home education guidance and social work services to help them update their educational notions and improve their quality of educational involvement. these findings can have theoretical and practical implications for policy making, school education, and home education by deepening the understanding of the mechanism influencing the effect of parent-child agreement or disagreement in educational expectations on adolescent academic burnout in low-income families. they underscore the necessity of supporting low-income teenagers in pursuing high educational aspirations with measures like increasing educational investment in low-income regions and offering scholarships and grants to those eligible to alleviate financial burdens on their families. in the meantime, it is important to establish a robust home education guidance system to provide parents with knowledge on scientific home education methods, including setting legitimate educational goals and ensuring effective educational involvement, to reduce academic burnout in their children. additionally, the community can pool resources available, such as libraries and cultural centers, to organize activities like parent-child co-reading and handicraft making for families adopting grandparenting, in a bid to encourage parent-child emotional interaction, which can contribute to the mitigation of academic burnout of the adolescent children. source: china youth study, 2025; 2025 (08):51-59. bece. newsletter vol.19, no.1, 2025, bece 1930 the relationship between the teacher education level and student academic achievement: an empirical study based on data from the china education panel survey by gu, j. & xu, x. correspondence to: xinyue xu, changchun university of technology, china. email: 95577638@qq.com ptimizing teachers’ qualifications has been viewed as a consequential strategy for the comprehensive enhancement of the quality of basic education in china. drawing on baseline and follow-up data from the china education panel survey (ceps), this study investigates the effects of teacher education levels on student academic performance using the hierarchical linear model (hlm). the effects are measured by the students’ academic gains in secondary chinese language, mathematics, and english. research findings: • the effects of teacher education levels on student academic performance in chinese language and english is not affected by the choice of analysis model and other factors. the effects of teacher education levels on student academic performance in mathematics can be affected or moderated by other explanatory variables. • higher teacher education levels (full-time university degrees or above) have more significant positive effects on student academic progress in chinese language and english, compared with lower teacher education levels (junior college degrees), whereas the gap between higher and medium teacher education levels (adult undergraduate course degrees) is not significant. higher teacher education levels have more noticeable effects on students’ academic gains in mathematics than lower ones. the study uses anova and t-test to analyze the questionnaires from the ceps, aiming to pinpoint the factors influencing the effects in question. teaching behaviors, such as providing personalized tutoring, posing questions, and giving praises, are salient factors contributing to student academic progress. moreover, teachers with higher education levels are more skillful in choosing suitable teaching methods and leveraging digital media to meet the needs of students. policy implications of the study include: (i) raising teacher entry qualifications is helpful in narrowing the achievement gaps generated by stuo mailto:95577638@qq.com vol.19, no.1, 2025, bece 1931 dents’ personal factors. (ii) in the meantime, it is important to expand opportunities for in-service teachers to further elevate their education levels. source: contemporary teacher education, 2024; 17(3):67-76. can a growth mindset be successfully cultivated in adolescents? a threeyear longitudinal study of an intervention program in a rural school in china junfeng zhang, ruxian yun school of education, nanjing university, nanjing 210023, china abstract: in response to the debates on the effectiveness of growth mindset interventions and their applicability in various cultural contexts, the study applied a localized intervention program in a rural school in china’ yangtze river delta region through a randomized controlled experiment and evaluates its effects longitudinally using the difference-in-differences method. its research findings revealed that the localized growth mindset intervention program significantly strengthened the growth mindset of the subjects, that the intervention had long-term effects, that it had a greater positive effect on growth mindset development in younger students and those with lower initial levels of this mindset, and that the enhancement of the students’ growth mindset via the intervention program successfully improved their learning behavior. best evidence in chinese education 2025; 21(1):1993-1997 doi: 10.15354/bece.25.ar177 how to cite: zhang, j., & yun, r. (2025). can a growth mindset be successfully cultivated in adolescents? a three-year longitudinal study of an intervention program in a rural school in china. best evidence in chinese education, 2025, 21(1):1993-1997. keywords: growth mindset, intervention and follow-up, learning behavior, adolescent, china wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.21, no.1, 2025 1994 about the author: ruxian yu, school of education, nanjing university, nanjing 210023, china. e-mail: jssyyrx@163.com correspondence to: ruxian yu at nanjing university in china. conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2025 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:jssyyrx@163.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.21, no.1, 2025 1995 introduction rowth mindset cultivation has been deemed an effective strategy for assisting with adolescents’ mental development and unlocking their potential. nevertheless, recent years saw growing debates on the effectiveness of growth mindset interventions and their applicability in various cultural contexts, which has prompted consideration of cultural background, specific educational practices, and developmental characteristics of the individual in the development of growth mindset cultivation programs. this study is a longitudinal evaluation of a localized growth mindset intervention program with a sample of 340 upper-grade students at a rural primary school in china’s yangtze river delta region. using panel data, the difference-in-differences (did) method, and a mediation model, the study addresses three questions: (i) can the growth mindset be successfully fostered in adolescents? (ii) which adolescents benefit more from a growth mindset intervention? (iii) is fostering adolescents’ growth mindset beneficial for the improvement of their learning behavior? research design implementation of the experiment experimental subjects the subjects were fourth and sixth grade students from a rural primary school in jiangsu province. randomly selected were one fourth-grade class and one sixth-grade class as the control group, and another two classes of the same pattern as the experimental group. there were 171 students in the experimental group and 169 students in the control group. enactment of the experiment the experiment spanned three academic years: september 2021– june 2022, september 2022– june 2023, and september 2023– june 2024. prior to the intervention’s implementation, every student completed a background information questionnaire and the main questionnaire in september 2021 (t1). the research team implemented the intervention during the two semesters of the first academic year. follow-up investigations based on the main questionnaire were administered in the classroom at the following time points: december 2021 (t2), march 2022 (t3), june 2022 (t4), june 2023 (t5), and june 2024 (t6). g wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.21, no.1, 2025 1996 the intervention program to better align the intervention with the needs of chinese students, a classic growth mindset intervention program was adapted, incorporating dimensions of effort-valued culture, metacognitive strategies, and multifaceted evaluation, based on the characteristics of chinese students’ mindsets. the questionnaire the main questionnaire consists of four scales: implicit theory of intelligence (iti), peer praise (pp), self-confidence attitude attribute scale (saas), and academic motivation (am). estimation methods first off, a two-period did model was used to analyze the effectiveness of the intervention program in enhancing the students’ growth mindset. furthermore, multi-period did was employed to evaluate the long-term effects of the intervention, which is made possible by the study’s panel data. also, the quantile regression method was adopted to examine the intervention’s effects on students with varying initial levels of growth mindset. in addition, the study created a mediation model to determine the intervention’s effects in improving the students’ learning behavior. research findings first, the intervention program had significantly positive effects in enhancing the growth mindset levels of all subjects in the experimental group. the regression results remained consistent when variables, such as environmental factors (grade, class), personal factors (gender, urban or rural residence), and parental factors (parental occupation, parental highest education level), were incorporated respectively. second, students with younger ages and lower initial levels of growth mindset benefited more from the intervention. the program exhibited grade differences in its effects, affecting the fourth-grade subjects more greatly than the six-grade ones. also, there was an inverse correlation between the initial level of the subject and the intervention’s effects. the lower the subject’s initial level of growth mindset, the more effective the intervention was in enhancing it. this implies that growth mindset intervention can contribute to the mitigation of academic gaps in students. third, the intervention program showcased long-term effects in elevating the growth mindset levels in the subjects, particularly in the fourth graders, whose changes were evidenced by six-period data, which showed wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.21, no.1, 2025 1997 the intervention’s effects remained basically stable within the two years after its implementation, albeit with slight, but insignificant declines. lastly, heightening the subjects’ growth mindset via the intervention program significantly improved their learning behavior, including reducing negative motivations for learning, diluting the ability-based attribution, increasing process-focused inter-peer feedback, and reinforcing the effortbased attribution. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of east china normal university (educational sciences), 2025; 43(04): 53-69. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 张军凤 云如先 (2025). 青少年的成长型思维可以有效培养吗?——基于一所农村学校为期三年的 干预追踪调查. 华东师范大学学报（教育科学版）, 43(04): 53-69. received: june 24, 2025 revised: august 11, 2025 accepted: september 04, 2025 how adolescents’ family socioeconomic status affects their career preparation: the mediating effect of social and emotional skills haili cui shanghai jiao tong university, shanghai 200240, china abstract: drawing on data of 15-year-old chinese students from the second round of the oecd survey on social and emotional skills in 2023, this study examines the relationship between family socioeconomic status and career preparation (including exploring the future, experiencing the future, and thinking about the future) in teenagers, as well as the mediating effect of social and emotional skills of the individual on this relationship. the results reveal that the adolescent’s family socioeconomic status not only directly influences their career preparation but also exerts an indirect effect via their social and emotional skills, particularly those in the domains of open-mindedness, task performance, and collaboration. best evidence in chinese education 2025; 21(2):2039-2043 doi: 10.15354/bece.25.ar182 how to cite: cui, h. (2025). how adolescents’ family socioeconomic status affects their career preparation: the mediating effect of social and emotional skills. best evidence in chinese education, 2025, 21(2):2039-2043. keywords: career preparation, family socioeconomic status, social and emotional skills cui. (china) family ses and teen career prep: the role of social-emotional skills. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2040 about the author: haili cui, school of education, shanghai jiao tong university, shanghai 200240, china. email: hlcui@sjtu.edu.cn correspondence to: haili cui at shanghai jiao tong university in china. conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2025 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. introduction dolescents are at a critical stage of life, experiencing a transition from childhood to adulthood, and begin to develop the awareness of career readiness. identifying the factors that influence adolescents’ career readiness is crucial for parents’ and educators’ efforts to a mailto:hlcui@sjtu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ cui. (china) family ses and teen career prep: the role of social-emotional skills. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2041 prepare them fully for the future work life. using data of 15-year-old chinese students, from the second round of the oecd survey on social and emotional skills (sses) in 2023, this study examines the influences of students’ family socioeconomic status (ses) and social and emotional skills (across five major domains) on their career preparation and analyzes the role of social and emotional skills in mediating the relationship between family ses and career preparation in adolescents. data and methods data and variables the study’s research subjects include 3,283 students aged 15 from jinan city, china, who participated in the sses 2023. they were the third-year students at middle schools and the first-year students at high schools and vocational high schools, distributed across 42 junior secondary schools, 26 general senior secondary schools, and 7 secondary vocational schools. classified into three thematic areas, namely, exploring the future, experiencing the future, and thinking about the future, student career preparation activities are the dependent variables in the study. student family ses is the independent variable. the oecd’s student questionnaire gathered information on the highest education level of the participant’s parents, their occupations, and family possessions (such as electronic devices, books, rooms, internet connection, and cars). principal component analysis is used to synthesize these variables into a continuous variable, i.e., student family ses, with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. student social and emotional skills are the mediating variable. the student questionnaire measured social and emotional skills in five domains, namely task performance (selfcontrol, responsibility, perseverance, achievement motivation), emotional regulation (stress resistance, optimism, emotional control), open-mindedness (curiosity, creativity, tolerance), collaboration (empathy, trust), and engaging with others (energy, sociability, assertiveness). in addition, personal characteristics of the student, including gender, migration status, academic performance, and the school attended, are the control variables. analytical methods first analyzed were the correlations between student family ses, social and emotional skills in five domains, and career preparation activities. after that, the statistical software stata 17.0 was used to conduct stepwise regression analysis and bootstrap mediation effect testing to estimate the mediating effects of social and emotional skills on the relationship between family ses and career preparation in the subjects. cui. (china) family ses and teen career prep: the role of social-emotional skills. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2042 research findings there were statistically significant positive correlations between student family ses, social and emotional skills, and career preparation. first, the positive correlations between student family ses and career preparation in all three dimensions indicate that students with higher family ses tend to engage more in exploring and experiencing the future and have higher educational aspirations. second, the positive correlations between student family ses and social and emotional skills in all five domains suggest students with higher family ses typically possess higher levels of social and emotional skills. third, those between student social and emotional skills and career preparation demonstrate that students with higher average scores in social and emotional skills have more desirable performance in “exploring the future,” “experiencing the future,” and “thinking about the future.” students’ social and emotional skills significantly mediated the relationship between their ses and career preparation, with skills in the domains of open-mindedness, task performance, and engaging with others exerting partial mediation effects. furthermore, the mediating effects identified varied across different domains of skills. for the relationship between student family ses and “exploring the future,” the mediating effects of open-mindedness, task performance, emotional regulation, engaging with others, and collaboration made up 26.9%, 15.7%, 10.5%, 10.1%, and 2.8% of the total effect, respectively, in the order of strength. for the relationship between student family ses and “experiencing the future,” the figures were 22.1% (open-mindedness), 18.7% (social interaction), 10.6% (task performance), 7.4% (emotional regulation), and 2.6% (collaboration). on that between student family ses and “thinking about the future,” open-mindedness, engaging with others, and task performance had relatively stronger mediating effects than the other two domains. the chinese version of this article has been published in journal of research in educational development, 2025; 45 (08): 76-84. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. cui. (china) family ses and teen career prep: the role of social-emotional skills. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2043 崔海丽. (2025). 家庭背景如何影响青少年的职业生涯准备—社会与情感能力的中介作用. 教育发 展研究, 45 (08): 76-84. received: august 17, 2025 revised: september 30, 2025 accepted: october 03, 2025 bece. newsletter vol.20, no.2, 2025, bece 1985 the relationship between the remigration age and academic adjustment in remigrant children: an empirical study based on a survey in six counties in china by wang, c., yan, j., & cheng, y. correspondence to: yongzhou cheng, sanxia university, china. e-mail: 85600855@qq.com he study is based on a field survey of junior and senior secondary school students as remigrant children in six counties in hubei, guangdong, and yunnan provinces, who had lived outside their home places at younger ages with their migrant worker parents, using the cluster sampling method. it aims to examine the relationship between the remigration age and academic adjustment in this group, employing the ols regression, quantile regression, and mediation effect models. research findings: • there was a negative correlation between the remigration age and academic adjustment in remigrant children. their academic adaptability did not improve as their remigration durations prolonged. • the negative impact of the remigration age was significant among children with prior moderate and above levels of academic adjustment but insignificant among those with prior low levels of academic adjustment. • the remigration age of the children not only directly and negatively predicted their academic adjustment but was also indirectly related to it via the mediation effect of their willingness of returning to home places. the implications of the study include that the barriers to migrant children’s schooling outside their home places should be eliminated, that the migrant worker family needs to make legitimate decisions on remigration, and that local governments and schools should formulate inclusive programs for remigrant child education. source: education & economy, 2025; 41(01):70-77. t impact of pet companionship on student development: a meta-analysis peixuan li, jijun yao, yifan xu, fangru zhou nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china abstract: animal companionship has been found to have a positive influence on human well-being, and the presence of pets can have a subtle yet significant impact on the healthy development of students. pet companionship takes various forms across different fields in china and other regions worldwide, and the impact of such companionship remains uncertain. hence, it is imperative to investigate the impact of diverse forms of companionship and animals on multiple facets of student growth and development. this study employed meta-analysis methodologies to examine 47 effect sizes derived from 12 domestic and international studies on pet companionship. the aim was to investigate the overall trends of the influence of pet companionship on student development as well as the effects of diverse types of companionship and pets on different aspects of student development, including physical and mental health, social-emotional abilities, and academic performance. the objective was to enhance the exploration of approaches for maximizing the utilization of various forms of pet companionship. furthermore, this research suggests a systematic and incremental approach to enhancing the function of pets within households, educational institutions, and medical facilities. adequate content and organization are essential for scientific advancement and the development of students. in this particular context, it is possible to optimize the impact of pet companionship on the development of students. best evidence in chinese education 2023; 14(1):1727-1743. doi: 10.15354/bece.23.or077 how to cite: li, p., yao, j., xu, y., & zhou, f. (2023). impact of pet companionship on student development: a meta-analysis. best evidence in chinese education, 14(1):1727-1743. keywords: pet companionship, student development, meta-analysis li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no.1, 2023 1728 about the authors: peixuan li, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china. e-mail: pxli_edu@163.com yifan xu, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china. e-mail: nnu_xuyifan@163.com fangru zhou, school of psychology, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china. e-mail: frzhou_psy@163.com correspondence to: jijun yao, school of educational science, nanjing normal university, nanjing 210024, china. e-mail: yaojijun_njnu@163.com finding: undergraduate talent training program of nanjing normal university, college students’ innovation and entrepreneurship competition of jiangsu province. conflict of interests: none. © 2023 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:pxli_edu@163.com mailto:nnu_xuyifan@163.com mailto:frzhou_psy@163.com mailto:yaojijun_njnu@163.com http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1729 introduction ets serve as companions to children in various ways, including by providing constant companionship at home, participating in animal-assisted classes at school, and engaging in animal-assisted therapy. they are valuable friends for students. however, there are certain opinions that challenge the efficacy of pet companionship. parents express concerns that the act of raising pets may have adverse effects on the physical well-being and socio-emotional growth of students, ultimately impeding their overall healthy development. furthermore, the adoption of pet companionship is confronted with various uncertainties and hazards, including but not limited to the potential harm that pets’ self-defense mechanisms may pose to infants and young children, gender-based discrepancies in attitudes towards pets among male and female students (bosacki & tardif-williams, 2019), and the adverse impact that inadequate pet raising and care by families may have on student growth and development. given the ambiguity surrounding the effects of pet companionship on student development, parents and society require empirical data to address inquiries pertaining to the potential benefits of pet companionship on student development, as well as the optimal type of pet companionship that may promote students’ holistic growth, in order to facilitate informed decision-making. this study employs a meta-analysis methodology to investigate the influence of pet companionship on student development, drawing on both domestic and international research on the subject. the study aims to examine the effects of various types of companionship and provide insights into the role of pet companionship in promoting healthy development among students in family, school, and medical contexts. literature review definitions of core concepts pet companionship the teenage period is a crucial life stage that has the potential to positively impact an individual’s lifelong physical health, learning behavior, and emotional well-being. additionally, pets can play an important role in adolescents’ learning, therapies, families, and overall quality of life. studies on the subject of pet companionship have been carried out in multiple countries, focusing mostly on three areas. the first is having pets in daily life. according to statistics, at least one pet is owned by 68% of us families (american pet products association, 2016) and 46% of uk families (pet food manufacturers association, 2016). according to epidemiological studies, families with children are more likely than other types of households to own pets (westgarth et al., 2010; melson, 2003). since most students spend their time at home, companion animals play a significant role in daily human interaction. the second is animal-assisted therapy, which dates back to the founding of the quaker rehabilitation center in the uk in 1792, where patients might p li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1730 feel joy and responsibility through the employment of animals in treatment plans (boris & gerald, 1997). animals act as co-therapists in animal-assisted therapy, collaborating with medical professionals to establish a secure therapeutic environment that treats hospitalized children with serious illnesses by lowering their anxiety (lang et al., 2010). the third is bringing dogs into the classroom. human-animal interaction (hai) social support theory contends that pets can be a source of comfort and safety for students, acting as transitional objects to ease pain and problematic behaviors (peter et al., 2002; triebenbacher, 1998). students’ stressful experiences at school can result in maladaptive behaviors in their homes and social lives. students may benefit from the motivation and education that come from having animals in the classroom. in contrast to other nations, pet companionship has recently gained popularity in china. people’s spiritual and material worlds have increasingly become richer as china’s economic development and urbanization intensify. pets are deeply involved in different parts of students’ lives in such a setting. according to huang qin, young students’ attachment to dogs can help them cope with loneliness (huang, 2009). meanwhile, wang jiaojiao and her colleagues work on dog-assisted intervention in reading for special education children, employing methodologies like one-on-one reading and dialogue-based reading (wang et al., 2020). however, there is still a scarcity of research in this sector in china, and some parents fear that having a pet interferes with their child’s growth. the present study delineates the notion of pet companionship as a tripartite construct encompassing the following components: cohabitation in daily routines, animal-assisted therapy, and academic accompaniment. the assessment of students’ social adaptation, physical health, and learning ability constitutes the measurement of these three distinct dimensions. student development in mingyuan gu’s (1998) education dictionary, “development” is defined as a persistent and irreversible change in cognition, personality, physical condition, and socialization that occurs over the course of an individual’s entire existence. in the context of education, student development theory is an extension of human development theory. education, whose primary purpose is to cultivate individuals, encompasses a variety of activities that contribute to the formation and development of knowledge, abilities, physical and mental health, and ideological and moral qualities. the level of a student’s physical and mental health is the basis of their development. individuals who are physically and mentally healthy actively experience positive emotions such as happiness, have excellent social adaptability, and are able to realize their full potential. they are vital and capable of contributing to society (liu, 2001). studies have indicated that in certain nations and regions, the development of comprehensive abilities has consistently placed emphasis on knowledge acquisition as a key priority and a fundamental criterion for talent quality. in light of societal progress and its consequent transformations, it is insufficient to depend solely on the cognitive capacities of individuals to fulfill their developmental requisites (wang & tan, 1998). within this particular context, social-emotional competencies have garnered significant attention from the general public and have emerged as a central and focal point for deli et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1731 veloping talent in the 21st century. social-emotional skills pertain to the intrinsic attributes of individuals that are indicative of their personality traits. in contrast to academic achievement, there is a lack of consensus on the definition of social-emotional competencies. the framework for social-emotional skills developed by the oecd is the most commonly employed among the diverse definitions available. the framework is founded upon the big five personality traits, encompassing five distinct dimensions, namely task performance, emotional regulation, collaboration, open-mindedness, and interactions with others. the aforementioned domains provide a systematic summary of the trajectory of non-cognitive skill development in students. in china, there was a time when academic performance was the primary measure of student development, and the concept of holistic student development was not given much consideration. this lack of understanding at the practical level of education has led to intense competition, which is not conducive to the establishment of a positive educational environment. the demand for the incorporation of non-cognitive factors and the advancement of holistic student development has been on the rise. in light of this context, the chinese government has released a series of official papers aimed at advancing the reform of enhancing the comprehensive competencies of students. in 2021, a set of guidelines was implemented to alleviate the onerous workload of compulsory education students, including the double reduction policy, with the aim of mitigating the burden on students and fostering their holistic growth. this study categorizes student development into the growth of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities based on physical and mental health, depending on the aforementioned analyses. non-cognitive abilities are assessed using the oecd framework of social-emotional skills, which includes self-control, emotional control, sociability, selfefficacy, and other abilities in social-emotional domains. cognitive abilities are assessed by students’ learning capacity and academic performance. the impact of pet companionship on student development the impact of pet companionship on student development has been extensively researched, yielding varying conclusions. on the bright side, there are studies that show how having a pet can positively impact student development. interacting with animals in settings like home, school, or hospital can have a positive impact on students’ emotional regulation, empathy, and stress relief, according to research by anderson et al. (2006), chubak et al. (2017), and paul & serpell (1996). it’s great to see that animal-assisted education has become increasingly popular in recent years. this approach has been shown to have many positive effects on students, including the development of empathy, stress reduction, positive emotional development, stronger classroom cohesion, increased pro-social behavior, and fostering better attitudes toward learning (brelsford et al., 2017; nancy et al., 2017). this is a promising trend that can benefit students in many ways. it’s great to know that early pet ownership can potentially reduce the risk of allergies and asthma in students, according to studies. it’s great to know that exposure to pets in the first year of life can lower the risk of allergic rhinitis at age 7-9 and asthma at age 12–13 (hesselmar, 1999). li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1732 in hospital settings, the presence of animals can help alleviate pain during medical procedures and make hospitalization easier for pediatric patients (hoffmann et al., 2009). conversely, alternative evidence suggests that the companionship of pets may not be advantageous or may even have adverse effects on the growth and progress of students. salo et al. (2004) conducted research on chinese adolescents and revealed a higher incidence of persistent coughing in households that owned cats and dogs, particularly among children under the age of six. a study conducted on bulgarian students aged 2–8 years revealed a favorable association between the existence of cats or dogs in their households during birth and their present-day susceptibility to asthma, rhinitis, and eczema, as reported by naydenov et al. (2008). pets have the potential to elevate the concentration of airborne allergens, thereby amplifying the susceptibility to allergic respiratory ailments such as asthma. therefore, it can be argued that the effects of pet companionship on student development are ambiguous. this uncertainty is largely attributable to multiple factors. in other words, other factors moderate the effect of pet companionship on student development. based on this, this study used cma 3.0 to conduct a comprehensive metaanalysis of domestic and international studies on pet companionship and student development in order to identify the general patterns of the effect of pet companionship on students’ physical and mental development. research process literature retrieval meta-analysis is a secondary analysis that re-analyses the findings by incorporating data from the extant literature (zeng & yao, 2020). the following keywords are crucial to the literature search: “pet raising,” “student development,” “physical health,” “mental health,” “higher order thinking skills,” “social emotion,” “animal assisted therapy,” “school,” and “study” on various databases like the china national knowledge infrastructure (cnki), the web of science, springerlink, and google scholar. after retrieving 7,127 pertinent studies, 12 were ultimately added to produce 47 effect sizes (figure 1). literature inclusion criteria meta-analyses require consistent inclusion criteria to retrieve and screen studies related to a particular topic and then to construct a literature pool that satisfies the requirements of the research topic and meta-analysis in order to support subsequent research. in order to better select relevant literature for this study, it was necessary to first define pet companionship and the research topic. this study defines pet companionship as activities in which pets accompany humans, such as the raising of pets at home, the incorporation of pets in the classroom, and animal-assisted therapy. the focus of this study is the influence of pet companionship on student development, and the intervention is whether or not pet companionship will be utilized. the target audience consists of students younger than 18 years of age. on this basis, the following inclusion criteria were developed: li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1733 figure 1. literature screening process. definition of pet companionship, research topic, research subjects, literature characteristics, and statistical requirements for the meta-analysis. i. the study’s intervention measures are pet companionship or animal-assisted therapy, and the target population is students under the age of 18. ii. the research findings should pertain to student development, including aspects such as academic achievement, physical and mental health treatment, motor skills, and the enhancement of social and emotional skills. iii. for the purpose of this study’s timeliness, the included studies must have been published between 2000 and 2021, regardless of form, in chinese or english. iv. the design of the study should be experimental or quasi-experimental, with experimental and control groups. the sample size for large-scale survey reports should be greater than 250. v. the sample sizes of the experimental and control groups should be comparable to prevent biases resulting from a significant difference between the two categories of groups. vi. to calculate effect sizes, the study should provide information such as the mean, standard deviation, sample size, t-value, and p-value. vii. pretest differences should not be excessively large, and the effect size d should not exceed 0.5. li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1734 literature coding as previously stated, a meta-analysis is a statistical technique that involves synthesizing an extensive body of literature, albeit with inherent heterogeneity across various studies. consequently, it is imperative to encode the pertinent research for subsequent examination, and the precise codes are explained as follows: i. type of literature: journals are coded as q, whereas other types are coded as x. ii. type of pet companionship: home pet ownership is recorded as fam, whereas animal-assisted therapy, animal-assisted education, multifaceted content, and unreported are coded as aat, edu, mix, and un, respectively. iii. type of output: academic ability is coded as study, social skills are coded as social skill, physical health is coded as physical health, mental health is coded as mental health, and other elements are coded as other. iv. type of companion animal: dogs are coded as dog, horses as horse, mixed animal species are coded as mix, and unreported animals are coded as un. v. gender: males are coded as m, females as f, males and females together are coded as mix, and those who were not reported are coded as un. vi. students at risk: students who have a low health level are coded as pd, those who have behavioral issues (such as truancy, violence, etc.) are coded as bd, those who have both of the aforementioned issues are coded as mix, and those who have not been reported are coded as un. vii. length of research: research that is not less than 12 weeks in length is coded as > 12, less than 12 weeks in length is coded as < 12, and not reported is coded as unreported. viii. intervention intensity: low (≤ 30 minutes per week), medium (30-75 minutes per week), or high (> 75 minutes per week). according to the literature, the precise information should be written down, and the unreported data is coded as unreported. ix. age group: pre-adolescent years (6-12) are coded as preadolescence, adolescence (13–18) is coded as adolescence, and a combination of various stages is coded as mix, in accordance with the age distribution in established studies and the typical developmental model proposed by broderick and blewitt (2003). x. sample size: studies with sample sizes of less than 100, between 100 and 250, and greater than 250 are coded as < 100, 100-250, and > 250, respectively. research results and analysis heterogeneity testing although there is heterogeneity among different studies, a meta-analysis provides an opportunity to integrate a large body of literature and gain valuable insights. there are several effective methods for conducting heterogeneity tests, such as the q statistic, h statistic, and i 2 values. this study successfully utilized the q statistic and i 2 values to analyze the heterogeneity between the studies (zeng & yao, 2020). the q statistic showed that there is some heterogeneity among the samples (q = 80.563, p < 0.001), but the i 2 values indicate that it is only moderate (i 2 = 42.902). li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1735 table 1. margaret coding table. literature companionship type doc typ e output type animal gender age sample size students in crisis program length intervention intensity amy, 2017a aat q mental dog mix mix <100 pd <12 low amy, 2017b aat q mental dog mix mix <100 pd <12 low amy, 2017c aat q mental dog mix mix <100 pd <12 low andrea, 2013b edu q mental dog mix preadolescence <100 un >12 high andrea, 2013c edu q mental dog mix preadolescence <100 un >12 high andrea, 2013d edu q behavior dog mix preadolescence <100 un >12 high andrea, 2013e edu q behavior dog mix preadolescence <100 un >12 high andrea, 2013f edu q behavior dog mix preadolescence <100 un >12 high andrea, 2013g edu q mental dog mix preadolescence <100 un >12 high anne, 2015 fam q mental dog mix preadolescence >250 un un un carie, 2009a aat q physical dog mix mix <100 pd <12 low carie, 2009b aat q physical dog mix mix <100 pd <12 low carie, 2009c aat q physical dog mix mix <100 pd <12 low carie, 2009d aat q physical dog mix mix <100 pd <12 low carie, 2009e aat q physical dog mix mix <100 pd <12 low cristiano, 2021 edu q mental dog mix preadolescence <100 un <12 high deborah, 2017 edu q study dog mix preadolescence <100 un <12 medium davis, 2009a aat q mental horse mix mix <100 pd <12 medium davis, 2009b aat q mental horse mix mix <100 pd <12 medium davis, 2009c aat q mental horse mix mix <100 pd <12 medium davis, 2009d aat q mental horse mix mix <100 pd <12 medium davis, 2009e aat q mental horse mix mix <100 pd <12 medium davis, 2009f aat q mental horse mix mix <100 pd <12 medium davis, 2009g aat q mental horse mix mix <100 pd <12 medium edward, 2017a edu q study dog mix preadolescence <100 un <12 medium edward, 2017b edu q study dog mix preadolescence <100 un <12 medium edward, 2017c edu q study dog mix preadolescence <100 un <12 medium edward, 2017d edu q study dog mix preadolescence <100 un <12 medium christian, 2012a fam q physical dog m preadolescence >250 un un un christian, 2012b fam q physical dog m preadolescence >250 un un un christian, 2012c fam q physical dog f preadolescence >250 un un un christian, 2012d fam q physical dog f preadolescence >250 un un un christian, 2012e fam q behavior dog m preadolescence >250 un un un christian, 2012f fam q behavior dog f preadolescence >250 un un un christian, 2012g fam q behavior dog m preadolescence >250 un un un christian, 2012h fam q behavior dog f preadolescence >250 un un un javascript:; javascript:; li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1736 jessa, 2016a fam q mental dog mix adolescence >250 un un un jessa, 2016b fam q mental dog mix adolescence >250 un un un jessa, 2016c fam q mental dog mix adolescence >250 un un un julie, 2008a edu q behavior dog mix preadolescence >250 bd <12 middle maria, 2016a aat q mental dog mix mix <100 mix >12 low maria, 2016c aat q social skill dog mix mix <100 mix >12 low marta, 2017a fam q mental dog mix adolescence >250 un un un megan, 2021 fam q mental mix mix mix 100250 un un un shu li, 2016a fam q physical mix male mix >250 un un un shu li, 2016b fam q physical mix f mix >250 un un un table 2. overall effect size and heterogeneity testing results of the impact of pet companionship on students’ development. k q i² (%) es 95%ci p-value fixed-effect model 47 80.563 (p = 0.001) 42.902 0.222 0.189 0.256 0.000 random-effect model 47 0.237 0.183 0.291 0.000 analysis of the effects of pet companionship on student development the heterogeneity test results revealed that the samples in this study had a modest amount of heterogeneity. table 1 displays the results of the study using the fixed-effect model, with a combined effect size of 0.222 (p < 0.05), and table 2 displays the results using the random-effect model, with a combined effect size of 0.237 (p < 0.05). cohen defines small, medium, and high impact sizes, respectively, as 0.2, 0.5, and 0.8. therefore, having a pet as company has a minor but distinctly positive effect on students’ growth. analysis of the moderating effects as mentioned previously, the samples in this study were heterogeneous (q = 80.563, p < 0.001), which may be closely related to the type of pet, the type of pet companionship, and the diverse backgrounds of the participants. in order to identify the origins of heterogeneity, it was necessary to assess the moderating effects in this study. based on the results of the random-effect model analysis and the subgroup analysis, this study investigated the origins of heterogeneity in pet companionship at both the individual and research project levels. li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1737 as previously stated, student growth is primarily represented in physical health, mental health, academic output, social-emotional abilities, and behavior. table 3 shows the results of an in-depth analysis of the types and forms of student development outputs undertaken in this study to investigate the unique effects of pet companionship on student development. pet companionship has a significant favorable impact on academic output (d = 0.098, p = 0.667), physical health (d = 0.199, p < 0.001), mental health (d = 0.259, p < 0.001), and behavioral performance (d = 0.244, p = 0.018), but the effect sizes are small. pet companionship has a medium impact size and has a considerable beneficial influence on social-emotional skills (d = 0.595, p < 0.001). the findings indicate that pet companionship improves students’ academic achievement while also encouraging physical and mental health as well as behavioral performance, and it plays an important role in strengthening students’ social-emotional abilities. previous research has focused on the effects of pet companionship on students’ physical health rather than the development of social-emotional abilities, according to the current study. some of the studies included in this investigation did not report potential influencing factors such as participants’ families’ economic situation and the gap between times of pet companionship, resulting in the loss of some sources of heterogeneity in this study. as indicated in table 4, characteristics including participant gender, age, and physical and mental health may contribute to heterogeneity at the individual level. the beneficial effect on male participants among teenagers (d = 0.189, p < 0.001) is marginally bigger than that on female participants (d = 0.152, p < 0.001). participants who are preadolescent (d = 0.280, p < 0.001) and adolescent (d = 0.205, p < 0.001) in age do not experience any negative effects from pet companionship. in particular, it has a modest effect on preschool participants and a large favorable effect with relatively moderate effect sizes on preadolescent and adolescent participants. the strongest effect of pet companionship is on elementary school kids (d = 0.399), with a small effect size in the preadolescent period, whereas the poorest effect is on secondary school students (d = 0.099). regarding the hazards that teenagers face, pet companionship has a statistically significant favorable effect on students who are at health risk (d = 0.215, p < 0.001) and behavioral risk (d = 0.717, p < 0.001). pet companionship also has a good impact on children who are at risk for both physical and mental health, with an effect size of 0.207. the effects on students with behavioral risk and mental health crises are medium. as demonstrated in table 5, heterogeneity at the research project level may be related to elements like the kind of pet, the kind of pet partner, and the degree of the intervention. horses, a common form of pet, have a beneficial impact on participants and have an effect size that is statistically significant (d = 0.344, p < 0.001), although dogs and other pets similarly significantly improve student development but with smaller effect sizes (d = 0.239, p < 0.001). animal-assisted therapy, animal-assisted education, and pet companionship at home all had substantial benefits on various aspects of pet companionship; the corresponding effect sizes are 0.215, 0.385, and 0.202, with animal-assisted education surpassing the other two. low-intensity interventions (d = 0.245, p = 0.005), medium-intensity interventions (d = 0.259, p < 0.001), and highintensity interventions (d = 0.345, p < 0.001) all significantly affect student development, and the effect is stronger as the intensity rises. this study also examined the moderating effects of literature type, sample size, and the period of publication in order to further understand how the characteristics of li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1738 table 3. analysis of heterogeneity of student development output types. k q es 95% ci p type of output physical 12 3.245 (p = 0.518) 0.199 0.143 0.256 0.000 mental 21 0.259 0.186 0.332 0.000 social skill 5 0.595 -0.038 1.228 0.000 behavior 8 0.244 0.042 0.446 0.018 study 5 0.098 -0.362 0.558 0.677 table 4. analysis of heterogeneity at the individual level. k q es 95% ci p at-risk students pd 15 35.766 (p < 0.001) 0.203 0.075 0.330 0.001 hd 1 0.717 0.555 0.880 0.000 mix 3 0.319 -0.043 0.680 0.084 un 28 0.207 0.159 0.246 0.000 age pre-adolescence 22 0.858 (p = 0.651) 0.262 0.153 0.371 0.000 adolescence 5 0.205 0.145 0.266 0.000 mix 20 0.208 0.139 0.277 0.000 gender f 5 q=9.828 (p = 0.007) 0.152 0.086 0.218 0.000 m 7 0.189 0.121 0.258 0.000 mix 53 0.291 0.208 0.374 0.000 table 5. analysis of heterogeneity at the project level. k q es 95% ci p type of pet companionship aat 18 3.021 (p = 0.221) 0.215 0.095 0.336 0.000 edu 13 0.373 0.185 0.585 0.000 fam 16 0.195 0.153 0.251 0.000 pet breeds dog 37 0.276 (p = 0.871) 0.243 0.175 0.312 0.000 horse 7 0.200 0.023 0.376 0.026 mix 3 0.224 0.144 0.303 0.000 intervention intensity low 10 1.844 (p = 0.605) 0.245 0.074 0.416 0.005 middle 14 0.259 0.066 0.453 0.000 high 7 0.345 0.119 0.571 0.000 un 16 0.202 0.153 0.251 0.000 li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1739 table 6. heterogeneity analysis of literature characteristics and study characteristics. k q es 95% ci p sample size <100 30 0.897 (p = 0.639) 0.243 0.142 0.344 0.000 100-250 1 0.341 0.131 0.551 0.001 >250 19 0.233 0.158 0.308 0.000 figure 2. funnel plot of standard error by std diff in means. the literature and studies may also be significant factors affecting heterogeneity. the outcomes are displayed in table 6. since all of the included studies were journal articles, this study did not examine them. in terms of sample size, medium sample sizes (100-250 samples) have the largest effect sizes (d = 0.341), followed by small sample sizes (< 100 samples) (d = 0.243), and big sample sizes (> 250 samples) (d = 0.233). both small and large sample sizes have non-significant effect sizes. robustness testing publication bias publication bias indicates that the studies included in the meta-analysis are the result of journal selection, and this selective bias typically results in positive meta-analysis results. consequently, it is essential to evaluate the scientific validity of the results. this li et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1740 study used funnel plots and egger’s regression coefficient to assess the results of a meta-analysis, as these are common methods for evaluating meta-analysis results. the funnel plot for this study is depicted in figure 2, which is approximately symmetrical, and the effect sizes of the study samples are primarily concentrated in the middle and upper effective areas of the funnel plot. the egger’s regression coefficient indicates an insignificant egger test result (t = 0.71642, p1 = 0.23872, p2 = 0.47744 > 0.01) and, consequently, a low probability of publication bias in this investigation. sensitivity analysis in this study, the fail-safe n was 1,463 (α = 0.05, p < 0.000), indicating that 2,622 additional studies would be required to render the results non-significant or to refute the conclusions. as a result, the findings of the study were relatively robust. discussion throughout the course of human history, animals have served as valuable aides, confidants, and associates, with such companionship being prevalent across various global societies. currently, cats and dogs have emerged as the most popular domesticated animals. several studies have indicated that the presence of pets can potentially augment the physical and psychological well-being of individuals, particularly adolescent students, and foster their social aptitude. however, a counterargument posits that pets may exacerbate the ailments of adolescent students. hence, there is an exigent requirement for pertinent evidence to address the crucial inquiry of whether the companionship of pets fosters the physical and psychological growth of students. furthermore, given the significance of pet companionship in facilitating school education and hospital treatment, it is imperative for educational institutions and healthcare facilities to comprehend the specific attributes of pet companionship that can enhance the physical and mental growth of students. this understanding is crucial for the optimization of animalassisted therapy and animal-assisted education. this study employed meta-analysis techniques to examine the impact of pet companionship interventions on the development of adolescent students. specifically, the study analyzed 12 studies to identify general patterns and test the effectiveness of various types of pet companionship. the findings may contribute to the optimization of animal-assisted therapy, animal-assisted education, and pet companionship in domestic settings. the findings of this study suggest that the presence of pets has a noteworthy and favorable influence on the physical health (d = 0.199, p < 0.001), mental health (d = 0.259, p < 0.001), and social-emotional skills (d = 0.595, p < 0.001) of students. furthermore, its positive impact on social-emotional skills surpasses that of physical and mental health. the study suggests that the effect on academic development is not statistically significant (d = 0.098, p = 0.677). regarding the category of animal companions, research indicates that the association between students and horses and dogs as pets yields more substantial outcomes, with effect sizes of 0.200 and 0.243, respectively that are statistically significant. regarding the category of animal companionship, animalassisted therapy, animal-assisted education, and domestic pet companionship have notable impacts, exhibiting effect sizes of 0.215, 0.373, and 0.195, respectively. the findli et al. (nanjing, china). pet companionship and student development. bece, vol.14, no. 1, 2023 1741 ings of this study exhibit conformity with certain assessments of the association between humans and pets conducted in other nations. notwithstanding the uniformity of the impact’s orientation, the magnitudes of the effects observed in this study deviate from those reported by certain researchers. this study places a greater emphasis on china’s present circumstances within the chinese context in comparison to other meta-analyses on pet companionship conducted in other nations. hence, the outcomes of this investigation hold greater significance for the advancement of pet companionship within the educational and medical domains in the current phase of china. additionally, they are crucial for the enhancement of pet companionship in the entire country. conclusions and suggestions the present study employed meta-analytic procedures to scrutinize the phenomenon of pet companionship across a total of 12 studies, with the aim of examining the impact of such companionship on the physical health, mental health, and social-emotional competencies of students. this study conducted an analysis of the sources of heterogeneity present in the individual-level and research project-level studies that were included in the study. the findings indicate that (i) regarding the developmental stage, pet companionship has a better effect on preadolescent students than on adolescent students (d = 0.205); (ii) pet companionship has a significant positive effect on students with physical health risk (d = 0.203, p = 0.001) and behavioral risk (d = 0.717, p < 0.001), and the effect on those with behavioral risk is more significant and reaches a medium level; (iii) animals such as horses (d = 0.200) and dogs (d = 0.243) have significant positive effects on adolescent development; (iv) in terms of the type of pet companionship, animalassisted therapy, animal-assisted education, and pet companionship at home all have significant effects, with effect sizes of 0.296, 0.373, and 0.195, respectively; (v) in terms of intervention intensity, low intensity (d = 0.245, p = 0.005), medium intensity (d = 0.259, p < 0.001), and high intensity (d = 0.345, p < 0.001) all significantly promote student development; (vi) the effect sizes of medium sample sizes (100-250 samples) are the greatest (d = 0.341), and the effect sizes of small sample sizes (d = 0.243) and large sample sizes (d = 0.233) are small. the identification of overarching trends in the effects of pet companionship on the physical and mental development of students has the potential to enhance the efficacy of pet companionship in domestic settings, animal-assisted education in academic institutions, and pet-assisted therapy in clinical contexts. the analysis indicates that in china, when engaging in pet companionship, it is crucial to consider the physical and mental well-being, as well as the social-emotional growth, of individuals in order to enhance their holistic development. the significance of pets in facilitating the development of children should not be disregarded. furthermore, it is imperative to enhance the function of companion animals strategically and systematically in various settings, such as households, educational institutions, and medical facilities, when they are in the company of students. the appropriate content and organization of pet companionship are essential for both scientific advancements and the development of students. furthermore, the lack of proper planning in pet companionship can result in unanticipated outcomes. li et al. 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(2024). effectiveness of computer application in improving reading skills in chinese language and towards post-attitudes as home-based learning. best evidence in chinese education, 18(1):1875-1895. keywords: online learning, student engagement, educational technology, learning outcomes, remote education, home-based learning chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no.1, 2024 1876 about the author: ken nee chee, ts.dr., department of computing and digital technology, faculty of computing and meta-technology, universiti pendidikan sultan idris, 35900 tanjong malim, perak, malaysia. email: cheekennee@meta.upsi.edu.my correspondence to: ken nee chee at universiti pendidikan sultan idris in malaysia. conflict of interests: none. funding: no funding sources declared. ethics approval: ethical approval is not required for this research. ai declaration: the authors affirm that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2024 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:cheekennee@meta.upsi.edu.my http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1877 introduction eveloping strong reading skills forms the cornerstone of successful language acquisition. this is particularly true for languages like chinese, characterized by its unique logographic writing system and vast vocabulary. traditional classroom settings, however, can be limited by time constraints and the sheer volume of characters students must learn. these challenges are further amplified for learners in home-based environments, where access to qualified instructors and consistent guidance may be limited. additionally, the lack of peer interaction and structured learning routines can hinder motivation and engagement (wen, 2022). in recent years, educational landscapes worldwide have witnessed a surge in the adoption of technology-based learning tools. within the realm of language acquisition, computer-assisted language learning (call) applications have emerged as promising tools to enhance learning experiences. these interactive programs offer several advantages over traditional methods. firstly, call allows for personalized learning paths. learners can progress at their own pace, focusing on areas requiring additional attention. this is particularly beneficial for beginners in chinese, where mastering a large number of characters is crucial (lee & yeung, 2020). secondly, call programs often incorporate multimedia elements, including audio, video, and games, which can make learning more engaging and enjoyable (yang & kuo, 2020). this interactive nature has the potential to boost motivation and engagement, especially for students in a home environment where distractions may be greater (lahlali et al., 2023). the potential benefits of call extend beyond simply improving reading skills. studies suggest that technology-integrated learning environments can cultivate positive learning attitudes (parmaxi et al., 2013). the interactive nature of call programs, coupled with immediate feedback and rewards, can make learning more enjoyable and foster a sense of accomplishment (nawaz, 2022). additionally, call can promote self-directed learning, a valuable skill that can benefit students throughout their academic careers (zhang, 2020). despite the growing popularity of call applications, research investigating their effectiveness in improving reading skills and fostering positive learning attitudes amongst students learning chinese as a home-based language remains limited. while previous studies have explored the integration of various technologies, including call, mobile access, and web 2.0 tools, into the teaching and learning of chinese as a second language (csl) (lin et al., 2017), there is a need for more specific research on the impact of call in home settings (gong et al., 2020). much of the existing research focuses on csl education within china or foreign language environments (lyu & qi, 2020), with limited exploration of its application for heritage language learners in home environments (lahlali et al., 2023). this study aims to address this gap by examining the impact of computer applications on reading skills and learning attitudes of year 1 students in a single primary school learning chinese as a home-based language. by analyzing the effects of callintegrated teaching and learning methods, this research seeks to contribute valuable d chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1878 insights into the effectiveness of computer applications for enhancing reading skills and fostering positive attitudes towards learning chinese in a home-based environment. research question 1. is there a significant difference in chinese character reading skill achievement as shown in gain scores between the control group and the experimental group? 2. to what extent do students perceive the use of computer applications as beneficial in their learning of chinese? literature review the acquisition of strong reading skills is fundamental for successful language learning, particularly for a language like chinese with its unique writing system and vast vocabulary. mastery of chinese characters forms the bedrock of literacy, with each character composed of radicals (components) and strokes (wang et al., 2022). numerous studies highlight the importance of character recognition in learning chinese. kai-chee et al. (2018) suggests prioritizing character recognition for beginners, while hsu (2022) emphasizes the link between character recognition skills and overall reading competency. similarly, zhang et al. (2021) underlines the importance of understanding character structure for young learners. however, memorizing individual characters can be a daunting task. wang et al. (2021) suggested that focusing on the relationship between components within characters can be more effective. focusing on the relationship between components within characters can be more effective in fostering orthographic awareness, the ability to infer meaning and pronunciation based on character structure. studies have shown that chinese characters are often composed of subcharacter components that are semantically informative, and the internal semantic features of these components can provide additional information for character representation (wang et al., 2021). by decomposing chinese characters into components and modeling them as a graph structure, the azimuth relationship among subcharacter components can be preserved, allowing for the explicit modeling of component-level internal semantic features (leong et al., 2019). additionally, an improved statistical structure modeling method has been proposed to pick up all meaningful components in a character, effectively reflecting stroke relations and measuring the importance of relationships (yu et al., 2012). these approaches can help learners develop the ability to recognize and understand chinese characters more effectively (xu, 2017; lee et al., 2011). as students develop metalinguistic awareness, their understanding of characters becomes more nuanced, leading to improved efficiency (jiang, 2006). computer-assisted language learning (call) applications have the potential to support these learning approaches effectively. despite the promise of call, the majority of existing research focuses on individual character memorization through drills and exercises based on shape, stroke order, and meaning (chuang & ku, 2011). this approach falls short of exploiting the full potential of call in fostering deeper understanding of character structure. while a significant body of research investigates the use of technology for language learning, the focus is often on english vocabulary development (shadiev & yang, chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1879 2020). studies specifically exploring the use of ict in mandarin chinese learning and teaching remain relatively scarce. shadiev et al. (2017) found that research on using ict for chinese learning lagged behind that for english by a factor of 10, despite these languages being the world’s most spoken (ghanizadeh et al., 2015). this highlights the need for further research on technology-aided chinese language learning. previous studies have documented several benefits of call and cai (computer-assisted instruction). current instructional technology can personalize learning experiences, catering to individual student needs (shemshack et al., 2021). numerous studies have explored the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction (cai) in improving chinese reading skills. one study found that cai can be an effective means of addressing literacy deficits and achievement gaps, with kindergarten students who used a computer-adaptive reading program scoring significantly higher than those who used it less (nini & kong, 2021). another study conducted a quasi-experimental research and found that the use of smartphone applications in teaching chinese language reading skills improved students’ reading ability and motivation (shamir et al., 2023). additionally, a longitudinal study demonstrated that the use of an adaptive cai program had a lasting impact on young students’ literacy skills, with students who used the program outperforming those who did not, even one to two years after they stopped using it (chee et al., 2017). these findings suggest that cai, including computer-adaptive programs and smartphone applications, can be effective tools for improving chinese reading skills. similar positive effects of cai on young readers have been reported by other studies (e.g., cassady & smith 2004, 2005; hecht & close 2002; macaruso et al. 2006; van daal & reitsma 2000; cheung & slavin, 2011, macaruso & rodman, 2011). additionally, text-to-speech technology has been shown to benefit struggling readers by promoting reading fluency and comprehension (elkind et al., 1993; leong 1995; lundberg & olofsson 1993; elkind & elkind, 2007). researchers have also explored the potential of cai programs in directly improving reading comprehension strategies (e.g., kim et al., 2006; macarthur & haynes 1995). furthermore, call has been shown to be particularly effective in the teaching of chinese as a second language. the unified competition model suggests that optimizing training schemes can enhance l2 learning by fostering various protective factors zhang & macwhinney, 2023). in one study, training with familiar stimuli from the textbook and unfamiliar stimuli from novelty design were administered to two groups of learners. the results showed that training with novelty stimuli led to greater improvement for intermediate learners, while training with familiar stimuli was more effective for beginning learners (kan & loh, 2022). another study used drama conventions, such as still image and reader’s theater, to teach chinese literature to cal students. the findings indicated that students gained a deeper understanding of the text and could evaluate the behaviours of the characters critically (zhang, 2022). additionally, a study explored the usefulness of call-based communication in conjunction with instruction on learners’ l2 pragmatic development. the findings demonstrated that call coupled with teaching intervention had a long-term impact on learners’ pragmatic development (li, 2020). motivation and interaction with the target language are crucial aspects of successful language learning programs (narayana, 2023). studies by zhang and chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1880 macwhinney (2023) demonstrated positive learner attitudes and improved vocabulary acquisition in call environments compared to traditional methods. research focused on computer-assisted language learning (call) in chinese reading instruction has yielded positive results. studies have identified effective practices for call reading instruction, including the use of eye-tracking techniques to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying chinese reading (ke, 2020). additionally, the use of a computer aided chinese reading platform has been found to promote teaching strategies and improve students’ core literacy in chinese courses (zhang et al., 2022). these findings highlight the potential of call in enhancing reading instruction and literacy development in chinese as an additional language. however, it is important to acknowledge that effective call implementation necessitates a multifaceted approach. firstly, call programs must cater to diverse learning needs through differentiated instruction. gamification can engage beginners, while advanced learners benefit from advanced analysis tools and authentic materials (chua et al., 2021). secondly, teacher training is crucial for successful integration of technology in chinese language teaching. it ensures that computer-assisted language learning (call) supplements, rather than replaces, traditional teaching methods. data analysis from call programs can personalize instruction and identify areas for targeted support (anqi & yanqun, 2022). effective teacher training models are needed to develop the essential competencies of chinese as a foreign language (cfl) teaching excellence (bai, 2022). teachers should be treated as complete human beings and be prepared for learning, attach importance to professional writing, and build a learning community (meng, 2020). integration of content and language learning in teaching chinese culture to english majors requires strategic planning and reflective evaluation. it enhances language learning and content acquisition, providing learners with a meaningful context (saisai, 2023). primary and secondary chinese language teachers have training needs in skills involving chinese script, oral skills, teaching exceptional students, composition writing, ict and media for teaching, and alternative pedagogies. students’ main difficulties include word recognition, lack of interest/positive attitude/confidence, and hanyu pinyin (soh, 2016). finally, a balance between screen time and traditional activities is crucial. call programs should complement activities like discussions and character practice, potentially by providing discussion prompts or digital writing opportunities. this thoughtful integration of call fosters a dynamic learning environment that enhances student motivation, personalizes learning, and ultimately deepens understanding and appreciation of the chinese language (arundell et al., 2022). the challenges faced by learners in home-based environments further strengthen the case for call in chinese language acquisition. limited access to qualified instructors and consistent guidance can hinder progress (tang et al., 2021). additionally, the lack of peer interaction and structured learning routines can negatively impact motivation and engagement. call applications have the potential to address these challenges. firstly, call programs offer a structured learning environment that can supplement the lack of formal instruction in home settings. secondly, the interactive and engaging nature of call can help to maintain motivation and make learning more enjoyable, particularly for students who may struggle with distractions in a home environment (zhang, 2022). thirdly, some call programs incorporate elements of social interaction, allowing stuchee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1881 dents to connect with peers and instructors virtually, fostering a sense of community and collaboration. while research on call has yielded promising results, there is a significant gap in the literature exploring its effectiveness in improving reading skills and fostering positive attitudes amongst students learning chinese as a home-based language. the majority of studies focuses on call in classroom settings or explores english language learning (shadiev & yang, 2020). furthermore, existing research on call for chinese language acquisition often emphasizes character memorization drills rather than fostering a deeper understanding of character structure (chuang & ku, 2011). this present study aims to address this gap in the literature by examining the impact of call on reading skills and learning attitudes of year 1 students in a single primary school learning chinese as a home-based language. by analyzing the effects of call-integrated teaching and learning methods, this research seeks to contribute valuable insights into the effectiveness of computer applications for enhancing reading skills and fostering positive attitudes towards learning chinese in a home-based environment. method research design this quantitative investigation adopted a quasi-experimental design to examine the effectiveness of computer software in enhancing chinese language reading proficiency among primary school students. the primary aim was to evaluate the impact of digital tools on language acquisition, specifically assessing how an application designed to facilitate chinese reading skills influences students’ learning outcomes. to achieve this, the study utilized a structured quantitative questionnaire to gather data on students’ perceptions and engagement levels with the computer application dedicated to improving their reading capabilities. to ensure the validity of the findings, the research meticulously controlled for extraneous variables that could potentially affect the results, such as differences in teaching personnel, educational environment, and instructional materials. this control was achieved by maintaining uniformity in key aspects of the educational setting, including the employment of a single educator, the use of a consistent curriculum, and the operation within the same school premises for both the experimental and control groups. the experiment delineated two homogenous groups of students: the treatment group, which received instruction through remote learning sessions facilitated by the ‘learn chinese mandarin’ software as illustrated in figure 1, and the control group, which was taught using conventional methodologies, specifically through the deployment of powerpoint presentations for remote education. this quasi-experimental research was conducted within two classes at the same elementary school, with class selection being randomized to ensure methodological rigor. in the conventional instructional approach, detailed guidance on utilizing powerpoint presentations was provided. conversely, the experimental teaching strategy showcased the integration of a computer application ‘learn chinese 2008’ as illustrated in figure 2, highlighting a novel approach to language instruction. a singular educator supervised both groups, ensuring consistency in educational delivery. the curriculum chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1882 figure 1. learn chinese 2008 computer app’s interface. figure 2. student was using their computer application during the study was carried out. chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1883 was divided equally, allocating two sessions per week to traditional teaching methods and two sessions to the exploration of computer application-enhanced learning strategies, all within the framework of a home-based learning model. sampling in the present investigation, the researchers employed a convenience sampling strategy for the selection of the sample, a method often adopted owing to limitations related to time, resources, and financial constraints. the research participants consisted of 60 first-grade students from malaysia, with 30 students in the control group and 30 in the experimental group. these students were selected based on their enrollment in chinese language classes, ensuring a uniform baseline of language proficiency prior to the intervention. consequently, the representativeness of the selected sample in accurately mirroring the broader population characteristics is compromised. the scope of the study was confined to a singular elementary educational institution located in jenjarom, selangor, malaysia. therefore, the aggregate number of respondents encompassed within this study amounted to sixty pupils, distributed evenly between a control group and an experimental group, each comprising thirty students. instrument in the present study, the methodological approach involved the utilization of both a test and a questionnaire as primary instruments for data collection. initially, an oral pretest comprising 30 questions was conducted to establish baseline data prior to the initiation of the experimental intervention. this pretest was designed to assess the subjects’ competencies relevant to the study’s focus. upon the conclusion of the intervention period, an oral post-test was administered, featuring questions randomly selected from the initial pretest to evaluate the efficacy of the therapeutic intervention. individual assessments of reading proficiency were conducted by an educator for each participant, with a designated duration of 20 minutes per assessment. subsequent to a one-month period of the investigation, both control and experimental groups were presented with a questionnaire employing a four-point likert scale to measure their perceptions and attitudes towards the intervention. the likert scale ranged from 4 (“strongly agree”) to 1 (“strongly disagree”), enabling a nuanced analysis of participant responses in relation to the study’s outcomes following the disclosure of test results. this methodological framework was carefully selected to ensure the reliability and validity of the data collected, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of the intervention’s impact on the participants. pilot study the study used a self-developed test and questionnaire, both rigorously designed for validity and reliability. test items derived from curriculum objectives were reviewed by experts, pilot-tested, and statistically analyzed, with revisions made based on item discrimination and difficulty. cronbach’s alpha assessed internal consistency. the questionnaire development included a literature review to identify relevant constructs, rechee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1884 finement by educational psychologists and teachers, pilot testing, and feedback collection. factor analysis confirmed construct validity, and cronbach’s alpha assessed reliability. these steps ensured the instruments were robust and valid for measuring the intended constructs. to ensure the relevance and alignment of the research questions with the objectives of the study, the researchers administered questionnaires to seasoned lecturers for evaluation, thereby assessing the content validity of the instrument. furthermore, to ascertain the reliability of the instrument, the researchers conducted an analysis of its cronbach’s alpha value, which was found to be 0.669. it is noteworthy that according to hatcher and stepanski (1994), cronbach’s alpha values as low as 0.66 are deemed acceptable within the realm of social sciences. procedure the procedure of the study is meticulously structured to assess the impact of integrating computer applications in enhancing chinese reading skills among participants. initially, participants are subjected to a pretest consisting of 30 questions in chinese (detailed in appendix a) to evaluate their baseline reading proficiency. subsequently, they engage with 30 vocabulary items from the year 1 chinese language syllabus, during which educators meticulously record each participant’s ability to accurately read and write the given vocabulary. following the intervention, a post-test comprising randomly ordered question is administered to measure the effectiveness of the treatment. educators then analyze the data to develop a formula aimed at assessing the feasibility of incorporating computer apps in teaching chinese characters to improve reading skills. additionally, participants complete a 10-question questionnaire to capture their perceptions and interest in using computer programs for reading enhancement. the final step involves a thorough evaluation of questionnaire responses by educators, aimed at drawing conclusions about the participants’ attitudes and interests towards the utilization of computer applications as a supportive tool in developing reading skills, thereby providing valuable insights into the pedagogical approach. the data collection was subject to rigorous analysis employing both frequency and percentage methodologies. the analytical procedures commenced with the administration of a preliminary test designed to evaluate any performance disparities between two distinct cohorts: the treatment group and the control group. this initial phase included a pretest wherein students were tasked with answering questions pertinent to the instructional content prior to the commencement of the teaching sessions. utilizing the mann-whitney u test to assess the outcomes of the oral pretest, the findings indicated no substantial variance between the groups (u = 450.000, p = 1.000). the experimental group demonstrated a median score of 7 with a range of 7, contrasted with the control group’s median score of 8 and a range of 6. consequently, the inference drawn was that student performance between the two classes did not significantly differ. subsequent analysis aimed at discerning the differential impact on achievement attributable to the two pedagogical strategies post-intervention. owing to the nonnormal distribution of gain scores within the control group and a breach of levene’s test assumption concerning homogeneity of variances—f(1,58) = .00, p = 1.00—a nonchee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1885 parametric approach was necessitated, thus the mann-whitney u test was once again employed to evaluate the disparities in scores between the preand post-tests. in addition to these methods, a questionnaire was disseminated to amass data pertinent to the investigation. prior to the analytical phase, the questionnaire underwent a validation process through a pilot study and was critically assessed by two subject matter experts to ascertain both its reliability and its alignment with the research objectives. the analysis of the questionnaire data was conducted using descriptive statistical techniques, with a focus on frequency, percentage, and median scores. the purpose was to evaluate the effectiveness of integrating computer programs into teaching and learning processes, specifically to enhance reading skills. for the data analysis, both spss version 26.0 and microsoft excel were utilized, facilitating a comprehensive examination of the data collected for the study. result in the pretest and posttest phases of the study, ten vocabulary items in chinese were employed to evaluate the participants’ performance in examinations. this evaluation involved tabulating the count of items each participant correctly answered within each group, followed by an assessment to ascertain if there were statistically significant median differences through the application of the mann-whitney u test. the application of the shapiro-wilk test for normality on the achievement scores of the control group yielded a value of 0.001, leading to the rejection of the hypothesis that the dataset follows a normal distribution. conversely, this study also incorporated a questionnaire designed to gauge the perspectives of students by soliciting their responses to ten inquiries. the primary aim of this segment was to explore the impact of computer applications on the enhancement of students’ reading proficiency in chinese. the questionnaire items were rated on a four-point likert scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” to measure the respondents’ reading aptitude for texts in chinese. the research methodology utilized median scores, frequency counts, and percentage distributions to analyze the influence of the respondents’ interest levels and their perceptions regarding the efficacy of computer applications on their proficiency in reading chinese language materials as indicated by their responses to the questionnaire items. differences of gain score between experimental group and control group in achievement test the mann-whitney u test was used to compare the median for the procurement of teaching reading chinese using a computer program to the traditional way (see table 1). the mann-whitney test revealed that the experimental group mastered reading chinese at a greater rate (mdn = 21.00) than the control group (mdn = 15.00), u = 450.0, p = 1.000. however, this result indicates that there are no significant differences in reading achievement scores between the control and experimental groups in the chinese language as indicated in figure 3 where the experimental group’s flagship has a higher chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1886 table 1: analysis of mann whitney test on gain score for experimental group and control group in achievement test. group n median u z p-value control 30 15.00 450.0 0.000 1.000 experimental 30 21.00 significant *p < 0.05. figure 3. boxplot shows comparison for gain score between control group and the experimental. median than the control group. in any case, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected: there are no significant changes in the median student accomplishment scores in chinese reading skills between students subjected to computer-assisted instruction and students exposed to traditional instruction. to clarify, the results suggest that there are few differences in gain score between the two groups, indicating that using a computer application that runs at home has no effect on students’ reading competency in chinese vocabulary when compared to a control group that received no intervention from the computer application. difference in learning attitudes between groups item 1 examines the level of interest in chinese culture among respondents. the findings show that 80 percent of both the control (24 respondents) and experimental (27 respondents) groups strongly agree (scale 4) with a keen interest in chinese culture. this outcome suggests an enhanced interest in chinese language subjects among the chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1887 experimental group participants, attributable to their engagement with the computer program. item 2 assesses the readiness of respondents to learn chinese subjects. a notable difference was observed, with 20 percent (6 respondents) in the control group and approximately 21 percent (21 respondents) in the experimental group selecting “highly agree” (scale 4). this indicates a significant increase, exceeding 15 individuals, in the experimental group’s readiness to learn chinese, likely as a consequence of their interaction with computer programs. item 3 concerns the level of attention devoted during chinese language instruction. sixty percent (18 respondents) of the control group and a slightly higher proportion in the experimental group (21 respondents) chose “highly agree” (scale 4). conversely, a lower level of agreement (scale 3) was noted among 40 percent of the control group and none in the experimental group, with a few experimental respondents (6 individuals) selecting “disagree” (scale 2). this suggests a potential increase in inattentiveness among students during chinese lessons when computer programs are used. item 4 explores the satisfaction derived from independently solving chineserelated problems. an increase of six respondents in the experimental group selecting “strongly agree” (scale 4) compared to the control group indicates that computerassisted teaching and learning methods enhance students’ satisfaction and their ability to develop proficiency in reading chinese. item 5 addresses the review of previously taught chinese concepts. a significant increase, with 15 additional respondents in the experimental group selecting “strongly agree” (scale 4), indicates a higher willingness and autonomy in reviewing chinese concepts among students exposed to computer applications. item 6 investigates the frequency of inquiries about chinese language challenges with teachers and peers. the data show that 50 percent of the control group (15 respondents) and a slightly higher proportion in the experimental group (18 respondents) strongly agree (scale 4) with engaging in such inquiries, suggesting that students in the experimental group are more proactive in seeking help. item 7 evaluates the extent to which students feel unafraid and not bored with chinese subjects. ninety percent of respondents in both control (27 respondents) and experimental (30 respondents) groups strongly agree (scale 4), highlighting a significant improvement and the effectiveness of the innovative instructional method in increasing interest and engagement through interactivity. item 8 investigates participants’ attitudes towards learning chinese, specifically regarding its perceived ease of comprehension. the experimental group, with an addition of three participants over the control group, displayed a marked improvement in positive reactions towards the language. this enhancement in positive sentiment underscores the efficacy of the intervention in fostering favorable attitudes towards chinese. item 9 addresses individuals’ confidence levels in engaging in verbal communication in chinese. again, the experimental group saw an increase of three participants compared to the control group, suggesting that innovative educational methods can significantly bolster learners’ confidence in speaking chinese. item 10 delves into the participants’ self-assessment of life achievements in correlation with their proficiency in chinese. a striking 90 percent of the control group (27 respondents) strongly agreed with feeling successful due to their chinese language chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1888 table 2: mean comparison based on students’ perceptions of reading skills of chinese language subjects for the control and experimental groups. number questionnaire item mean of control group mean of experimental group 1 i am very interested in the chinese subject. 3.8 3.9 2 my reading skill in chinese had been increased. 3.1 3.5 3 i pay full attention during chinese subject class. 3.6 3.5 4 i feel excited when i can read the chinese language correctly by myself. 3.6 3.9 5 i continually revise the topic in the chinese language class that had been taught. 3.1 3.6 6 i always ask the question to teacher and friend when i came across difficulty reading the chinese language. 3.2 3.6 7 i feel not so fear and not so fast boring towards chinese subject. 3.8 4.0 8 i feel that chinese subject is a subject that is not too difficult to understand and read. 3.5 3.6 9 i am confident when i communicate or verse in the chinese language. 3.5 3.6 10 i think i will see success in my life if i can verse in the chinese language skillfully. 3.8 4.0 figure 4. mean comparison based on students’ perceptions of reading skills of chinese language subjects for the control and experimental groups. chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1889 skills, as indicated by their selection of scale 4. conversely, this sentiment was unanimously shared by all thirty participants in the experimental group, indicating a heightened sense of accomplishment post-intervention among those proficient in chinese. the analysis also categorizes various items based on the psychological constructs they pertain to. items 2, 4, 5, and 6 are linked to motivation, while items 1, 7, and 8 are associated with interest. furthermore, items 9 and 10 are identified with confidence, and item 3 is related to attention. notably, the experimental group’s average scores for perceptions on the efficacy of computer-assisted instruction in enhancing chinese reading proficiency are above 3.0. table 4.2, which contrasts the mean scores for each item from both groups’ perceptions on chinese reading skills, reveals that the experimental group consistently outperforms the control group across most metrics, with the exception of item 3, where the control group scored marginally higher. the comparative analysis based on table 2 and figure 4 demonstrates that the integration of computer applications in chinese language learning generally enhances students’ perceptions of their reading skills and attitudes towards the subject. the experimental group consistently outperforms the control group across most metrics, except for attention levels during class. this suggests that while computer applications are effective in improving motivation, confidence, and engagement, attention span remains an area for further investigation and improvement. overall, the use of computer applications appears to be a valuable tool in enhancing the learning experience and outcomes for students in chinese language education. discussion the integration of computer applications in language acquisition has been a subject of considerable interest, particularly in the context of chinese language learning. this study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of such applications in enhancing reading skills and fostering positive learning attitudes among primary school students engaged in home-based learning. impact on reading skills the results of the study indicate that while there was an improvement in the reading skills of students who used the computer application, the differences in gain scores between the control and experimental groups were not statistically significant. this finding aligns with previous research, which suggests that while technology can enhance learning experiences, the extent of its impact may vary depending on several factors, including the design and implementation of the application, the learners’ initial proficiency levels, and the overall learning environment (shadiev & yang, 2020). however, the qualitative feedback from students highlighted a preference for computer-assisted learning over traditional methods. this preference can be attributed to the interactive and engaging nature of call applications, which often incorporate multimedia elements such as audio, video, and games, making the learning process more enjoyable and stimulating (xue, 2022). the ability to progress at one’s own pace and receive immediate feedback also contributed to a more personalized and effective learning experience (lee & yeung, 2020). chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1890 student perceptions and attitudes the study found that students generally had positive attitudes towards using computer applications for learning chinese. they reported greater ease and enjoyment in acquiring reading skills through these digital tools compared to conventional methods. this is consistent with the findings of parmaxi et al. (2013), who noted that technologyintegrated learning environments could enhance students’ motivation and engagement. the immediate feedback and rewards provided by call programs can foster a sense of accomplishment and encourage self-directed learning (nawaz, 2022). motivation and engagement one of the significant benefits of call highlighted in the study is its potential to maintain student motivation and engagement, particularly in home-based learning environments where distractions are prevalent. the structured and interactive nature of call applications helps to create a more engaging learning experience, which is crucial for maintaining students’ interest and focus (lahlali et al., 2023). furthermore, the ability to connect with peers and instructors virtually through some call programs can mitigate the lack of peer interaction and foster a sense of community and collaboration, which is often missing in home-based learning settings (zhang, 2022). challenges and considerations despite the positive outcomes, the study also underscores the challenges associated with implementing call in home-based learning environments. limited access to qualified instructors and consistent guidance can hinder the effectiveness of technologybased learning tools (tang et al., 2021). additionally, the success of call depends heavily on the quality of the application and the extent to which it aligns with educational objectives and students’ learning needs (chuang & ku, 2011). teacher training is another critical factor for successful call integration. educators need to be well-versed in both the technical and pedagogical aspects of using technology in language instruction to ensure that call supplements rather than replaces traditional teaching methods (bai, 2022). effective teacher training models are essential for developing the competencies required for integrating call into the curriculum and for using data from call programs to personalize instruction and identify areas for targeted support (anqi & yanqun, 2022). future research directions the findings of this study highlight the need for further research to explore the longterm impact of call on reading skills and learning attitudes. future studies could focus on larger and more diverse samples to enhance the generalizability of the results. additionally, research could investigate the specific features of call applications that are most effective in promoting language acquisition and how these tools can be optimized for different learning contexts. chee. (malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1891 there is also a need to explore the potential of call in fostering deeper understanding of character structure, rather than merely focusing on memorization drills. approaches that incorporate semantic and orthographic awareness could be more effective in developing comprehensive reading skills (wang et al., 2021). conclusion this study explored the effectiveness of a computer application in improving reading skills in chinese language among primary school students engaged in home-based learning. the quasi-experimental design involving 60 students revealed insights into both the potential and limitations of using technology in language education. firstly, while the improvement in reading skills among students using the computer application was observed, the difference in gain scores between the experimental and control groups was not statistically significant. this finding suggests that while computer-assisted language learning (call) applications can support learning, their impact may vary and is influenced by several factors including the design of the application, initial proficiency levels of the students, and the learning environment. secondly, the qualitative feedback from students indicated a clear preference for computer-assisted learning over traditional methods. students found the call application engaging and enjoyable, highlighting the benefits of multimedia elements and interactive features that make learning more stimulating and personalized. this aligns with existing literature suggesting that technology can enhance motivation and engagement in learning. furthermore, the study demonstrated that call applications have the potential to foster positive learning attitudes. students reported greater ease and enjoyment in acquiring reading skills through digital tools, underscoring the role of technology in creating a more engaging learning experience. this is particularly significant in homebased learning environments where maintaining motivation and focus can be challenging. despite these positive outcomes, the study also highlighted several challenges. the effectiveness of call is contingent on the quality of the application and its alignment with educational objectives. additionally, limited access to qualified instructors and consistent guidance can impede the success of technology-based learning tools. teacher training emerged as a critical factor for effective call integration, emphasizing the need for educators to be proficient in both the technical and pedagogical aspects of using technology in language instruction. in conclusion, while the integration of computer applications in chinese language learning shows promise, it is essential to address the challenges associated with their implementation. the study underscores the importance of high-quality application design, teacher training, and alignment with educational objectives. further research is needed to explore the long-term impact of call on reading skills and learning attitudes, and to identify the most effective features of these applications. by addressing these areas, the potential of call to enhance language learning can be fully realized, providing a valuable tool for educators and students alike. chee. 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(malaysia). computer application in improving reading skills in chinese. bece, vol.18, no. 1, 2024 1896 appendix a chinese vocabulary reading test (pre-test & post-test) no. vocabulary able to read bil vocabulary unable to read 1 用 16 重 2 朋 17 侯 3 明 18 猴 4 晴 19 主 5 睛 20 住 6 蓝 21 往 7 篮 22 今 8 鸟 23 令 9 鸡 24 铃 10 鸭 25 零 11 鹅 26 邻 12 告 27 己 13 休 28 已 14 体 29 该 15 量 30 孩 total correct reading answer= / 30 ar-chee-bece_title-september_2024 ar-chee_bece-maintext-september2024 analysis of the factors influencing junior high school students’ academic performance and the construction of a prediction model shunzhi yan, wenhui li shenyang normal university, shenyang 110136, liaoning province, china abstract: academic performance is a critical factor in determining the future academic path and the possibility of social class mobility of junior high school students. exploring the influencing factors of academic performance and predicting them can help provide empirical evidence for a comprehensive and objective evaluation of students’ academic performance. using ceps 20142015 data, we analyze the influencing factors of junior high school students’ performance based on the i-e-o model, use a nomogram to predict the likelihood of students’ achievement of excellent results, and visualize and analyze the important factors. it was found that, in terms of psychological characteristics, students’ and their parents’ educational expectations had a much greater impact on academic performance. additionally, students’ motivation and persistence significantly influenced their academic performance. in terms of demographic characteristics, we found notable differences between boys and girls, with girls outperforming boys academically. in terms of student involvement, time spent on school homework and in cram schools has a significant impact on academic performance, but the impact of attending cram schools is negative. finally, in terms of school characteristics, the level of school per student expenditure had a significant effect on achievement. best evidence in chinese education 2025; 21(2):2009-2037. doi: 10.15354/bece.25.or026 how to cite: yan, s. z., & li, w. h. (2025). analysis of the factors influencing junior high school students’ academic performance and the construction of a prediction model. best evidence in chinese education, 2025, 21(2): 20092037. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2010 keywords: junior high school students, academic performance, prediction model, educational expectation about the authors: shunzhi yan, shenyang normal university, shenyang 110136, liaoning province, china. email: xzsa13@126.com wenhui li, shenyang normal university, shenyang 110136, liaoning province, china. e-mail: llwwhh1984@synu.edu.cn correspondence to: dr. wenhui li at shenyang normal university in china. conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. © 2025 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. mailto:xzsa13@126.com mailto:llwwhh1984@synu.edu.cn http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2011 introduction cademic performance is a key indicator of students’ knowledge acquisition and learning outcomes, reflecting both individual progress and the effectiveness of educational systems (huang et al., 2016). variations in academic performance among students from different backgrounds often reveal disparities in educational resource distribution and structural inequities, reflecting regional differences in education quality and access. junior high school marks a critical stage in compulsory education, shaping adolescents’ self-identity and social development, while also determining future educational and career paths through the streaming mechanism based on high school entrance exam results. for junior high school students, academic performance is essential, serving as a core measure of individual developmental potential and educational efficacy. high academic performance fosters confidence and motivation, encouraging deeper engagement with learning, which contributes to long-term educational success, career opportunities, and the development of high-quality human capital vital for societal sustainability. literature review internal student factors can directly affect academic performance, and educational expectations are one of the important factors. students’ educational expectations, encompassing both short-term (e.g., exam performance) and long-term academic goals, directly influence academic achievement through bidirectional relationships with performance outcomes (pinquart & ebeling, 2020a; pinquart & ebeling, 2020b). empirical evidence confirms significant positive correlations between students’ self-educational expectations and academic performance, with cross-lagged analyses demonstrating reciprocal causation (sanders et al., 2001; pinquart & ebeling, 2020b). closely related to students’ self-educational expectations, parents’ educational expectations are also one of the most important factors affecting students’ performance. it substantially predicts academic performance through dual mechanisms: active involvement in educational activities and psychological transmission of competence beliefs, which students internalize as personal behavioral standards (yamamoto & holloway, 2010). in addition to educational expectations, students’ learning motivation is an important influence on academic performance. while both educational expectations and learning motivation influence academic behaviors, they constitute distinct psychological effects. educational expectations reflect future-oriented beliefs about educational attainment, whereas learning motivation drives goal-directed actions through cognitive activation (yamamoto & holloway, 2010; moreira-morales & garcía-loor, 2024). specifically, learning motivation comprises intrinsic a yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2012 (task-inherent satisfaction) and extrinsic (external reward-driven) dimensions, both significantly predicting academic performance through behavioral engagement (entwistle et al., 1974). according to hull’s formula, academic performance derives from the multiplicative interaction of motivational drive and study habits (eysenck, 1957), with educators frequently attributing academic failures to deficiencies in these components (entwistle et al., 1974). a sem study showed that both internal and external motivation of students are significantly and positively correlated with academic performance and are important influences on academic performance (nauzeer & jaunky, 2019). in addition to internal student factors, school characteristics, as key external factors, significantly influence learning outcomes. researchers have examined various aspects of the school environment, including climate, location, facilities, division, and classroom conditions, to assess their impact on academic performance. physically, classroom environment, location, and facilities remarkably affect student achievement (iwuagwu, 2016); moreover, researchers have found that schools with more greenery show higher exam success rates, whereas barren landscapes negatively affect performance (kweon et al., 2017). psychologically, a positive and supportive school climate enhances academic performance, while a negative climate harms students’ well-being and achievement (podiya et al., 2025). positive social relationships and a sense of belonging at school increase academic self-efficacy as well, which in turn improves performance (zysberg & schwabsky, 2020). the factors affecting academic performance certainly do not stop there, and a review of existing research on students’ academic performance reveals that there is a wealth of research in this area, covering a wide range of topics. domestic studies have focused on individual student traits, school characteristics, and teacher attributes, offering insights into current performance trends and their determinants. however, these studies often analyze influences through a single dimension, such as extracurricular tutoring (guan, 2022) or family-school cooperation (zhang er al., 2020), after controlling for demographics, limiting findings to specific causal factors, and failing to reflect the complexity and diversity of academic performance. additionally, most studies focus on university students, with insufficient attention to junior high school populations. in 1977, astin proposed the input-environment-outcome (i-e-o) model to analyze how higher education influences student development (astin, 1977). the model categorizes educational processes into three components: input (students’ pre-enrollment background and social experiences), environment (educational experiences and institutional characteristics), and output (changes in students’ cognitive, skills, and value domains) (zhang et al., 2020). it posits that student learning and competence development result from the interaction between pre-enrollment inputs and environmental factors during education. in 1984, astin expanded the model by introducing the yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2013 theory of student involvement, a key aspect of environment, which measures the physical and mental energy students invest in their education, reflected in time spent, participation in activities, and engagement with faculty and peers (astin, 1984). studies have found that greater student involvement positively affects academic performance (bao & zhang, 2012). although the i-e-o model was developed for higher education, its framework applies broadly, as both higher and basic education involve similar developmental processes shaped by input, environment, and outcome. therefore, drawing on the i-e-o model and using national survey data, this study examines ninth-grade junior high school students to better understand the factors influencing academic performance and to expand research on this population. all along, the “scores-only theory” has led schools and parents to overemphasize written examination results, neglecting process evaluation and overall quality assessment. this manner could cause student disengagement and psychological stress, both closely linked to academic performance. effectively evaluating academic performance and identifying its key influencing factors have thus become critical issues. using data from the china education panel survey (ceps), this study examines junior high school students’ academic performance from input and output perspectives and develops a predictive model to provide empirical insights for improvement. methods data source the data utilized in this study are derived from the china education panel survey (ceps). the ceps is a large-scale, nationally representative longitudinal survey designed and implemented by a top-tier university in china with an outstanding academic reputation. this survey aims to analyze how factors such as family, school, community, and broader social structures collectively influence individual educational outcomes. it also seeks to deeply uncover the role and mechanisms of these educational outcomes throughout an individual’s life course, thereby providing a reliable empirical basis for the formulation of educational public policy and for academic research in related fields. to ensure the national representativeness of the sample, ceps employed a multi-stage probability proportional to size (pps) sampling design. using the population’s average education level and the proportion of the migrant population as stratification variables, this method first randomly selected 28 county-level units nationwide as survey sites. subsequently, 112 schools were randomly drawn from these selected county-level units. finally, 438 classes were sampled from these schools, and all students in the chosen yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2014 classes were included in the sample. the baseline survey, conducted in the 2013-2014 academic year, comprised approximately 20,000 students. ceps employs questionnaire surveys as its primary data collection method, targeting a wide range of respondents including students, parents, homeroom teachers, main subject teachers, and school administrators. the content of the questionnaires is tailored to each respondent group: the student questionnaire focuses on basic information, academic growth, physical and mental health, and social-behavioral development; the parent questionnaire centers on the home educational environment, perspectives on school education, and educational expectations for their children; the teacher questionnaire concentrates on educational philosophies, daily teaching practices, work-related stress, and job satisfaction; and the school administrator questionnaire is primarily concerned with the school’s basic information, educational mission, teaching facilities, and daily instructional management. ceps is a thirty-year longitudinal survey, with its baseline survey launched in the 2013-2014 academic year. it began tracking two cohorts of students, who were then in the seventh and ninth grades. these students were surveyed annually during their middle school years, and follow-ups are planned at multiple subsequent time points after their graduation, with the final survey scheduled for completion in 2043. this study uses data from the first follow-up wave conducted in the 2014-2015 academic year. this wave targeted the baseline cohort of 10,279 seventh-grade students, of whom 9,449 were successfully re-interviewed, resulting in a high follow-up rate of 91.9%. because ceps has not released new data since 2015, this wave constitutes the most recent dataset available. for this research, variables were selected from the student, parent, and school administrator questionnaires. after data cleaning, a total of 5,998 valid cases were obtained. concurrently, in strict compliance with ethical and legal standards, ceps ensures the confidentiality of all identifiable information, such as county (district), school, and administrative codes, to effectively protect respondent privacy. description of the variables dependent variable the dependent variable in this study is student academic performance. the data for this variable consist of student midterm examination scores from the fall 2014 semester, which were provided directly by the surveyed schools. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2015 figure 1. indicator system based on the ieo model. these are administrative data, not self-reported variables. specifically, the data include the raw scores for three subjects—chinese, mathematics, and english—and the corresponding maximum possible score for each subject. (the ceps survey exclusively covers academic performance in these three core subjects). as chinese, mathematics, and english are core subjects in middle school (and notably, these three subjects have the same maximum score in the high school entrance examination in most provinces), they were assigned equal weight to comprehensively reflect student academic performance. the raw scores from these three subjects were directly summed to create a raw total score. to eliminate inter-school differences, this study then conducted a within-school standardization of the students’ total scores. on a school-byschool basis, the arithmetic mean of all students’ total scores was calculated, with this school-level mean serving as a benchmark for each school’s academic level. finally, based on the individual student’s score and their school’s mean score, a core binary variable was generated to represent the student’s performance level relative to their in-school peer group. if a student’s total score was higher than the school mean, the variable was assigned a value of 1; conversely, if the score was equal to or lower than the mean, it was assigned a value of 0. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2016 independent variables the independent variables are the influences related to students’ academic performance, with a total of 14 variables divided into two dimensions, input and environment, and four sub-dimensions. see figure 1 for details. input dimension input variables refer to students’ pre-institutional characteristics and are divided into two sub-dimensions: personal background and psychological characteristics. personal background includes gender, ethnicity, hukou type, and students’ self-rated health. psychological characteristics include students’ self-educational expectations, parental educational expectations, learning motivation, and learning persistence. gender is a binary nominal variable. the data were sourced from the ‘personal background’ module of the student questionnaire and represent a single-item measure self-reported by students during the 2013-2014 baseline survey. as gender is a stable attribute, it did not require repeated measurement; therefore, this information was not collected again in the 2014-2015 follow-up survey. the complete gender information was obtained by merging the baseline data with the follow-up data using the unique student identification code (variable name: ids). the original coding for this variable, “1=male, 2=female,” was used without modification. data on ethnicity were also sourced from the ‘personal background’ module of the student questionnaire, representing a single-item measure selfreported by students in the 2013-2014 baseline survey. due to its stability, this question was not repeated in the follow-up survey; the ethnicity information for students was obtained by merging the datasets. the original variable was a multi-category nominal variable with eight categories (1=han, 2=mongol, 3=manchu, 4=hui, 5=tibetan, 6=zhuang, 7=uygur, and 8=other). to avoid the potential interference of small-sample categories in the statistical analysis, this study transformed it. the original eight categories were consolidated into a binary nominal variable, with the coding scheme 0=ethnic minority (including mongol, manchu, and other groups) and 1=han. the student’s hukou (household registration) type is a single-item measure self-reported by students in the 2013-2014 baseline survey. this information was obtained by merging the baseline and follow-up data using the student id. the original variable was a four-category nominal variable with the following codes and meanings: 1=agricultural hukou, 2=nonagricultural hukou, 3=resident hukou (a type issued in some regions to all residents, without distinguishing between agricultural and non-agricultural status), and 4=no hukou. based on this study’s focus on the traditional uryan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2017 ban-rural hukou disparity, the original variable was recoded. considering that the “resident hukou” is a product of hukou system reforms aimed at reducing this binary distinction and is more closely aligned with the nonagricultural hukou in terms of public services and social rights (urban attributes), “2=non-agricultural hukou” and “3=resident hukou” were merged to form the urban hukou category, which was assigned a value of 2. the “1=agricultural hukou” category was retained as is. furthermore, the “4=no hukou” category was excluded from the analysis due to its ambiguity and extremely small proportion. the resulting transformed variable is a binary nominal variable. data on self-rated health were derived from the ‘physical and mental health’ module of the student questionnaire. the corresponding original question was: “which one of the following best describes your general health condition at present?” this is a single-item, self-reported measure. the variable was originally a five-category ordinal variable (1=very poor, 2=not very good, 3=moderate, 4=good, 5=very good). for this study, it was recoded into a three-category ordinal variable with the following structure: the ‘very poor’ (1) and ‘not very good’ (2) categories were merged into ‘poor’ and assigned a value of 1; the ‘moderate’ (3) category retained its original meaning but was reassigned a value of 2; and the ‘good’ (4) and ‘very good’ (5) categories were combined into ‘good’ and assigned a value of 3. the transformed variable is thus a three-category ordinal variable. data on students’ self-educational expectations were sourced from the ‘academic development’ module of the student questionnaire. the variable is a single-item, self-reported measure based on the question: “what is the highest level of education you expect yourself to receive?” the original variable was a 10-category ordinal scale: (1) drop out now, (2) graduate from junior high school, (3) go to technical secondary school or technical school, (4) go to vocational high school, (5) go to senior high school, (6) graduate from junior college, (7) get a bachelor degree, (8) get a master degree, (9) get a doctor degree, and (10) i don’t care. based on a hierarchical logic of ascending educational expectations, this study simplified the variable into a three-category ordinal measure. the first category, “1 = secondary education and below,” includes the original codes 2 through 5. the “drop out now” (1) and “i don’t care” (10) options were also assigned to this category because they largely reflect low educational expectations. the second category, “2 = university degree,” represents the foundational level of higher education and combines the original codes for “graduate from junior college” (6) and “get a bachelor degree” (7). the third category, “3 = postgraduate degree,” corresponds to the advanced level of higher education and includes the original codes for “get a master degree” (8) and “get a doctor degree” (9). yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2018 the raw data for parental educational expectations were derived from the ‘family education’ module of the parent questionnaire. this variable is a single-item, self-reported measure based on the question: “what is the highest level of education do you expect this child to receive?” the original coding and the meanings of the categories for this variable were identical to those for student self-educational expectations. for the analysis, this study applied the same consolidation and simplification logic to parental educational expectations as was used for the student self-educational expectations variable. data on learning motivation were derived from a sub-item within a scale in the student questionnaire’s ‘physical and mental health’ module, which begins with the prompt: “how much do you agree with each of the following statements about your experiences in grade 7?” it is a singleitem, self-reported measure corresponding to the specific statement: “i would try my best to finish even the homework i dislike.” the variable was originally a four-point likert-type ordinal variable, with the following codes and meanings: 1=strongly disagree, 2=somewhat disagree, 3=somewhat agree, and 4=strongly agree. to simplify the analysis, this study merged and transformed it. the categories ‘1=strongly disagree’ and ‘2=somewhat disagree,’ which had smaller sample proportions, were combined into ‘not really agree’ and assigned a value of 1. the ‘3=somewhat agree’ category retained its original meaning, with its code adjusted to 2, and the ‘4=strongly agree’ category was recoded to 3. the transformed variable is a three-category ordinal variable. data on learning persistence were also sourced from the student questionnaire’s ‘physical and mental health’ module. it is a single-item, self-reported measure from the same scale as the learning motivation variable, corresponding to the specific statement: “i would try my best to finish my homework, even if it would take me quite a long time.” as a four-point likert-type ordinal variable, its original coding and meanings were identical to those of the ‘learning motivation’ variable. the logic used for its consolidation and transformation was also the same as that applied to ‘learning motivation’, resulting in a three-category ordinal variable. environment dimension environmental variables reflect learning resources and influence inside and outside school, central to the educational process. it’s divided into two subdimensions: student involvement and school characteristics. student involvement includes weekly hours spent on school homework, cram school attendance, extra homework (assigned by parents or cram school), and exercise. school characteristics include school type, availability of library, and per-student expenditure. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2019 regarding school characteristics, three variables were included: school type, whether the school has a library, and per-student expenditure. all three items were sourced from the ‘basic information of the school’ module of the school administrator questionnaire. school type is a single-item measure self-reported by the principal. the variable was originally a five-category nominal variable with the following codes and meanings: (1) public school, (2) private school subsidized by the government, (3) ordinary private school, (4) private school for children of migrant workers, and (5) other. because this study’s primary aim is to investigate the difference in impact between public and private schools on student achievement, this variable was recoded. specifically, categories 2 through 4 were merged to form the ‘private school’ category, which was assigned a value of 0. the ‘public school’ category (1) was kept unchanged. the transformed variable is a binary nominal variable. additionally, among the 112 schools in the sample, none were classified as ‘other’ (5). whether the school has a library is a single-item measure selfreported by the principal, derived from a sub-item under the scale “does your school have the following facilities?”. the original variable was a three-category ordinal variable: (1) no, (2) yes, but need to be improved, and (3) yes, and well equipped. for this study, categories 2 and 3 were merged to form the “has a library” category, which was assigned a code of 2. the “no” category remained unchanged. the transformed variable is a binary nominal variable. per-student expenditure was a self-reported item completed by the principal, representing objective administrative statistical data. the corresponding original question was: “how much fiscal appropriation per student has your school received this year?”. the variable was originally a continuous variable, taking non-negative values (unit: yuan/student) with a range of 0 and above. for this study, the data were recoded into a threecategory ordinal variable with the following codes and meanings: 1=low funding (<800 yuan), 2=medium funding (800-1,800 yuan), which represents the primary distribution range of the data, and 3=high funding (≥1800 yuan). data on the weekly time students spent on school homework, cram school, and extra homework were all derived from the ‘academic development’ module of the student questionnaire. they were sub-items under the scale asking, “how much time on average everyday did you spend on the following extra-curricular activities?”. the corresponding original items were: ‘doing homework assigned by teacher,’ ‘taking cram school courses (related to schoolwork),’ and ‘doing homework assigned by parents or cram school.’ the time spent was measured separately for weekdays and weekends. the response options for the weekday scale were: (1) 0 hours, (2) less than 1 hour, (3) about 1-2 hours, (4) about 2-3 hours, (5) about 3-4 yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2020 hours, and (6) more than 4 hours. the response options for the weekend scale were: (1) none, (2) less than 2 hours, (3) about 2-4 hours, (4) about 4-6 hours, (5) about 6-8 hours, and (6) more than 8 hours. because the original options represented interval data, the midpoint of each interval was taken and multiplied by the corresponding number of days. the resulting values for weekdays and weekends were then summed to calculate the total weekly time spent (unit: hours). data on students’ physical exercise were obtained from the ‘physical and mental health’ module of the student questionnaire. this was a selfreported, two-part measure corresponding to the question: “how often do you do physical exercise? usually [ ] days a week, [ ] minutes a day.” existing research indicates that “ensuring two hours of daily physical activity for middle school students” is a national-level reform goal that is being vigorously promoted but has not yet been fully realized, and that insufficient exercise among students remains a common phenomenon (liu & shan, 2025). based on this, we concluded that some students’ self-reported daily exercise durations (e.g., over 150 minutes) likely deviated significantly from the prevalent reality. therefore, to ensure data validity and the robustness of the analysis, this study treated cases reporting more than 150 minutes of daily exercise as outliers and excluded them. subsequently, for the remaining valid sample, the ‘days of exercise per week’ was multiplied by the ‘minutes of exercise per day,’ and the result was converted into hours to generate the total weekly physical exercise duration. the transformed variable is a continuous variable with non-negative values. methods of analysis data cleaning was carried out via stata 17 to retain relevant variables, recode categorical variables, and remove outliers. statistical analysis was performed using spss 26.0; chi-square tests were applied to categorical variables related to student background, psychological and school characteristics, while one-way anova was used for continuous variables on student involvement, with significance set at p < 0.05. variables with p < 0.05 were entered into binary logistic regression to assess their association with academic performance. multicollinearity was assessed using the variance inflation factor (vif), with vif < 5 indicating acceptable independence among predictors. based on logistic regression results, a nomogram was constructed using r 4.4.2 to visualize the prediction model and improve interpretability. model performance was evaluated using roc curves, area under the curve (auc), and calibration curves. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2021 table 1. effects of input characteristics on academic performance. categorization n high score achiever percentage ² p value gender 273.078 ＜0.001 male 3,024 1,408 46.56 female 2,974 2,013 67.69 ethnicity 0.954 0.329 han 5,430 3,108 57.24 minority 568 313 55.10 hukou type 12.958 <0.001 rural 3,182 1,746 54.90 urban 2,816 1,675 59.48 self-rated health 4.603 0.1 poor 387 215 55.56 fair 1,749 964 55.12 good 3,862 2,242 58.05 self-educational expectation 785.385 <0.001 secondary education & below 1,160 289 24.91 university degree 3,058 1,757 57.46 postgraduate degree 1,780 1,375 77.25 parental education expectation 702.429 <0.001 secondary education & below 723 129 17.84 university degree 3,222 1,771 54.97 postgraduate degree 2,053 1,521 74.09 learning motivation 183.38 <0.001 not really agree 1,197 491 41.02 fair 2,536 1,459 57.53 strongly agree 2,265 1,471 64.94 learning persistence 192.135 <0.001 not really agree 1,251 518 41.41 fair 2,476 1,414 57.11 strongly agree 2,271 1,489 65.57 total 5,998 3,421 57.04 results differences in junior high school students’ academic performance on inputs the result showed that of the 5,998 students, 3,421(57.04% of the total) had academic performance above the average of their schools. in terms of demographic characteristics, girls’ academic performance (67.7%) is better than boys’ (46.6%), and the difference is statistically significant (² ＝ 273.078, p < 0.001). this result indicates that gender is one of the factors that significantly affects students’ performance. the percentage of han ethnicity and ethnic minority students who performed better than the school average was 57.24% and 55.10%, respectively. from the results, ethnicity is not a significant influence on academic performance. in terms of hukou type, urban household register students outperformed rural household regis ter students with a significant difference (² ＝ 12.958, yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2022 table 2. the impact of school characteristics on academic performance. categorization n numbers of above-average percentage ² p value school type 9.517 0.002 private 410 204 49.76 public 5,588 3,217 57.57 library 0.011 0.915 no 902 513 56.87 yes 5,096 2,908 57.06 per-student expenditure 16.609 < 0.001 low 2,209 1,187 53.73 medium 2,751 1,608 58.45 high 1,038 626 60.31 p < 0.001). the highest percentage of students who perceived themselves as physically good achieved good grades (58.10%), followed by those who perceived themselves as physically poor and fair (55.60% and 55.12%, respectively), but there was no significant difference in grades between students with different health conditions (p ＝ 0.1). in terms of psychological characteristics, students’ and parents’ educational expectations have a significant effect on students’ academic performance, with higher educational expectations being associated with better academic performance. students’ learning motivation and persistence are also significant influences on academic performance; the stronger the learning motivation and persistence, the better the students’ academic performance. the details are shown in table 1. the impact of school characteristics on students’ academic performance regarding school characteristics, the proportion of students with aboveaverage academic performance was significantly higher in public schools (57.57%) than in private schools (49.76%) (² = 9.517, p = 0.002). in terms of school material resources, whether a school had a library was not significantly associated with student academic performance (² = 0.011, p = 0.915). in fact, the proportion of students who achieved above-average scores was nearly identical in schools with libraries (57.06%) compared to schools without them (56.87%). per-student expenditure had a significant effect on academic performance(²＝16.609，p<0.001), with students’ academic performance gradually improving as per-student expenditure increased, as shown in table 2. regarding student involvement, this study found that the amount of time students spent per week writing school and extra homework, attending cram school, and exercising all had a significant effect on students’ academic yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2023 table 3. the impact of student involvement on academic performance. categorization square sum degrees of freedom mean square f p value sch_ homework 48.122 32 1.504 6.310 ＜0.001 extra_ homework 19.316 32 0.604 2.482 ＜0.001 cram_ school 23.076 30 0.769 3.173 ＜0.001 exercise 50.513 109 0.463 1.923 ＜0.001 table 4. descriptive analysis of student engagement (n = 5,998). categorization min max mean sd sch_ homework 0 40.5 16.07 8.390 extra_ homework 0 40.5 4.14 6.144 cram_ school 0 40.5 4.30 7.535 exercise 0 17.5 2.30 2.148 performance (p < 0.001). the effect of hours of writing school homework on academic performance was relatively high (f ＝ 6.310), followed by hours of cram school (f = 3.173) and extra work (f = 2.482), and exercise had the smallest effect (f ＝ 1.923), but still had a significant effect on performance (see table 3 for details). in addition, we used descriptive statistics to analyze student involvement, and the results are presented in table 4. the results showed that students spent the longest amount of time per week on school homework, with an average of 16.07 hours per week, followed by attending cram school and writing extra homework. in contrast, students exercise an average of only 2.30 hours per week, dramatically less than the time spent on academics. logistic regression analysis of factors affecting academic performance binary logistic regression analyses were conducted using the statistically significant factors from the univariate analyses as independent variables and students’ academic performance as the dependent variable. in order to mitigate potential bias in the results due to high correlation between variables, vif was used to check the data for multicollinearity. the results showed that the vif values of all the variables in this study were less than 5 (range 1.019 2.147), proving that there is no problem of multicollinearity among the variables. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2024 table 5. logistic regression results. independent variable b se wald ² p value or 95%ci lower limit upper limit intercept -2.876 0.173 277.671 <0.001 0.056 0.040 0.079 exercise -0.015 0.014 1.172 0.279 0.985 0.958 1.012 extra_ homework -0.007 0.006 1.483 0.223 0.993 0.982 1.004 cram_ school -0.016 0.005 12.286 <0.001 0.984 0.976 0.993 sch_ homework 0.010 0.004 7.807 0.005 1.011 1.003 1.018 gender female 0.756 0.060 160.300 <0.001 2.129 1.894 2.393 male hukou type urban -0.097 0.063 2.386 0.122 0.908 0.803 1.026 rural self-educational expectation secondary education & below university degree 0.809 0.090 81.000 <0.001 2.245 1.882 2.677 postgraduate degree 1.450 0.107 184.118 <0.001 4.262 3.457 5.255 parental educational expectation secondary education & below university degree 1.114 0.118 89.633 <0.001 3.046 2.419 3.836 postgraduate degree 1.692 0.128 174.621 <0.001 5.428 4.224 6.976 motivation not really agree fair 0.260 0.095 7.482 0.006 1.297 1.076 1.563 strongly agree 0.273 0.114 5.776 0.016 1.314 1.052 1.642 persistence not really agree fair 0.200 0.095 4.444 0.035 1.221 1.014 1.470 strongly agree 0.304 0.114 7.149 0.007 1.355 1.085 1.694 per-student expenditure low medium 0.339 0.066 26.531 <0.001 1.404 1.234 1.598 high 0.215 0.088 5.991 0.014 1.240 1.044 1.473 school type public 0.209 0.118 3.149 0.076 1.232 0.978 1.552 private the logistic regression analysis revealed that in terms of student involvement, the weekly time spent on exercise and extra homework had no significant effect on academic performance. attending cram school had a significant negative impact. school-assigned homework was the only variable in the student involvement dimension that positively influenced academic performance; for each additional hour spent on school homework, the odds of performing above the school average increased by 1.1%. regarding personal background, gender differences were significant, with female students significantly outperforming male students. the effect of hukou type on academic performance was not significant. with respect to psychological characteristics, the student’s own educational expectations, parental educational expectations, learning motivation, and learning persistence all had a significant impact on academic performance. among these, the student’s o w n a n d p a r e n t a l e d u c a t i o n a l e x p e c t a t i o n s w e r e t h e yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2025 figure 2. nomogram. strongest predictors of academic performance, with their odds ratios (ors) being substantially greater than 1 and significantly higher than those of other independent variables. the regression results are detailed in table 5. predictive modelling of academic performance of junior high school students a nomogram prediction model was developed based on the factors affecting students’ academic performance, the details of which are shown in figure 2. the names of the variables are displayed on the left side; each variable corresponds to a line segment, and the scale of the line segment indicates the range of scores of the variable. the larger the range of scores, the greater the impact of the variable on the predicted results of the model, and the more important the variable is. individual scores on each variable are summed to obtain the total point, which represents the total score of an individual in the model. the probability that a student’s academic performance is higher than the school average is obtained by plotting the total point against the prob of outcome axis. according to the nomogram, the significance of the predictor variables is: parental education expectation > self-education yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2026 figure 3. roc curve. figure 4. calibration curve. expectation > cram school > gender > school homework > per-student expenditure >learning persistence > learning motivation. the results of the roc curve test showed that the average auc value was 0.756, and the sensitivity and specificity were 0.709 and 0.667, respectively. these results indicate that the model is effective in predicting yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2027 students’ academic performance, and the predictions are within acceptable limits (mandrekar, 2010). the specific details of the roc curve are shown in figure 3. the calibration curve fluctuates around the ideal curve and almost overlaps with the ideal curve, which fully indicates that the model predicts well and is repeatable. the mean absolute error (mae) is 0.003, and the lower error rate once again indicates the prediction accuracy of the model, details of which are shown in figure 4. discussion based on the input-environment-outcome (i-e-o) theoretical framework, we utilized nationally representative large-scale survey data to investigate the influence of multidimensional factors on the academic performance of ninth-grade students. the findings indicate that the formation of academic performance is a complex process involving the synergistic effect of multiple factors. a student’s individual and psychological characteristics serve as the internal drivers influencing academic performance. at the same time, the educational environment in which students are situated, and their academic involvement within it, also have a significant impact on their academic performance. slightly more than half of the total number of students in this study, 57.04%, performed above the school average. overall, students’ academic performance tended to be better than average. in terms of the distribution of the number of students with high and low academic performance, this result is also in line with the reality that 50% of students enter regular senior secondary schools under the mechanism of ‘50-50 streaming in the high school entrance examination’. the dominant role of educational expectations this study found that both parental and student self-educational expectations significantly and positively predict academic achievement, with the role of parental expectations being more critical. higher levels of expectation are associated with a greater probability of achieving high academic performance, a finding that is consistent with existing research (fishamn, 2022). furthermore, according to the results from the nomogram model and the regression analysis, the importance of parental educational expectations for student achievement is slightly greater than that of student self-expectations, highlighting the crucial role played by external family expectations. this finding aligns with the classic wisconsin model of status attainment, which posits that educational expectations, as a key sociopsychological variable, serve as the core mediator linking family socioeconomic background to an individual’s ultimate educational achievements yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2028 (sewell et al., 1969). our study demonstrates that this model remains applicable within the chinese educational context. however, this study also finds that when we incorporate the practical application of these expectations, specifically the weekly time spent in cram school, into the model, this factor exhibits a significant negative effect on academic performance. this indicates that merely holding high expectations is insufficient. how these expectations are translated into concrete educational behaviors is key to moderating their ultimate effect. this finding thereby adds a new interpretive dimension to the wisconsin model’s application in contemporary china. specifically, the positive influence of high parental educational expectations is effective because, through high-quality interaction and support, these expectations are effectively internalized by students and transformed into autonomous self-expectations (pinquart & ebeling, 2020a). according to self-determination theory, the positive influence of high parental expectations is realized when these expectations are conveyed in a supportive, understanding, and encouraging manner. in such a context, students feel their autonomy is respected and are thus more likely to integrate external goals as intrinsic motivation, fostering greater learning persistence and self-efficacy. this process of internalization aligns parental and student expectations, synergistically driving academic success. however, this study’s finding that weekly time spent in cram school negatively impacts academic performance illustrates an alienated pathway for the transmission of expectations. when high parental expectations fail to be internalized through effective family communication and emotional support, and are instead transformed into a form of external, coercive behavioral control, the positive effect can be diminished or even reversed. in such cases, an ‘expectation gap’ emerges between the parents’ high expectations and the students’ actual feelings, abilities, or willingness (cheng et al., 2022). an expectation gap transforms educational expectations from a motivational goal into an oppressive source of external control, negatively affecting academic performance through several mechanisms. first, the expectation gap directly undermines a student’s learning autonomy, shifting learning from intrinsic exploration to passive coping, which in turn weakens learning motivation (li & hu, 2021). second, persistent pressure and the negative feedback that may accompany failure to meet high expectations can erode a student’s academic self-efficacy, making them feel that they can never satisfy their parents, regardless of their efforts. finally, long-term psychological stress, academic burden, and negative emotions significantly increase the risk of academic burnout, leading students to cognitively and emotionally disengage from learning, which results in a substantial negative impact on their academic achievement (cheng et al., 2022). therefore, the influence of educational expectations on the academic achievement of middle school students is not a simple linear positive relationship but rather a complex process characterized by dynamic interplay. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2029 while high expectations from parents and students are undoubtedly valuable psychological capital for academic success, the realization of their positive effects hinges on the manner of their transmission and application. only when the communication of these expectations maintains and promotes a student’s autonomy and intrinsic motivation, thereby achieving high-quality internalization, can they serve as a catalyst for academic development. conversely, they will erode a student’s learning motivation, be detrimental to their physical and mental well-being, and ultimately impede academic progress. the negative impact of cram schools on academic performance the influence of student involvement on academic performance presents a contradiction: although the time spent completing school homework is positively associated with high academic performance, the duration of participation in cram school shows a significant negative association. this seemingly conflicting result indicates that the sheer ‘quantity of time invested’ is not the key to academic success; rather, the nature of that engagement may play a more crucial role. we argue that school homework and cram school courses are fundamentally different in how they affect student learning autonomy. from the perspective of self-determination theory (sdt), school homework, as an extension of the school curriculum, is typically designed by teachers in accordance with the syllabus. its content is synchronized with the pace of instruction, and its difficulty is often within the student’s zone of proximal development, which helps students consolidate knowledge and effectively satisfies their need for competence. in contrast, cram school courses are often arranged by parents and are more representative of external control rather than an autonomous choice by the student. these courses frequently aim to “teach ahead” or “raise the bar,” and their learning content may exceed the student’s current cognitive abilities, leading to persistent frustration and undermining their sense of competence. this passive participation can thwart the student’s need for autonomy. even if a student is intrinsically motivated, such a controlling learning context may lead to inefficient, surface-level learning, thereby negatively impacting academic achievement. as existing research has indicated, excessive extracurricular tutoring intensity is closely associated with students’ psychological stress and academic burnout (fu et al., 2023). additionally, although descriptive statistics indicate that students’ physical exercise time (mean = 2.30 hours/week) is severely constrained by numerous academic activities, the multiple regression model reveals that, within the analytical framework of this study, exercise duration was not a direct predictor of academic achievement (p = 0.279). therefore, the negayan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2030 tive effect of cram school is not primarily realized through the indirect pathway of crowding out time for physical exercise, but is more likely to stem from its direct impact on learning psychology and the learning process. specifically, although existing research has indicated an association between attending cram school and negative emotions such as an aversion to learning (li & liu, 2022), this study finds that learning motivation and learning persistence remain among the most critical psychological characteristics for achieving high performance. in other words, the negative impact of attending cram school may not be that it simply and completely destroys students’ motivation to learn; rather, it likely operates through other mechanisms while their motivation is still present. for example, the intensive, test-oriented training in cram school may hinder the development of students’ deep learning and critical thinking skills (guill et al., 2022). even if a student is motivated to complete assignments, their learning efficiency and ultimate outcomes could be substantially compromised by a shift toward surface-level learning. indirect effects of hukou and school type in the univariate analysis, hukou type and school type were initially found to be significantly associated with academic achievement. however, when micro-level variables such as individual student characteristics, the psychological characteristics, and specific school resources were incorporated into the binary logistic regression model, the predictive effects of these two variables were no longer significant. this does not suggest that hukou type and school type have no impact on academic performance. instead, it reveals that their influence is indirect: after the inclusion of more substantive micro-level variables, their effects are mediated by these variables. in the analysis, the effect of hukou type on academic performance exhibited a significant transformation. in the univariate analysis, students with a non-agricultural hukou demonstrated significantly better academic performance than students with an agricultural hukou. however, in the binary logistic regression model that incorporated more control variables, the direct predictive effect of hukou type became non-significant. this shift indicates that hukou type does not directly determine academic performance but more likely operates through more specific mediating pathways. specifically, from the perspective of family cultural capital, educational expectations demonstrated the strongest predictive power among all independent variables. this points to a pathway for the influence of hukou type. a reasonable explanation is that families with a non-agricultural hukou are typically situated in urban environments with more advantaged socioeconomic status and cultural resources, and this environment may naturally translate into higher educational expectations among family members (sun et al., 2025). these high yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2031 expectations, acting as a potent form of “cultural capital,” not only directly motivate students but also positively influence their “learning motivation and learning persistence,” and these two psychological qualities are also significant predictors in the model. consequently, when the model directly measures this core driver of educational expectations, a portion of the explanatory power held by hukou, a relatively macro-level background label, is absorbed by these more targeted psychological variables. while educational expectations are the most central of these variables, the model’s other significant predictors, learning motivation and learning persistence, also likely stem from the family environment. together, they constitute a psychological mediation chain through which hukou type influences academic performance. on the other hand, from the perspective of educational resource allocation, the regression analysis shows that “per-student expenditure” is another significant environmental factor influencing student achievement. china’s longstanding urban-rural dual structure has created vast disparities in educational resources, resulting in significant inequality in accessing financial support between rural schools associated with agricultural hukou and urban schools associated with non-agricultural hukou (zhao, 2023). urban schools typically receive higher per-student funding, which translates to higher-quality teachers, better facilities, and richer educational resources. because this study’s model directly controls for “per-student expenditure” which is the core variable reflecting the school environment, it also accounts for the resource advantages attached to hukou status, rendering the independent effect of hukou type no longer statistically prominent. therefore, the influence of hukou type on the academic performance of middle school students is indirect; its effect is realized through two pathways: shaping the “family soft environment” and the “school hard environment.” when the model simultaneously controls for both the family soft environment and the school hard environment, the influence of hukou type as a macro-level social identity is no longer significant. similarly, the school type variable, which was significant in the univariate analysis, was no longer significant in the binary logistic analysis. this disappearance of significance may be due to the presence of selection bias. the “public school advantage” observed in the univariate analysis may not stem from the “public” status itself, but is rather a combined result of the school’s resource endowments and the student population it serves. existing research has pointed out that schools of different types have significant differences in their student populations, and a school’s educational effectiveness is largely influenced by the selection mechanisms related to its student quality (yao, 2023). first, from the perspective of resource endowments, the binary logistic regression model included “per-student expenditure” as a key variable in the analysis. the results show that the level of per-student expenditure has a significant positive impact on students’ academic perforyan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2032 mance, which indicates that the financial resources a school receives are an important factor in student academic development. when the model controls for this variable, which more directly reflects a school’s resource level, the general labels of “public” or “private” lose their independent predictive power. in other words, for both public and private schools, being able to obtain adequate resource investment is the key to promoting student academic development, not the nature of their governance. second, from the perspective of student body composition, this study, proceeding from the ‘input’ dimension, selected a large number of variables related to students’ individual backgrounds, including educational expectations, learning motivation, and persistence. all of these variables were found to be powerful predictors of academic performance. in chinese educational practice, schools of different types or reputations often attract student groups from diverse backgrounds, a phenomenon known as ‘student sorting’ (tan & zhang, 2025; yao, 2023). high-quality public schools with strong reputations may naturally attract students who come from families with higher educational expectations and more ample support. therefore, the advantage of public schools observed in the univariate analysis may simply be a concentrated reflection of the preexisting advantages of its student population. consequently, when the multivariate regression model takes these advantageous factors into account, the independent effect of the school type subsequently disappears, its explanatory power having been absorbed by the more substantive variables. model evaluation and reflection building upon the identification of key factors influencing the academic performance of middle school students, this study further developed a nomogram model with strong predictive performance. in terms of model performance, its auc was 0.756, with a sensitivity and specificity of 0.709 and 0.667, respectively. this indicates that the model can effectively discriminate between student groups performing above or below the in-school average, demonstrating predictive power within an acceptable range. furthermore, the model’s calibration curve nearly coincided with the ideal curve, and its mae was only 0.003 this clearly demonstrates a high degree of concordance between the predicted probabilities and the observed frequencies of high achievement, showcasing good calibration performance and thereby enhancing the model’s reliability for practical application. the strong performance of the model in this study can be attributed to its precise capture of key influencing factors, particularly through the quantification and successful integration of variables such as student and parental educational expectations, gender, and academic involvement into a unified predictive framework. compared to traditional regression equations, the greatest advantage of the nomogram model constructed in this study lies in its intuitive nature yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2033 and ease of use. the model transforms complex statistical results into a simple, graphical scoring system, enabling educators without a statistical background to use it with ease. on a practical level, schools and teachers can utilize this nomogram to conduct prospective assessments of student academic performance. by inputting a student’s specific information on the various indicators, one can quickly obtain a quantified probability of that student’s achievement being above the in-school average. this helps educators identify students who may face academic challenges, thereby allowing for early intervention and the provision of personalized academic support or psychological counseling to achieve targeted instruction. the model in this study also has certain limitations. on the one hand, there are limitations in the scope of variable selection. although this study, guided by the i-e-o model, included 14 variables from the ‘input’ and ‘environment’ dimensions, it may still have overlooked other potentially important factors. these include teacher-level variables such as teaching style, peer effects, and other deeper psychological variables like student selfefficacy and resilience. these unmeasured variables may have constrained the upper limit of the model’s predictive accuracy. on the other hand, there are boundaries at the methodological level. first, the model constructed in this study is a predictive model; it reveals correlations between variables and the outcome, rather than strict causal relationships. second, the model’s external validity requires further examination. although the model demonstrated good internal validation, its generalizability to different regions or types of schools still needs to be verified through further empirical testing. conclusion and limitation this study systematically investigated the multifaceted factors influencing the academic performance of middle school students and constructed a nomogram model with good predictive performance (auc = 0.756). the conclusions indicate that psychological capital that originates from the family and is internalized by the student, especially educational expectations, serves as the core driving force that surpasses other variables, highlighting the decisive role of intrinsic motivation in academic achievement. the study also revealed the differential returns of various academic involvement behaviors and elucidated that the influence of macro-structural factors, such as hukou type and school type, is largely realized indirectly through more direct micro-level pathways like family cultural background and actual school resources. overall, this study not only identified the key predictors of academic performance but also provided deeper insights into the complex interaction among these factors, offering a valuable empirical reference for educational practice and policy interventions. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2034 this study has several limitations. first, the data used were collected from surveys conducted between 2014 and 2015, the most recent available from the ceps dataset. however, to more accurately and comprehensively investigate factors influencing junior high school students’ academic performance, future studies should employ more representative and up-to-date data that reflect changes in the educational context. second, the study focused exclusively on grade 9 students. as final-year students, they face unique curricular demands and psychological pressures. therefore, further research is needed to examine the factors influencing academic performance among students in earlier grades of junior high school. yan & li. (china). factors influencing junior high school students’ academics. bece, vol.21, no.2, 2025 2035 references astin, a. w. 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(2020). school climate, academic selfefficacy and student achievement. educational psychology, 41(4), 467482. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.202 0.1813690 received: september 16, 2025 revised: october 30, 2025 accepted: november 08, 2025 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9121-z https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9121-z https://doi.org/10.3868/s110-007-022-0009-6 https://doi.org/10.3868/s110-007-022-0009-6 https://doi.org/10.16477/j.cnki.issn1674-2311.2020.02.009 https://doi.org/10.16477/j.cnki.issn1674-2311.2020.02.009 https://doi.org/10.16477/j.cnki.issn1674-2311.2020.01.001 https://doi.org/10.16477/j.cnki.issn1674-2311.2020.01.001 https://doi.org/10.54097/ajmss.v3i3.11127 https://doi.org/10.54097/ajmss.v3i3.11127 https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2020.1813690 https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2020.1813690 lenient-understanding parenting and the academic grit of secondary school students: the mediating effects of academic interest and the sense of meaning in study xiaona li, 1,2 xiaohua li, 1 huashan liu2 1. school of education, long dong university, qingyang 745000, gansu, china. 2. school of psychology, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. abstract: the study investigates how lenient-understanding parenting affects the academic grit of secondary school students from the perspective of positive psychology, based on a questionnaire survey of 2,101 secondary school students. its research findings reveal a significantly positive correlation between lenient-understanding parenting and student academic grit, which is mediated by student academic interest and the student’s sense of meaning in study. best evidence in chinese education 2025; 20(1):1965-1968 doi: 10.15354/bece.25.ar150 how to cite: li, x., li, x., & liu, h. (2025). lenient-understanding parenting and the academic grit of secondary school students: the mediating effects of academic interest and the sense of meaning in study. best evidence in chinese education, 2025, 20(1):1965-1968. keywords: lenient-understanding parenting; academic grit; academic interest; sense of meaning in study wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.20, no.1, 2025 1966 about the author: xiaona li, school of education, long dong university, qingyang 745000, gansu, china; school of psychology, central china normal university, wuhan 430079, hubei, china. e-mail: hzd76@163.com correspondence to: xiaona li at long dong university and central china normal university in china. conflict of interests: none funding: no funding sources declared. ai declaration: the author affirms that artificial intelligence did not contribute to the process of preparing the work. introduction his study investigates the relationship between lenient-understanding parenting and the academic grit of secondary school students and analyzes the mediating effects of student academic interest and the student’s sense of meaning in study on the relationship, from the perspective of positive psychology. the study’s results reveal the positive effects of lenient-understanding parenting on academic progress of secondary school students, which provide new perspectives on school and home education, as well as evidence for relevant education policies and practices. research methodology sources of data using the method of cluster sampling, the study surveyed 2,300 secondary school students through questionnaires. a total of 2,101 valid questionnaires (97.72% of the questionnaires distributed) were retrieved. the sample consists of 1,233 male and 868 female students, with an average age of 16.012 years. among them, 681 were junior secondary, 1,164 senior secondary, and 256 vocational students. the analysis model and variables a mediating effect model was created to facilitate a thorough examination of how lenient-understanding parenting affects the academic grit of secondary school students. in this model, lenient-understanding parenting is the core explanatory variable, measured with the parenting style questionnaire developed by zhang and liu (2013). student academic grit is the dependent variable, assessed with the secondary school student grit self-report scale created by li et al. (2020). for a more precise evaluation of the effects of lenient-understanding parenting on student academic grit, the study introduces two mediating variables, namely student academic interest and the student’s sense of meaning in study. they are measured with the interestenjoyment subscale from the intrinsic motivation inventory (markland & hardy, 1997) and the subscale with the items on the meaning of study and its t mailto:hzd76@163.com wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.20, no.1, 2025 1967 pursuit from the senses of meaning in life scale (adapted by cheng et al., 2019), respectively. the study conducts pearson correlation analysis and mediation effect analysis via model 6 of the process macro developed by hayes, using the software spss 24.0. research findings  there is a significant positive correlation between lenientunderstanding parenting and student academic grit (r = 0.268, p < 0.01), indicating that this parenting style can directly predict student academic grit.  student academic interest and the student’s sense of meaning in study have significant mediating effects on the relationship between lenient-understanding parenting and student academic grit, including (i) the independent mediating effect of student academic interest, with an effect size of 0.091, accounting for 34.04% of the total effect; (ii) the independent mediating effect of the student’s sense of meaning in study, with an effect size of 0.005, accounting for 1.91% of the total effect; (iii) the chain mediating effect of student academic interest and the student’s sense of meaning in study, with an effect size of 0.013, accounting for 4.89% of the total effect. the combined mediation effects account for 40.84% of the total effect, with student academic interest contributing the most (34.04%).  lenient-understanding parenting heightens student academic grit by fostering their academic interest and senses of meaning in study. © 2025 insights publisher. all rights reserved. creative commons noncommercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the insights publisher. reference: cheng, j., yang, r., guo, k., yan, j., & ni, s. (2019). the role of the family in boosting the hopes of vocational college students: the mediating effects of the meaning of life and its pursuit. chinese journal of clinical psychology, 27(03), 577-581. doi: https://doi.org/10.16128/j.cnki.10053611.2019.03.030. li, x., li, x., wang, x., & xia, y. (2020). the impact of inter-classmate relationships on the cultivation of grit in junior secondary school students: the mediating effect of self-worth. educational research and experiments, 2020(01), 92-96. available at: http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.16128/j.cnki.1005-3611.2019.03.030 https://doi.org/10.16128/j.cnki.1005-3611.2019.03.030 wang. (china). the impact of teacher leadership. bece, vol.20, no.1, 2025 1968 https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=xmmmt_ij6vhskp4dssrkcbhwcichies6boijbalnnh luslg_agsshdsnrcazvw1t7zn2whl0hdcnidutqngniib1x4eomdcrnotlqxsayzsnctva4brnxdejtbbvy9oe5ghwbroo6jtxcb ofju6woyo-73zgtabx2xeapi5ph91ylmcuewhxa==&uniplatform=nzkpt&language=chs markland, d., & hardy, l. (1997). on the factorial and construct validity of the intrinsic motivation inventory: conceptual and operational concerns. research quarterly for exercise and sport, 68(1), 2032. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.1997.10608863 zhang, t., liu, x., cheng, z., wang, x., chen, m., & zhu, y. (2013). re-testing the reliability and validity of the parenting style questionnaire. chinese journal of clinical psychology, 21(03), 420421+392. doi: https://doi.org/10.16128/j.cnki.1005-3611.2013.03.009 the chinese version of this article has been published in psychological research, 2025; 18(01): 7987. the english version has been authorized for being publication in bece by the author(s) and the chinese journal. 黎晓娜,李晓华,刘华山,龚少英. 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