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 short-

ening 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 opportu-

nities for students of different genders and urban-rural backgrounds to partic-

ipate 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 in-

creased, leading to the shift from a male-predominated to female-

predominated composition of pre-service teacher body. As of 2019, girls had 

six times more opportunities than boys to enroll in teacher education pro-

grams, indicating a severe gender imbalance in pre-service teacher body 

composition. This imbalance existed among students from both urban and ru-

ral areas. 

Source: Journal of South China Normal University, 2023; 2023(1):38-47. 

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mailto:wwy5819@163.com