Empower Rural China Students - 21st Century Skills

EEF is funding Professor Zizhou Wang’s Household Reading Site (HRS) project, which aims to increase reading access and improve literacy among rural children by placing shelves of books in selected rural families and establishing neighborhood reading centers in Chinese villages. The HRS project seeks to tackle an increasingly dire social problem that accompanies China's rapid urbanization – the crisis of “left-behind” children. In search of better job opportunities, many rural adults migrate to cities and leave their children behind. There are about 70 million left-behind children in China, and they experience various effects of poverty, including poor quality of education. Researchers from the Stanford Rural Education Action Program found that almost half of the left-behind children in the poorest central and western parts of China had dropped out of school by Grade 9. They cautioned that the high dropout rates may increase unemployment and widen inequality, which could lead to serious implications nationally and even internationally. One manifestation of disparities in education is rural children’s significant lack of access to suitable and adequate reading materials to develop their reading skills and interests. More than 70% of children in impoverished rural areas had access to only 10 or fewer extracurricular books a year and nearly 20% had none. Recognizing this barrier in reading and literacy development, the HRS project aims to make reading materials easily accessible to rural children by creating neighborhood reading centers in selected households. HRS has identified a total of 15 villages to implement the intervention. At each village, 5 households are selected to receive a bookshelf and age-appropriate reading materials for children in that household and neighboring families. Selected families are trained on how to run the household-based library to offer convenient access to books and foster a culture of reading among neighborhood children.

Professor Lili Luo is currently working with Professor Wang to develop an impact evaluation model for the HRS project. Impact evaluations help strengthen the evidence base for decision-making when developing programs and policies to reduce poverty and improve people’s lives. Evidence generated by impact evaluations informs strategic planning, project design, and resource decisions, and contributes to a greater body of knowledge and learning.

The project team has designed the instruments and methods for the impact evaluation. It is being pilot-tested at a selected village. The field team has completed the pretest data collection and analysis. The data is being processed and analyzed. The post-test will occur around February 2024. 

The team has submitted an abstract to the 2024 Asian Conference on Education and International Development (https://aceid.iafor.org/call-for-papers/?gad_source=1), and it has been accepted. The team will deliver a presentation at the conference and share the project findings with audiences from one of the most active Asian communities about education and international development.