Empower Rural China Students - 21st Century Skills

The rural Household Reading Site (HRS) project, an EEF-funded project, 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 less 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.

A total of 10 households in two rural villages in China participated in the HRS project. Each family received a bookshelf and age-appropriate reading materials (about 100 books) for children in that household and neighboring families. Selected families were trained on how to run the household-based library to offer convenient access to books and foster a culture of reading among neighborhood children.

To evaluate the impact of the HRS project, pretest measurement was conducted in June 2023, right before the end of the 2022-2023 academic year in China. Then, the HRS project was implemented. The posttest measurement was conducted in January 2024, after the conclusion of the fall 2023 semester, allowing children a full summer and a full semester to access and use the HRS. Findings indicated that children’s academic performance, as perceived by their teachers, increased significantly after the implementation of the HRS. The study was presented at the 2024 Asian Conference on Education and International Development.