Recent anecdotal reports suggest that dropout rates may be higher and actually increasing over time in poor rural areas. There are many reasons not to be surprised that there is a dropout problem, given the fact that China has a high level of poverty among the rural population, a highly...

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, China’s Ministry of Education embarked on an ambitious program of elementary school mergers by shutting down small village schools and opening up larger centralized schools in towns and county seats. The goal of the program was to improve the teacher and...

The overall goal of this study is to examine if there is a dropout problem in rural China and to explore the effectiveness of a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programme on the rate of dropping out. To meet this goal, we conduct a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to assess the impact of the CCT...

A significant gap remains between rural and urban students in the rate of admission to senior high school. One reason for this gap may be high tuition and other school fees at the senior high school level. By reducing student expectations of attending high school, high tuition and school fees...

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a high profile initiative to narrow the inequality of access to ICT and improve educational performance. However, there is little empirical evidence on its impacts. In order to assess the effectiveness of OLPC, we conducted a randomized experiment of OLPC with...

There is little evidence showing whether health information transmitted via text messages can change health and educational outcomes. We conducted a randomized field experiment involving 900 primary students in rural China to study whether a health education campaign conducted via text message...

Recent attention has been placed on whether computer assisted learning (CAL) can effectively improve learning outcomes. However, the empirical evidence of its impact is mixed. Previous studies suggest that the lack of an impact in developed countries may be attributable to substitution of...

Recent anecdotal reports suggest that dropout rates may be higher and actually increasing over time in poor rural areas. There are many reasons not to be surprised that there is a dropout problem, given the fact that China has a high level of poverty among the rural population, a highly...