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In response to the COVID-19 epidemic, many education systems have relied on distance learning and educational technologies to an unprecedented degree. However, rigorous empirical research on the impacts on learning under these conditions is still scarce. We present the first large-scale, quantitative evidence detailing how school closures affected education in China. The data set includes households and teachers of 4,360 rural and urban primary school students. We find that although the majority of students engaged in distance education, many households encountered difficulties including barriers to learning (such as access to appropriate digital devices and study spaces), curricular delays, and costs to parents equivalent to between 3.5 and 6 months of income. We also find significant disparities across rural and urban households.

The previous expansion of EdTech as a substitute for traditional learning around the world, the recent full-scale substitution due to COVID-19, and potential future shifts to blended approaches suggest that it is imperative to understand input substitutability between in-person and online learning. We explore input substitutability in education by employing a novel randomized controlled trial that varies dosage of computer-assisted learning (CAL) as a substitute for traditional learning through homework. Moving from zero to a low level of CAL, we find positive substitutability of CAL for traditional learning. Moving from a lower to a higher level of CAL, substitutability changes and is either neutral or even negative. The estimates suggest that a blended approach of CAL and traditional learning is optimal. The findings have direct implications for the rapidly expanding use of educational technology worldwide prior to, during, and after the pandemic.

Seeking ways to encourage broad compliance with health guidelines during the pandemic, especially among youth, we test two hypotheses pertaining to the optimal design of instructional interventions for improving COVID-19-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. We randomly assigned 8376 lower-middle income youth in urban India to three treatments: a concentrated and targeted fact-based, instructional intervention; a longer instructional intervention that provided the same facts along with underlying scientific concepts; and a control. Relative to existing efforts, we find that both instructional interventions increased COVID-19-related knowledge immediately after intervention. Relative to the shorter fact-based intervention, the longer intervention resulted in sustained improvements in knowledge, attitudes, and self-reported behavior. Instead of reducing attention and comprehension by youth, the longer scientific based treatment appears to have increased understanding and retention of the material. The findings are instrumental to understanding the design of instruction and communication in affecting compliance during this and future pandemics.

Whether faculty research affects college student learning has long been the subject of debate. Previous studies use subjective measures of student learning; focus on correlation rather than causation; and typically focus on one college, thus lacking generalizability. Using unique, large-scale survey and assessment data that we collected from nationally representative samples of STEM undergraduates in China, India, and Russia, as well as a causal identification strategy that accounts for differential sorting of students to faculty, we present generalizable estimates of the effect of faculty research on objective, standardized measures of student learning. Results show that faculty research has a negative effect on student learning, suggesting direct trade-offs between the university's dual mission of producing research and learning.

We examine the effects of computer-based versus paper-based assessment of critical thinking skills, adapted from English (in the U.S.) to Chinese. Using data collected based on a random assignment between the two modes in multiple Chinese colleges, we investigate mode effects from multiple perspectives: mean scores, measurement precision, item functioning (i.e. item difficulty and discrimination), response behavior (i.e. test completion and item omission), and user perceptions. Our findings shed light on assessment and item properties that could be the sources of mode effects. At the test level, we find that the computer-based test is more difficult and more speeded than the paper-based test. We speculate that these differences are attributable to the test's structure, its high demands on reading, and test-taking flexibility afforded under the paper testing mode. Item-level evaluation allows us to identify item characteristics that are prone to mode effects, including targeted cognitive skill, response type, and the amount of adaptation between modes. Implications for test design are discussed, and actionable design suggestions are offered with the goal of minimizing mode effect.

The demand for large-scale assessments in higher education, especially at an international scale, is growing. A major challenge of conducting these assessments, however, is that they require understanding and balancing the interests of multiple stakeholders (government officials, university administrators, and students) and also overcoming potential unwillingness of these stakeholders to participate. In this paper, we take the experience of the Study of Undergraduate Performance (SUPER) in conducting a large-scale international assessment as a case study. We discuss ways in which we mitigated perceived risks, built trust, and provided incentives to ensure the successful engagement of stakeholders during the study's implementation.

University faculty are frequently tasked with promoting academic honesty among students. However, there is little reliable evidence about whether faculty actions can prevent academic dishonesty. The purpose of this study is to examine whether more severe punishments from faculty can reduce academic dishonesty among students. We analyze nationally representative, longitudinal and matched data on engineering undergraduates and faculty from 33 universities in Russia, and document extremely high and increasing rates of dishonest academic attitudes among students, especially among the higher achieving students. In the first two years of study the proportion of students tolerant to academic dishonesty increases by 5 percentage points. We then show that despite the tide of increasing academic dishonesty among students, more severe punishments from faculty significantly and substantially improve student attitudes towards academic dishonesty. Taken together, the findings emphasize the importance of strengthening the role of faculty in promoting academic honesty among students.

Critical thinking has been identified as a crucial general skill contributing to academic and career success in the twenty-first century. With the increasing demands of the modern workplace and a global trend of accountability in higher education, educators and employers pay great attention to the development of students' critical thinking skills throughout their training. Therefore, there is an urgent need worldwide for an updated and comprehensive assessment tool of college-level critical thinking. This paper reports on the preliminary validation for the Russian version of the "HEIghten"® Critical Thinking assessment developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS). Based on a large Russian college student sample (N = 1060), we evaluated the psychometric quality of the items, individual and institution-level reliability, external validity, and student perceptions. Overall, the results suggested good psychometric quality, except that a few items showed low discriminating power and should be further examined with a second wave of data collection. IRT analyses revealed testlet effects and supported the essentially unidimensional structure of the measure. Appropriate correlations with external criteria provided support for the measure's convergent validity. Implications of the preliminary validation study results and the future research agenda, especially the need to collect longitudinal data, are discussed.

Researchers have long postulated the existence of a big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) in which a student's relative academic standing in class or school affects his or her academic self-concept. Few studies, however, use causal research designs to identify whether the BFLPE exists and whether it is generalizable across a wide variety of contexts. The goal of our study is to provide causal estimates of the BFLPE and examine whether the estimates differ by gender and national context. To fulfill our goal, we analyze cross-national TIMSS 2011 data using a cross-subject student-fixed effects model. Our results provide the strongest evidence to date that a sizeable BFLPE exists in STEM subjects regardless of gender and national context.

An increasing number of policy makers in developing countries have made the mass expansion of upper-secondary vocational education and training (VET) a top priority. The goal of this study is to examine whether VET fulfills these objectives of building skills and abilities along multiple dimensions and further identify which school-level factors help vocational students build these skills and abilities. To fulfill this goal, we analyzed representative, longitudinal data that we collected on more than 12,000 students from 118 schools in one province of central China. First, descriptive analysis shows that approximately 90 percent of VET students do not make any gains in vocational or general skills. In addition, negative behaviors (misbehavior in the classroom, antisocial behavior, and other risky behaviors) are highly prevalent among VET students. A nontrivial proportion of student internships also fail to meet minimum government requirements for student safety and well-being. Perhaps as a result of these outcomes, more than 60 percent of students express dissatisfaction with their VET programs, as evidenced by either self-reports or dropping out. Finally, using a multilevel model, we find that school inputs (such as school size, teacher qualifications, and per pupil expenditures) are not correlated with vocational and general skill at the end of the school year, or student dropout in the academic year.

The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze the relationship between ability tracking and student social trust, in the context of low-income students in developing countries. Drawing on the results from a longitudinal study among 1,436 low-income students across 132 schools in rural China, we found a significant lack of interpersonal trust and confidence in public institutions among poor rural young adults. We also found that slow-tracked students have a significantly lower level of social trust, comprised of interpersonal trust and confidence in public institutions, relative to their fast-tracked peers. This disparity might further widen the gap between relatively privileged students who stay in school and less privileged students who drop out of school. These results suggest that making high school accessible to more students may improve social trust among rural low-income young adults.

Assessing student learning outcomes has become a global trend in higher education. In this paper, we report on the validation of the Chinese HEIghten® Critical Thinking assessment with a nationally representative sample of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science students from 35 institutions in China. Key findings suggest that there was a test delivery mode effect favoring the paper tests over the online tests. In general, the psychometric quality of the items was satisfactory for low-stakes, group-level uses but there were a few items with low discrimination that awaits further investigation. The relationships between test scores and various external variables such as college entrance examination scores, university elite status and student perceptions of the test were as expected. We conclude with speculations on the key findings and discussion of directions for future research.

International assessments, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), are being used to recommend educational policies to improve student achievement. This study shows that the cross-sectional estimates behind such recommendations may be biased. We use a unique data set from one country that applied the PISA mathematics test in 2012 in ninth grade to all students who had taken the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS) test in 2011 and collected information on students' teachers in ninth grade. These data allowed us to more precisely estimate the effects of classroom variables on students' PISA performance. Our results suggest that the positive roles of teacher "quality" and "opportunity to learn" in improving student performance are much more modest than claimed in PISA documents.

Although a large number of students around the world attend vocational schools, there is little evidence about what factors matter for learning in these schools. Using data on approximately 1,400 vocational students in one eastern province in China, we employ a student fixed-effects model to identify whether teacher enterprise experience, direct occupational experience, and not just program training increases students' technical skills. We find this to be the case, especially for students who began the program as high performers. In contrast, "professional certification" that is given to teachers who participate in short-term training programs has no positive impact.

An alarming number of students drop out of junior high school in developing countries. In this study, we examine the impacts of providing a social-emotional learning (SEL) program on the dropout behavior and learning anxiety of students in the first two years of junior high. We do so by analyzing data from a randomized controlled trial involving 70 junior high schools and 7,495 students in rural China. After eight months, the SEL program reduces dropout by 1.6 percentage points and decreases learning anxiety by 2.3 percentage points. Effects are no longer statistically different from zero after 15 months, perhaps due to decreasing student interest in the program. However, we do find that the program reduces dropout among students at high risk of dropping out (older students and students with friends who have already dropped out), both after eight and 15 months of exposure to the SEL program.

Relatively little is known about differences in the quality of engineering education within and across countries because of the lack of valid instruments that allow for the assessment and comparison of engineering students' skill gains. The purpose of our study is to develop and validate instruments that can be used to compare student skill gains in mathematics and physics courses in undergraduate engineering programmes across countries. The approach includes procedures to establish construct validity and other necessary psychometric properties. Drawing on data collected from over 24 engineering experts and 3600 engineering students across Russia and China, we establish that it is possible to develop valid, equitable and cross-nationally comparable instruments that can assess and compare skill gains.

A huge increase in engineering graduates from the BRIC countries in recent decades potentially threatens the competitiveness of developed countries in producing high value-added products and services, while also holding great promise for substantially increasing the level of global basic and applied innovation. The key question is whether the quality of these new BRIC engineers will be high enough to actualize this potential. The objective of our study is to assess the evolving capacity of BRIC higher education systems to produce qualified engineering graduates. To meet this objective, we compare developments in the quality of undergraduate engineering programs across elite and non-elite higher education tiers within and across each BRIC country. To assess and compare the quality of engineering education across the BRIC countries, we use multiple sources of primary and secondary data gathered from each BRIC country from 2008 to 2011. In combination with this, we utilize a production function approach that focuses on key input-, process- and outcome-based indicators associated with the quality of education programs. Our analysis suggests that in all four countries, a minority of engineering students receives high quality training in elite institutions while the majority of students receive low quality training in non-elite institutions. Our analysis also shows how the BRIC countries vary in their capacity to improve the quality of engineering education.

Because higher education serves both public and private interests, the way it is conceived and financed is contested politically, appearing in different forms in different societies. What is public and private in education is a political--social construct, subject to various political forces, primarily interpreted through the prism of the state. Mediated through the state, this construct can change over time as the economic and social context of higher education changes. In this paper, we analyze through the state's financing of higher education how it changes as a public/private good and the forces that impinge on states to influence such changes. To illustrate our arguments, we discuss trends in higher education financing in the BRIC countries--Brazil, Russia, India, and China. We show that in addition to increased privatization of higher education financing, BRIC states are increasingly differentiating the financing of elite and non-elite institutions.

This article analyzes rural middle school students' tracking intentions (academic high school, vocational high school, or going to work), actual education choices, and the factors affecting them, using a random sampled baseline survey and follow-up survey of 2,216 second-year students residing outside of county seats in forty-one impoverished counties in a western province of China. We find that the path of vocational high school is not preferred by rural middle school students. Most students will select academic high school over vocational high school. But actual tracking results seem to indicate that the high school dreams of a considerable proportion of students are interrupted or shattered. We use multiple logistic regression to analyze factors influencing tracking intentions and actual education choices, including student grades, parents' education level, per capita household income, household type, parents' migrant worker status, and awareness of the government policy of financial aid for vocational students. We briefly discuss social stratification and the social and economic implications of rural middle school students' education choices, and question some of the policies for developing secondary vocational education.

Based on findings from a field survey, this article presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between the family background of Chinese high school graduates and their tendency to give up the opportunity to go to college or other forms of Higher Education (HE). The multinomial logistic regression results indicate that family background has significant influences on a high school graduates' choice to give up the opportunity to go to college. These findings suggest that further surveys into the inequity of the opportunities of attending college, which are related to family background, should be carried out, and from them certain measures be undertaken to address this issue.

We examine the impact of primary school mergers on academic performance of students using a dataset that we collected using a survey designed specifically to examine changes in the academic performance of students before and after their schools were merged. We use difference-in-differences and propensity score matching approaches and demonstrate that overall the primary school merger has not harmed the academic performance of students, as some have claimed. We do find, however, that the timing of mergers matter; when students are older (e.g., the fourth grade) their grades rise after merging. The grades of younger students, however, fall. (Contains 9 tables and 4 figures.)

The diffusion of fission products (FPs) in reactor materials affects the nuclear source term. The diffusion coefficient itself is measured through various techniques. In the release method, it is of interest to know the initial distribution of the FPs in nuclear graphite or other materials from an exterior measurement like mass surface flux or cumulative mass release. In this paper, a Fredholm integral of the first kind is considered, relating the initial distribution to the cumulative release fraction of a diffusant from a spherically symmetric body. The Tikhonov regularization, conjugate gradient least-squares (CGLS) method, and algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) with nonnegativity and conserved mass constraints were compared to fractional release data from a simulated linear profile using data for Cs diffusion in a 0.32-cm sphere NBG-18 at 1090 K. The Tikhonov regularization was shown to provide a better estimation of the initial linear distribution than the CGLS and ART methods. The performance of the Tikhonov regularization was further examined with simulated constant, quartic, and exponential initial distributions. The Tikhonov regularization provided a reasonable recovery of the exponential profile, while the estimation of the linear, constant, and quartic profiles suffers from several issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 71-year-old woman with a history of atrial fibrillation underwent a catheter-based ablation procedure. Months later, she presented with dyspnea and a left-sided pleural effusion. Diagnostic evaluation revealed left-sided pulmonary venous occlusion, with essentially absent left lung perfusion. The patient underwent left pneumonectomy, with left atrial appendage occlusion. Although lobectomy for pulmonary venous occlusion of a single vein after pulmonary vein isolation has been described, this appears to be a novel report of occluded pulmonary venous drainage of an entire lung necessitating pneumonectomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]