Exhausted but Effective? A Study of Teacher Burnout and Student Achievement in Chinese Middle Schools

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Wednesday 1:45pm
  In Poster Session: Exhausted but Effective? Teacher Burnout & Student Achievement in Chinese Middle Schools

Abstract

Teacher burnout is widely recognized as a threat to both teacher well-being and student outcomes, yet most existing evidence comes from Western contexts. This study uses data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) to examine how subject teachers’ burnout relates to student academic performance in middle schools. Focusing on the three core subjects: Chinese, Math, and English, we apply inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to account for confounders, followed by weighted least squares (WLS) regression. Results show a consistent positive relationship between teacher burnout and student achievement: the more burned out the teacher, the better students perform, highlighting a “burnout but persistence” phenomenon in China’s middle schools. This association is particularly strong in Chinese, indicating subject-specific variation.

Author

• Feifan Shan, University of Pennsylvania