Improving Compulsory Education in Underdeveloped Regions Through Systemic Teaching Research Reform

• In Event: Using Evidence-Based Practice to Improve Education in Underdeveloped Regions: Four Empirical Studies from One Longitudinal Project in China

Proposal

Compulsory education is the education every child should complete as a civic right and obligation. The compulsory education in China consists of six years of primary education and three years of lower secondary education. With decades of national endeavors, almost all age-appropriate children in China can currently complete their nine-year compulsory education. However, the quality of compulsory education, measured by school resources, teacher quality, and student performance, significantly varies across different regions. While well-developed urban regions (e.g., Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong) can provide high-quality compulsory education to their students, many geographically remote, economically lagging, ethnic-minority-populated regions (e.g., Guizhou, Tibet) face many and various challenges in providing equally high-quality education (Liu et al., 2020). Thus, improving the quality of compulsory education in underdeveloped regions has become a crucial issue for educational researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in China and many other countries (Holsinger et al., 2009; Xu & Wu, 2022).

As part of a large project on evidence-based educational practice and improvement in County Jin – a remote and mountainous region in China, this present study examines teachers’ perceptions of compulsory education in their county and how to improve its quality through systemic teaching research reform. The rationale for focusing on teachers and their engagement with teaching research is that teachers are the primary actors in compulsory education and also the most crucial determinant of the quality of compulsory education (Robertson, 2012). Furthermore, teaching research (教研, jiao yan) is an essential institutional infrastructure supporting Chinese teachers to reflectively, collaboratively, and continuously study and improve their teaching performance (Li et al., 2019). Therefore, systematically reforming teaching research is a potentially high-leveraging practice for improving the quality of the teacher workforce and compulsory education in underdeveloped regions.

Guided by the above research purpose, we collected two sets of empirical data in the present study: 1) a questionnaire survey data generated from 984 teachers in County Jin, focusing on the teachers’ perceptions of the status quo, problems, and improvement pathways of compulsory education in their county; 2) one-on-one interviews with 12 purposefully sampled teachers, probing the teachers’ experiences and perspectives on bettering compulsory education through systemic teaching research reform. A combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data has produced three preliminary findings. First, most teachers expressed concerns about the quality of compulsory education in their county, and they mainly attributed this problem to the theory/lecture-dominated, externally imposed, and bureaucratically organized teaching research practices. Second, most teachers concurred that systematically reforming teaching research to be more practice-oriented, internally driven, and democratically organized could be effective in boosting their active engagement and professional improvement. Third, many participating teachers considered that internal support (e.g., a shared vision of education reform) and external support (e.g., professional guidance from experts and favorable policy discourses) were pivotal for advancing systemic reform forward.

This study enriches the international literature on educational improvement in underdeveloped regions with recent empirical evidence from the Chinese context. It also highlights the importance of leveraging the “vital few” to promote systematic educational reform and improvement in challenging contexts.

Author

• Li Yuan, Beijing Normal University