Tanja Carmel Sargent

Keeping Teachers Happy: Job Satisfaction among Primary School Teachers in Rural Northwest China

Numerous empirical studies from developing countries have noted that parental education has a robust and positive effect on child learning, a result that is often attributed to more educated parents making greater investments in their childrens human capital. However, the nature of any such investment has not been well understood. This study examines how parental education affects various parental investments in goods and time used in childrens human capital production via an unusually detailed survey from rural China. It is found that more educated parents make greater educational investments in both goods and time and that these relationships are generally robust to a rich set of controls. Evidence suggests that making greater investments in both goods and time stems both from higher expected returns to education for children and from different preferences for education among more educated parents. A second key finding is that the marginal effect of mothers education on educational investments is generally larger than that of fathers education. Disciplines International and Comparative Education Comments Copyright The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted from Comparative Education Review, Volume 49, Issue 2, May 2005, pages 173-204. Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/503582 This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/gansu_papers/1 Comparative Education Review, vol. 49, no. 2. 2005 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. 0010-4086/2005/4902-0003

Professional Learning Communities and the Diffusion of Pedagogical Innovation in the Chinese Education System

05.00 Comparative Education Review 173 Keeping Teachers Happy: Job Satisfaction among Primary School Teachers in Rural Northwest China TANJA SARGENT AND EMILY HANNUM

New Curriculum reform implementation and the transformation of educational beliefs, practices, and structures in Gansu province

Pedagogical innovations have been diffusing unevenly through the Chinese education system as a result of the implementation of the New Curriculum Reforms. Drawing on large-scale linked teacher and principal survey data from the Gansu Survey of Children and Families, this article investigates the extent to which interlocking teacher networks, which are a characteristic of professional learning communities in China, play a role in the diffusion of pedagogical innovations. The article argues that, despite teachers’ pessimistic attitudes about the viability of reform success in the face of the examination system, innovative ideas about pedagogy diffuse successfully throughout the education system as a result of frequent opportunities for teachers to interact and observe each other teaching in school-level professional learning communities, and as a result of the cultivation of cosmopolitan external networks for officially designated near-peer teacher opinion leaders.

Teaching Reform in Chinese Undergraduate Education

Response to the implementation of the new curriculum reforms varies by regional context. A study of the effects of reform implementation on basic education in rural Gansu contributes to understanding the reforms in resource-constrained environments in China. Drawing on rich data from linked teacher, principal, student, and county administrator questionnaires available in three waves of the Gansu Survey of Children and Families, this article examines the relationships between new curriculum reform implementation and the transformation of educational beliefs, practices, structures, and student outcomes in primary and junior middle schools in rural Gansu.

Doing More With Less: Teacher Professional Learning Communities in Resource-Constrained Primary Schools in Rural China

The current reforms to higher education in contemporary China are guided by the National Medium and Long-Term Education Reform Development Plan (2010–2020) (Guojia zhongchangqi jiaoyu gaige he fazhan guihua gangyao 国家中长期教育改革和发展规划纲要) and also the “13th Five Year Plan.” These documents have shifted the focus from higher education expansion to raising the quality of teaching and learning that students have access to. In particular, there is a greater emphasis on learning outcomes. What will students be able to do as a result of their education? Additionally, a key concern is to make undergraduate teaching more student-centered and engage students in more active hands-on and experiential learning. In the United States, access to quality teaching in undergraduate education, especially in large research universities has been a topic of interest and concern for several decades. In these universities, the inherent conflict between a faculty tenure promotion system based on research productivity has been at odds with ensuring quality teaching (AACU 2002; Boyer 1990). University administrators in higher education institutions in China face the same challenges as they endeavor to reform teaching approaches and improve the quality of education for their undergraduate students, as outlined in President Wei Jianguo’s article in this issue. When talking about undergraduate teaching quality it becomes necessary to discuss evaluation and monitoring of teaching. As the interest in monitoring teaching quality in higher education increases around the world, a corresponding increase in attention is placed on evaluation and accountability of faculty instruction. In the U.S., faculty have been notoriously resistant to intervention but are now increasingly being urged to have clear goals that are framed around the learning outcomes of their students. Accrediting agencies in the U.S., such as the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (2009), exert pressures on universities to devise goals related to student learning and to demonstrate approaches to faculty and student assessment that determine the extent to which the university is meeting these goals in enacting their own development plans and this affects the universities in certain ways. There is still much debate as to the most effective ways to evaluate and monitor faculty teaching quality. In this issue, Zhang Wei and Liu Baocun set a broad context for emerging trends in faculty evaluation around the world, provide a detailed and comprehensive overview of the Chinese Ministry of Education’s quality assurance system and monitoring mechanism for undergraduate teaching quality, and analyze the current challenges and issues for improvement.