When I first started the Stanford e-Japan program, I never expected to be up on that podium making a speech [at Stanford University]… Yet there I stood, a little more grown up than before.
—Seiji Wakabayashi, Kumon Kokusai Junior-Senior High School

If I hadn’t participated in this program, I wouldn’t have been as interested in the U.S. as I am right now.
—Hikaru Suzuki, Senior High School at Otsuka, University of Tsukuba

I am very grateful to be given the chance to think about and to discuss with my fellow classmates what we should do in order to strengthen the U.S.–Japan relationship in the future.
—Haruki Kitagawa, Keio Senior High School

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) honored three of the top students of the inaugural 2015 Stanford e-Japan distance-learning course at an event at Stanford University on November 2, 2015. The three Stanford e-Japan Day honorees—Haruki Kitagawa (Keio Senior High School), Hikaru Suzuki (Senior High School at Otsuka, University of Tsukuba), and Seiji Wakabayashi (Kumon Kokusai Junior-Senior High School)—were recognized for their coursework and exceptional research essays that focused respectively on “A Comparison and Analysis of Educational Systems: What Is ‘Successful’ Education?,” “Why the Japanese Have a Good Image of America,” and “Schooling Japan.”

Stanford e-Japan Day featured welcoming comments by Dr. Gary Mukai, SPICE Director, and opening remarks on youth and the future of U.S.–Japan relations by Deputy Consul General Nobuhiro Watanabe, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco. Deputy Consul General Watanabe reinforced that youth are the ones to shoulder the U.S.–Japan relationship in the coming years, and that he is very much looking forward to the day when these students will engage in furthering our two countries’ strong ties.

Waka Takahashi Brown, Stanford e-Japan Instructor, gave an overview of the course. Stanford e-Japan is a distance-learning course on U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations that is offered annually to 25–30 high school students across Japan. The course presents a creative and innovative approach to teaching high school students about U.S. society and culture and U.S–Japan relations, and provides Japanese students with unique opportunities to interact with diplomats and top scholars affiliated with Stanford University and other institutions through online lectures and discussions. Importantly, the course introduces both American and Japanese perspectives on many historical and contemporary issues.

Each student honoree gave a succinct and lucid summary of his/her research essay and skillfully answered questions from the audience. Following the question-and-answer period, each student was presented with a plaque by Brown. Following the presentations, the students and their families joined the audience in a luncheon.

Following the event, Stanford undergraduate Mathieu Rolfo took time from his studies to take the three honorees on a tour of the Stanford campus. Mathieu is a former student in SPICE’s Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP), a distance-learning course on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations that has been offered to high school students in the United States for 12 years. RSP Instructor Naomi Funahashi honored Rolfo as one of her top three RSP students in 2011. Funahashi and Brown are planning to continue to engage their students “virtually” across the Pacific.

Stanford e-Japan has been generously funded for the first three years (2015–17) by a grant from the United States-Japan Foundation. SPICE supporter Amanda Minami Chao was in attendance and had the chance to share her thoughts on Brown University with student honoree Seiji Wakabayashi who plans to apply to her alma mater.

During a recent trip to Japan, Mukai had the opportunity to meet with other excellent students who were enrolled in the inaugural course. Shoko Kitamura, Waseda Honjo Senior High School, noted that she especially enjoyed a lecture by Dr. Joseph Yasutake on Japanese-American internment during which Yasutake shared his first-hand accounts. Tairi Goto, International School of Asia in Karuizawa, stated that he especially appreciated a class activity during which he was introduced to textbook descriptions of the atomic bombing of Japan from Taiwan, Korea, Japan, China, and the United States. Misaki Katayama, Hiroshima Prefectural Hiroshima Junior/Senior High School, commented on her interest in learning about Japanese picture brides who left prefectures like Hiroshima to the United States in the early 20th century.

Reflecting back on the inaugural Stanford e-Japan course and e-Japan Day, Brown noted, “The inaugural group of e-Japan students was phenomenal. It was wonderful to be able to meet at least some of the students in person on e-Japan Day, although I felt like I had already met them through our interaction during the course. I have no doubt that future leaders, diplomats, and entrepreneurs will emerge from this cohort. ”

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Two of the case studies Finney discussed during the week-long LAD workshop required students to analyze options to improve border management in Costa Rica and Indonesia. They were particularly relevant to Finney since much of his work in 2015 for Save the Children has involved directing food and medical supplies to families in the wake of the Nepal earthquake, the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and elsewhere. 

“I deal all the time with the complex behaviors of governments and difficult regulatory environments where the goal posts keep moving,” he said. “The LAD training really helped me understand all this in a more holistic way.”

The Leadership Academy for Development, part of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, trains government officials and business leaders from developing countries to help the private sector be a constructive force for economic growth and development. Participants benefit from lectures and discussions centered on real-life case studies led by a team of international scholars and local experts. Students are also required to work in teams to apply the ideas and skills they have gained to specific challenges they are facing in their professional duties.

That team assignment “triggered something for me,” Finney recalled. He had been thinking about Save the Children's work to persuade more motorcycle riders in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia to wear helmets. Motorcycle accidents are now the leading cause of childhood deaths in Thailand, for instance, where parents often balance multiple kids on their bikes, and teenagers as young as 13 race one another through traffic-clogged streets. Thai law requires all riders to wear helmets but few people comply and police are often reluctant to issue tickets.

Finney and the Save the Children team are applying some of these ideas around compliance and enforcement in Thailand: The “Helmet Hero” campaign includes playful videos designed to appeal to young people that have attracted a wide following. One video, for instance, features a monk who warns young people that even his blessing can’t protect them if they don’t wear a helmet. 

After the Singapore workshop, Finney stayed in touch with LAD-affiliated faculty member Kent Weaver who will teach the LAD curriculum at SMU again early next year.

“Kent suggested I write the helmet campaign as a case study about how to affect behavior change.” Finney has done that and come January, the student will become the teacher—Finney will take the podium, helping to teach a new group of LAD participants. 

A conference that honored the life and scholarly contributions of Stanford economist Masahiko Aoki was held at Stanford. Dozens of friends, family and community members paid tribute to Aoki, the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Economics, emeritus, who died in July at the age of 77.

Eleven renowned economists and social scientists gave talks on Aoki’s extensive fields of research in economic theory, institutional analysis, corporate governance, and the Japanese and Chinese economies at the Dec. 4 conference, which was followed by a memorial ceremony the next day.

“When we contacted people to speak at this conference, few people turned us down,” said Stanford professor Takeo Hoshi. “The reason for this is Masa. It shows how much Masa was respected and how much his work is valued.”

The events were hosted by the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Graduate School of Business, Department of Economics and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

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Aoki came to Stanford in 1967 as an assistant professor, held faculty appointments at Kyoto University and Harvard, and returned to Stanford in 1984. He retired to emeritus status at Stanford in 2005.

Throughout the conference, Aoki was described as an astute professor and colleague, valuable mentor and loyal friend by the many speakers and participants who shared works, stories and multimedia featuring their interactions with Aoki.

Aoki pioneered the field of comparative institutional analysis (CIA) with a team of scholars at Stanford: Avner Greif, John Litwack, Paul Milgrom and Yingyi Qian, among others. CIA analyzes and compares different institutions that evolve to regulate different societies.

“Masa had a good background in looking at the economy as a whole, financial institutions as a whole – not just how numbers or actors economically interact – but also the people who interact within a given institutional framework,” said Koichi Hamada, a professor emeritus at Yale University. 

Aoki applied a systematic lens to everything he studied, a “take society as a total entity” approach, Hamada said.

Aoki grew up in Japan, and developed a deep interest in Japanese politics at an early age. He was actively involved in student movements in the early 1960s, at the heart of which was a campaign against a controversial U.S.-Japan security treaty. China became another great interest of his as the country began to undergo economic transformation and modernization.

Throughout his career, Aoki traveled to Japan and China often, and sought to better inform policy debates by engaging scholars, government leaders and journalists there.

He believed in sharing lessons learned from his own scholarly analyses on what constitute institutions, particularly the “people” aspects – the employees, their cognitive abilities and levels of participation.

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Top left to right: Yingyi Qian of Tsinghau University talks with Avner Greif of Stanford University and Hugh Patrick of Columbia University. / Koichi Hamada of Yale University delivers his remarks titled "Masahiko Aoki: A Social Scientist." Bottom: Reiko Aoki, the wife of Masahiko Aoki, listens in to Kenneth Arrow, a professor emeritus at Stanford University. Credit: Rod Searcey

Aoki was not only a scholar of institutions but also a builder of them.

In 2005, Aoki helped oversee the development of the Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which held numerous roundtables in its first decade of existence, and continues to this day.

“Amid a time of diplomatic tensions between China and Japan…Masa was able to bring Japanese, Chinese and American economists together to study and do research,” said Yingyi Qian, dean and professor at the school of economics and management at Tsinghua.

At Stanford, Aoki played a leading role in the creation of the Stanford Japan Center and a multi-day conference that convened annually in Kyoto on issues of mutual concern between Asia-Pacific countries and the United States.

Earlier this year, Aoki was hospitalized for lung disease. Even at that stage, he worked tirelessly to revise a paper that examines the institutional development of China and Japan in the late 19^th to early 20^th centuries.

That paper titled, “Three-person game of institutional resilience versus transition: A model and China-Japan comparative history,” was presented at the conference by Jiahua Che, one of two scholars that Aoki asked to finish and publish the work.

Aoki was also fondly remembered for his mentorship of students at Stanford and other universities he taught at.

“He was an original and unique professor – quite different from others that I’ve met in many respects. He was generous with his time, not hierarchical,” said Miguel Angel Garcia Cestona, who studied for a doctorate at Stanford and now teaches at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

Garcia Cestona, among other former students, spoke of Aoki as a friend and shared memories of their former professor hosting them at his home.

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Masahiko Aoki in Northern California, 2014.

Related Links:

Conference agenda

Stanford obituary

Pilot program was designed to first ground students in the basics of empirical research, then provide an opportunity to apply that knowledge while conducting fieldwork in an international setting.

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and Office of International Affairs (OIA) launched a pilot collaboration last year to provide a rigorous, immersive teaching and training program for students interested in international fieldwork.  The result was a program that included a quarter-long course in the spring of 2015 followed by three weeks in Mexico during the summer to design and conduct a field research study. OIA spoke with Frank Wolak, the Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in Economics and Senior Fellow at FSI, to learn more about the project, titled International Field Research Training: Energy Reform in Mexico.

What was the impetus for designing a program for students with a field research component?

While students at Stanford have many opportunities to pursue independent research projects, they rarely have the opportunity to receive first-hand training in conducting interviews, research design and field implementation. With that in mind, we set out to design a program that would carry the students through the basics of empirical research and then give them the opportunity to apply that knowledge under close faculty supervision. Taking students out of the classroom and giving them the opportunity to see textbook methods in action is invaluable.

Our hope is that this training equips the students with the academic and logistical skills they need to execute their own robust research, be that for an honors thesis, a capstone project or an advanced degree.

How did the prerequisite course prepare students for working in the field? 

The Stanford course taught the basics of the design, implementation and interpretation of social science field research. Building on a basic knowledge of statistical methods and economics, the course first introduced observational field research and compared it with experimental field research. Significant attention was devoted to explaining what can and cannot be learned through each type of field research.

Topics covered included sample size selection, power and size of statistical hypothesis tests, sample selection bias and methods for accounting for it. Examples of best practice field research studies were presented as well as examples of commonly committed experimental design and implementation errors. Practical aspects of fieldwork were also covered, including efficient and cost-effective data collection, data analysis, teamwork and common ethical considerations.

After completing the quarter-long course on statistical research methods, the students, under the guidance of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development's research team, adapted an education-based research intervention for the Mexican electricity sector. The purpose was to see if providing individuals with information about how their energy bill was calculated and simple ways to reduce household electricity consumption would cause household energy bills to go down.

What was a typical day for the students gathering research?

Research was carried out in the city of Puebla, a city of 1.5 million people about 150 kilometers (93 miles) southeast of Mexico City. The Stanford students collaborated with students from the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla (UPAEP). For the first few days, the students all met at an UPAEP classroom space to design and review the survey tool, making revisions and conducting practice interviews.

Once oriented in Puebla, the students set out daily in research teams to interview randomly selected households in middle-income neighborhoods in Puebla. The students branched out from a central meeting place in teams of three, pairing two Stanford students with one UPAEP student.

In the field, the students all wore nametags and UPAEP baseball caps to make themselves identifiable as surveyors to households. They worked in the field for eight to 10 hours a day, taking about an hour break for lunch. In the first few days, they were able to collect 15-20 surveys a day, but as they became more comfortable with their pitch and knocking on doors, they were able to increase their yield to a high of 44 surveys in one day. At the end of two weeks, they completed over 260 surveys in just 10 days of fieldwork.

The students were also active on social media documenting their daily activities. For more on the student perspective, their activities and impressions of the project, check out their blog on the FSI website. 

What are the benefits for getting in-country field research experience?

There are a variety of situation-specific problems that are hard for any researcher to know fully without being immersed in the field. For example, one of the students' recommendations to improve energy efficiency was to switch household light bulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents (CFL). This is a valid recommendation in the United States where most people still use incandescent bulbs in their homes, but – surprisingly to the team – most of the people interviewed had already converted to all CFLs in their home.

I was amazed with the students; the level of intellectual curiosity and engagement was impressive with ongoing discussions into the evening at times. The students were not only getting an in-country immersive experience while conducting research, but they were also developing critical thinking skills along the way.

Research aside, the in-country experience gave the students a keen understanding of how local residents live. The methodology employed for gathering data allowed the students to connect with many types of families, ranging from senior citizens living alone to multi-generational families living under one roof. Through direct contact with the community, the students developed an understanding of the local culture and learned local customs. 

Conducting international research at Stanford can be challenging. Where did you turn to for advice on how to structure your activity?

At FSI, we have a great wealth of experiential knowledge on conducting field research all over the world. In addition to consulting with faculty and research managers at FSI, OIA had been enormously helpful in connecting us with resources across campus and facilitating some of the trickier logistics, such as processing stipend payments to our international collaborators and navigating the human subjects approval process. OIA was also able to discern that Puebla was a viable option as a research site.

How would you characterize the success of the pilot program? 

The pilot program exceeded our expectations in the best possible ways. Much of its success was due to the work of Elena Cryst ,'10, program manager for FSI's Global Student Fellows Program, who also accompanied us on our trip. She was an invaluable team leader and organizer and worked tirelessly to ensure that both the research and logistical aspects of the trip ran smoothly.

We will definitely be offering the field research course and research project again. We hope to go to another part of Latin America next, such as Chile or Colombia. We are also still active in Mexico, with three of the students that went on the trip working for us as research assistants this academic year, analyzing the data as it comes in and developing a self-administered online version of the survey instrument with which we hope to reach thousands of households in Puebla.

In addition, Elena will be using our experiences from the Mexico pilot to inform other FSI field research programs in China, Guatemala, India and potentially new sites for next year.

This article was originally published in The Stanford Report on October 27, 2015.

Alexandra Harney quotes REAP research in a feature on the recent boom in vocational education in rural China. To read the original article, click here.

In China's countryside, tracts of forests are being replaced with concrete as a new type of factory is being built: the education factory. Motivated by a push to redirect China's economy toward a more innovative, high-tech future—and hopefully dodge the "middle-income trap"—the government is investing in vocational school parks designed to educate hundreds of thousands of students. 

China's vocational schools focus on workplace skills, rather than theory and academic subjects. However, in twenty years these students may be left behind, possessing skills that are no longer applicable in China's changing economy. Furthermore, many vocational schools fail to provide human capital enhancing experiences, instead shipping their students off to work as interns in factories that are often irrelevant to their majors and in some cases violate Chinese labor laws. 

Harney writes, ""You can build as much as you want, but unless you get good teachers, good curriculum and a system that assesses and rewards high performing schools with more resources, it's just going to be a waste of money," says Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program at Stanford University and the author of many papers on vocational education in China.

"There is no question China needs to raise skill levels. Wayne Zhang, who runs a home decor products factory in northeastern China, says that finding skilled workers - in order to increase capacity or make more complex products - is increasingly hard. Of the 100 such staff he set out to hire last year, he has only been able to find 60.

"As of 2010, just 24 percent of China's workforce had attended at least some upper secondary school, compared with an OECD average of 74 percent, according to a study published by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University in February."

In response to this problem, REAP launched Assessing and Credentialing Vocational High Schools, a project aimed at establishing an evaluation system to hold vocational schools accountable to education standards and provide incentives to improve. Preliminary results show that the system is leading to improved student learning and school satisfaction. Read more about this project here.

Matt Sheehan
China Correspondent, The WorldPost
October 12th, 2015

Simply giving nearsighted children glasses can dramatically boost their school performance. Convincing teachers and parents is harder.

This article is the second in a What’s Working series that looks at innovative policy solutions pioneered by the Rural Education Action Program. REAP brings together researchers from Stanford University and China to devise new ways to improve rural education and alleviate poverty. You can read the first article in the series here.  

QIN'AN COUNTY, China -- Wei Wentai can barely be heard over the crescendo of cackles coming from the hallway. Fourth graders everywhere cane be boisterousness, but today the presence of two foreigners, an exotic breed in the rugged hills of western China, has driven these kids into a frenzy.

You could try to reason with the children: tell them they need to quiet down because Dr. Wei is here to train their teachers in how to perform vision tests. Those tests will give some kids free glasses so they can see the blackboard, dramatically improving their grades and chances of graduating high school.

But yeah, that’d be about as effective here in rural Gansu, in China's northwest, as it would be in Alabama, and it takes the lunch bell to drag the mob away from the classroom window. 

With relative peace restored, Wei continues to tutor the 12 village schoolteachers in the basics of eyesight and education. Having grown up nearby, he knows what superstitions to dispel (“No, glasses do not make your eyes worse”) and what points to drive home (“Yes, glasses dramatically improve grades for nearsighted students”). Despite receiving his medical training in Shanghai, Wei returned home after graduating and always speaks in the local dialect when training the teachers to perform this basic eye exam and write referrals.

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It’s a simple presentation tailored to this county, but one predicated on years of trust building and scientific trials by researchers on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Driving the project, called Seeing is Learning, are researchers from Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Plan (REAP) and Shaanxi Normal University’s Center for Experimental Economics in Education (CEEE). These groups operate in an emerging field of development economics that prizes rigorous experimentation over theory. Concrete interventions, randomized controlled trials and impact analysis are what drive their research and policy recommendations. Randomized controlled trials compare a randomly assigned group of participants receiving a particular treatment being studied with one not receiving the treatments. These trials are often called the gold standard of scientific research. 

REAP and CEEE have spent almost five years accruing the political capital and research results that they hope will overcome one of the biggest obstacles standing between rural Chinese kids and a high school diploma: most of them can’t even see the writing on the blackboard. 

Like many of their peers around East Asia, rural Chinese children suffer high rates of myopia. Around 57 percent are nearsighted by middle school, according to one REAP study. Unlike schoolchildren in Singapore or in China’s cities, most kids growing up in the Chinese countryside are ignorant of and isolated from vision care. 

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In hundreds of visits to rural Chinese classrooms, REAP program director Matt Boswell has rarely seen a bespectacled face. A patchy and inadequate rural medical system, the high cost of glasses and cultural preferences for eye exercises over glasses (what one researcher calls “voodoo health”) mean that most children growing up in townships and villages never take a vision test. 

“There is no eye care at the township level in China,” said Boswell. “Period.”

That void has a huge impact on education. In a study published in the British Medical Journal, REAP and Chinese researchers showed that giving myopic kids free glasses improved their math test scores by about as much as reducing class sizes. Those improvements came despite the fact that only 41 percent of students who were prescribed glasses actually wore them regularly. According to Boswell, when results were limited to the students who actually wore the glasses they were given, the impact proved enormous: it roughly halved the achievement gap between these rural students and their urban peers in just nine months.

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Improvements of that size represent some of the juiciest low-hanging fruit in Chinese education. Sixty percent of children in the countryside will drop out before high school, many due to failed grades and entrance exams. These tens of millions of dropouts threaten to throw a wrench in the Chinese government's plan to transition to a service- and innovation-based economy.

But when dealing with China’s bureaucracies, having a simple solution to a vexing problem isn’t enough to start harvesting that low-hanging fruit. The real art and science of the project came in aligning bureaucratic interests to get it off the ground.

“Every issue has its own little ecosystem,” Boswell said. 

For Seeing is Learning, that ecosystem involved education officials committed to the eye exercise regime, schools that closely guard access to their students, families who are deeply suspicious of the effect of eyeglasses and hospitals that saw no reason to screen rural kids.

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To break the impasse, the researchers had to first get local education bureaucrats on board. Randomized controlled trials proved the effectiveness of glasses and debunked the myth of eye exercises. They caught the eye of a powerful official in the nearby city of Tianshui, whose backing opened the doors to local schools. With REAP’s pledge to subsidize glasses, the hospitals suddenly saw large new markets materialize.

As a kicker, one trial found that when teachers were offered an iPad if their students were wearing glasses during random inspections, usage rates jumped from 9 to 80 percent.

“Hospitals love it because they get in the schools. Principals love it because of the impact on scores,” said Boswell. “We love it because the kids are learning.”

Turning that newfound excitement into a working program required the creation of two “Model Vision Counties” in which nurses and doctors like Wei Wentai receive accelerated optometry training.  In order to expand that reach from the county seat down to the village,  REAP ran another trial to see if teachers could conduct accurate eye exams after just a half-day training (answer: yes). So the newly trained doctors now rotate through the village schools, training teachers who then refer students to the hospital vision centers for proper prescriptions.

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Now the researchers are looking to scale up the program to six counties and at the same time turn the vision centers into sustainable social enterprises. Using their privileged access to schools, the vision centers can sell glasses to urban children with the resources to pay. Those profits then subsidize the first pair of glasses for rural kids, and repay REAP's initial loan, which REAP can then reinvest in creating further Model Vision Counties.

It’s a new model for REAP and one that prompts many new research questions. Can the vision centers earn enough revenue to both subsidize glasses and keep the hospitals happy? Will teachers enforce wearing eyeglasses if given a simple mandate rather than an iPad? Will the impact of the first pair of glasses convince rural parents to purchase the second pair?

Those questions will be investigated and answered when the project scales up. But as this van winds its way back down from the village to the county hospital, Wei Wentai reflects on the work they’ve done.

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A child takes an eye exam administered by REAP and CEEE.