China’s competitive education system has produced notably high learning outcomes, but they may be costly. One potential cost is high levels of anxiety. China has launched several initiatives aimed at improving student mental health. However, little is known about how effective these programs and policies are. The goal of this paper is to examine anxiety levels among children and adolescents in rural China, and to identify which subpopulations are particularly vulnerable to anxiety. Data are aggregated from ten different school-­‐‑level surveys conducted in rural areas of five provinces between 2008 and 2015. In total, 50,361 students were evaluated using a 100-­‐‑item, 9-­‐‑subcategory Mental Health Test (a variation of the Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale). Seven 21 percent of students were at risk for overall anxiety. However, over half of students were at risk for at least one subcategory of anxiety. Students at higher risk for anxiety included students from poorer counties and families, female students, secondary students, and students with lower levels of academic performance. Many students in rural China are at risk for anxiety, and certain student subpopulations are particularly vulnerable. We suggest that China’s government review and update student mental health programs and policies.

The overall goal of this study is to examine whether infant feeding practices differ between mothers and grandmothers in rural China. We randomly sampled 1383 caregivers of infants aged 18 to 30 months living in 351 villages across 174 townships in nationally designated poverty counties in rural areas. Results show that a high fraction of caregivers of 18- to 30-month-old children living in low-income areas of rural China do not regularly engage in positive infant feeding practices. Only 30% of children in our sample achieved adequate dietary diversity. Only 49% of children in our sample were fed meat in the day prior to survey administration. Few caregivers reported giving any vitamin supplements (such as calcium or iron supplements) to their children. We find that 33% of the children were cared for by grandmothers rather than mothers, and that grandmothers feed a less diversified diet to children than do mothers. Most (84%) caregivers rely solely on their own experiences, friends, and family members in shaping their feeding behaviors. Overall infant feeding practices are poor in rural China. Grandmothers engage in poorer feeding practices than do mothers. Grandmothers have improved their feeding practices compared to when their own children were young. Our results suggest shortcomings in the quality of infant feeding practices, at least in part due to an absence of reliable information sources.

Key words: child development, feeding practices, information sources, rural China

Education of poor and disadvantaged populations has been a long-standing challenge for education systems in both developed and developing countries. In China, millions of students in rural areas and migrant communities lag far behind their urban counterparts in terms of academic achievement. When they fall behind, they often have no way to catch up. Many of their parents have neither the skills nor the money to provide remedial tutoring; rural teachers often do not have time to give students the individual attention they need. Given this, there is growing interest by both educators and policymakers in helping underperforming students catch up using computer assisted learning (CAL). While CAL interventions have been shown to be effective internationally and elsewhere in China, traditional software-based CAL programs are difficult and costly to implement. An online version of CAL (OCAL), however, may be able to bypass many of offline CAL’s implementation problems and enhance the remedial tutoring experience. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence on whether OCAL programs can be effective in improving the quality of rural primary school education in developing countries. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of an OCAL intervention on the academic and non-academic performance of students and to explore the mechanism behind OCAL’s impact. Importantly, we also aim to assess the cost effectiveness of the new OCAL program versus traditional CAL interventions. To achieve these objectives, we carried out a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving over 1650 fifth grade students in 44 schools in rural areas and migrant communities across China. Students in the 22 treatment schools attended two 40- minute OCAL sessions during their computer class each week for one semester; the students in the other 22 schools were in the control group and did not receive any intervention. According to our findings, OCAL improved overall English scores of students in the treatment group relative to the control group by 0.56 standard deviations. This impact is large when compared with offline CAL programs. We found that OCAL also led to a positive change in the attitudes of students towards English learning and towards student aspirations for their future education level. We found three possible explanations for OCAL’s impact. After rejecting the possibility of the Hawthorne Effect or self-efficacy-induced changes, we believe interest-oriented stimulation is the main source of improvement among students. The chance for comparison and competition with peers, as well as customized remedial question banks tailored to each student’s individual needs, likely contributed to the measured increases in academic performance among students in our sample. Cost-effectiveness analysis showed that the OCAL program is more cost-effective than traditional offline CAL, a comparison which is significant for policymakers as it indicates high potential for OCAL program expansion.