Brown Bag: Engendering Love of Learning: Family and School Influence on Educational Engagement in Rural Gansu, China

Speaker

Yuping Zhang

Associate Professor of Sociology

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

 

 

Engendering Love of Learning: Family and School Influence on Educational Engagement in Rural Gansu, China Educational research in both developed and developing countries have shown that children’s engagement at school is one of the important factors that lead to success or failure of children’s education. In rural Gansu, as children still have to face the barriers imposed by lack of resources getting educated, especially at levels beyond compulsory education, it is important to understand how family and school environment that could help nourish children’s engagement. This study uses Gansu Survey of Children and Family. The GSCF data provides rich information on how children evaluate their teachers, schools, and parenting at home, which enables us to examine the school and home influence from children’s perspective. In this study, we treat children’s school engagement as outcome, as measured by children’s motivation in learning and their disengagement from school. We first create the scale measures of children’s motivation and disengagement based on factor analysis results, and then use them as outcomes in OLS analysis with school fixed effect approach.  Our analysis reveals strong association between children perceived school and home environment and their motivation and disengagement. The findings point to the important role of significant others in facilitating children’s love for learning. Children would benefit from awareness and investment in promoting their engagement, especially in the rural setting where there is still scarcity of resources.