Southwest Basic Education Project (SBEP)

4.2 Overall project effects in Chinese by regression model analysis

The change patterns of students’ mean ability score of girl and boy pooled as shown in Table 8 are described in Figure 1, suggesting a steady progress over time by Grades 3 and 5 students and greater progress made by Grades 7 and 9 students in project counties than those in non-project counties. The large leap at the EoP for Grades 3 and 5 students in non-project counties could be due to selection bias as discussed in the previous session of the report.

Southwest Basic Education Project (SBEP): Analysis of the impact of SBEP on student achievement

To further quantify and test the trends observed in Figure 1, estimates in the differences of mean changes at the MTR and EoP between project and non-project counties based on multilevel meta-regression models are presented in Table 10. All estimates are statistically significant with p<0.01 by Wald test. A positive value indicates more progress made by students of project schools than by those of non-project schools In the comparison, students of all grades from project counties demonstrated better improvement in their learning ability score at the MTR, and such improvement is continued to the EoP for students in Grades 7 and 9, but less so for Grade 5 students.