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ICI Academic║Professor Ke Zheng Reveals the Impact of Student Leaders’ Identity on Their Learning Opportunities

2020-08-20

Completed by professor Ke Zheng and master student Li Changjie, the article, The Impact of Student Leaders' Identity on Their Acquisition of Learning Opportunities: A Study Based on the Findings from 4026 Junior High School Students via Propensity Score Matching, was published on Educational Research.


Professor Ke Zheng

ICI, ECNU


Li Changjie

ICI, ECNU

In order to help readers to understand the study better and faster, the editor interviewed Professor Ke Zheng, and summarized the content of this article in a Q&A manner.

Editor: What scientific questions do you and Li Changjie intend to make clear?

Professor Ke: We would like to make clear whether junior high school students who serve as student leaders or not will have an impact on their learning opportunities.

Editor: Is it an important question? How did you pose such a question?

Professor Ke: A meaningful problem must root in the process of China’s education reform. This study is directly related to the realistic background of two aspects of school education in China.

The first is the student leader system in our country. Student leader system is a very basic and important system in China’s educational management system, and it also has Chinese characteristics.

The second is the problem of education equity. With the increasingly fierce competition in education and the promotion of students’ and parents’ awareness of education equity, people pay more and more attention to the fairness in the process of school education. One of the core contents is whether different students have fair learning opportunities in the process of classroom teaching, such as whether they have fair opportunities to ask questions, answer questions and receive individual guidance from teachers, and so on.

Combining these two aspects, we put forward a better topic, which has both theoretical perspective (equity in the educational process) and substantive content (student leader system).

Editor: This is indeed a very interesting topic. But has no one studied such an important topic before? Or, if there were already N studies, why did you do the N + 1 study?

Professor Ke: That’s a very good question. In fact, many people have paid attention to the relationship between student leader identity and learning opportunities, but they may not use the concept of learning opportunity or do not take it as the research title. Through the existing research, we know that student leaders do have more learning opportunities than other students.

However, these studies have not told us that there are more learning opportunities for student leaders, that is, there is a significant positive relationship between the identity of student leaders and learning opportunities, but are these learning opportunities brought about by the student leader identity? Students who serve as student leader generally have good grades or good family backgrounds, so do they get more learning opportunities because of their good grades or good family background, or because of the status of student leader identity themselves? Many people may say “both”. But there is no evidence to prove this opinion.

Editor: What research method did you and Changjie employ?

Professor Ke: The best method for casual inference is experiment method. But doing such experiments is virtually impossible either technically or ethically. Thus, like many other social sciences studies, we answer the questions by survey data.

In 2005, AERA launched a booklet in order to push forward America’s evidence-based research. The booklet told us what criteria should be followed for causal inference. Among them, four methods are recommended for using survey data to conduct causal inference: fixed effect model, instrumental variable, propensity score matching and breakpoint regression.

This study employs propensity score matching. There are still some problems with this approach but perhaps one of the best ways we can employ now.

Editor: What did you find in this study?

Professor Ke: Firstly, compared with other students, student leaders have significant advantages in obtaining learning opportunities. Secondly, applying propensity score matching method, we find that there exists causality between student leaders’ learning opportunity superiority and their identity which can increase their learning opportunities independently. Thirdly, student leaders’ “identity” influenced a lot on their learning opportunity.

Editor: What does these findings mean?

Professor Ke: What we ultimately want to discuss is the student leader system in China.

If we generally consider the above three findings, we will see a frustrating picture: first, students who have good grades, good personality and good family backgrounds are already advantage groups, but they are easier to become student leaders; second, after becoming student leaders, they gain further advantages in obtaining learning opportunities. Therefore, the student leader system helps student leaders further expand their advantages. This is a worrying situation, because it is not coincide with our original intention of student leader system.

Thus, we put forward two solutions to solve the problems.

First, let student leaders know their responsibility is to service the class, student leaders are regarded as pure service hillock volunteers. Second, since student leaders themselves can gain more learning opportunities, they can prioritize their learning opportunities to those who need learning opportunities (e.g. poor grades introverted personality).

Editor: Thank you very much for your answers, I believe that after reading the whole article, we will gain deeper understanding of the concept and layout of empirical research.