Does Teacher Training Narrow the Educational Gap between Urban and Rural Students? Empirical Evidence from CEPS Baseline Data

Oct 15, 2026

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Based on CEPS baseline data, the study examines how teacher training relates to students’ academic performance in urban and rural samples and how training affects the urban-rural performance gap. Results show a significant urban-rural gap, with larger differences at higher quantiles and in language subjects. Unconditional quantile regression indicates training benefits urban students across performance levels and rural students at intermediate or higher levels, but not lower-level rural students. Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition attributes the gap to endowment and coefficient effects of teacher training.

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Introduction

Literature Review

The Relationship between Teacher Training and Student Academic Development

Does Teacher Training Narrow the Educational Gap between Urban and Rural Students? Empirical Evidence from CEPS Baseline Data Ran Sun, Ping Du Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China | Abstract. Based on the baseline data of the China Education Panel Survey, this paper explored the relationship between teacher training and academic performance in urban and rural samples respectively and the impact of teacher training on the urban-rural gap of students'academic performance. The results showed that: firstly, there was a significant urban-rural gap in academic performance, and the gap in high quantiles and language subjects were even larger. Secondly, the results of unconditional quantile regression showed that teacher training could improve the performance of urban students with different academic levels and rural students with intermediate or above academic levels, but it cannot improve the performance of rural students with lower academic levels. In addition, the overall effect of teacher training in urban areas is significantly higher than that in rural areas. Thirdly, different quantiles of Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition found that the endowment effect and the coefficient effect of teacher training were the important causes of the urban-rural performance gap, but the relative sizes of the two were different according to the different grades and different quantiles of performance distribution. Therefore, to increase the training opportunities and improve the training quality of rural teachers as well as enhance the resource conversion rate of rural students are of great practical significance for narrowing the urbanrural performance gap.
Best Evidence in Chinese Education 2021; 9(2):1243-1261.
Doi: [10.15354/bece.21.ar036](10.15354/bece.21.ar036). | | --- | | How to Cite: Sun, R., & Du, P. (2021). Does teacher training narrow the educational gap between urban and rural students? Empirical evidence from CEPS baseline data. Best Evidence in Chinese Education, 9(2):1243-1261. | Keywords: Teacher Training, Urban-Rural Gap, Unconditional Quantile Regression, Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition About the Author: Ran Sun, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China. E-mail: [ransunsunny@163.com](ransunsunny@163.com) Correspondence to: Ping Du, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China. E-mail: [duping868@sina.com](duping868@sina.com) Conflict of Interests: None. © 2021 Insights Publisher. All rights reserved. Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed by the Insights Publisher. Introduction THE development of China’s compulsory education has achieved remarkable results. However, the academic development of rural students still lags behind that of urban students (Zhu, Li & Song, 2017; Peng, 2014; Qi & Zheng, 2019) . Access to education is dependent on the path (Chen, 2008) . The gap in the compulsory education stage will cause huge differences in the enrollment rate and academic development of urban and rural students in the subsequent learning stage (Zheng, Sun & Lu, 2019; Zhang, 2019), and ultimately affect the overall level of social human capital accumulation (Wang et al., 2018) . Therefore, it is crucial to reveal the reasons behind the gap in academic development of urban and rural students in the compulsory education stage. Studies have pointed out that the quality of rural teachers is much lower than that of urban teachers is the key reason for the gap between urban and rural students’ academic development (Qi & Zheng, 2019; Zong et al., 2018) . Therefore, the Chin

FAQs

What data and methods does the study use to analyze teacher training effects?

The study uses CEPS baseline survey data and applies unconditional quantile regression and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to evaluate relationships and gap decomposition.

Do teacher training programs improve academic performance for both urban and rural students?

Teacher training improves urban students’ performance across different academic levels and improves rural students at intermediate or above levels, but it cannot improve rural students with lower academic levels.

What explains the urban-rural academic performance gap according to the decomposition results?

The decomposition results indicate the endowment effect and the coefficient effect of teacher training are important causes of the performance gap, with their relative sizes differing across grades and quantiles.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Bulrr