Progress or Stagnation: Academic Assessments for Sustainable Education in Rural China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for having the opportunity to review the work entitled “Progress or Stagnation: Academic Assessments for Sustainable Education in Rural China”.

The work is interesting because it analyses aspects of the educational reality in the rural context of China, a quite unknown geographical area outside of this country. Thus, the work could be accepted for publication in the journal.

However, the work is unambitious, superficial, quite descriptive, and based on a very small sample of subjects. This makes their results merely preliminary and very difficult to generalize.

The subject analysed is not very innovative since it has long been known that unfavourable conditions, underdevelopment, lack of resources, isolation, rural and depressed areas, are associated with worse educational conditions and worse educational performance in general.

Regarding the composition of the work, the objectives are well formulated and well-founded, the chosen methodology allows the planned objectives to be sufficiently achieved. The statistical analyses are well planned and the results are well obtained.

A limiting aspect of the study relates to the sample of participants in the study. The sample size is unfortunately small to establish the conclusions that the authors intend to reach. In this sense, the sample with which they have worked does not represent the reference population (and even more so in such a large country). This means that the results and their generalization have to be taken with caution. Furthermore, this must be recognized as a limitation of the study. I also suggest that the authors modify the wording of some paragraphs of the discussion and conclusions, taking into account this limitation. In addition, indicating the need to deepen and advance studies with larger samples in future research. Authors should be cautious and prudent in drawing conclusions based on their results due to the limitations of their work.

Finally, these aspects can be taken into account, and the work can be improved. For this reason, I suggest that the work can be accepted for publication with minor changes.

To finish, I want to congratulate the authors for the work carried out and even more so for the methodology followed, which brings a great effort and a good approach.

Good luck.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your positive feedback and suggestions. Changes to the manuscript were highlighted in red. Meanwhile, we would also like to respond to the reviewer’s comments. First, the novelty of the study lies in the learner attributes in the Chinese rural context. We specifically analyzed the variables of gender and grade level in academic achievements and found that the stagnation of rural students’ academic performance between different learner characteristics. Second, we do acknowledge that the sample size limits the generalizability of the study. We have explicitly discussed this limitation in the section “conclusions and future directions” (pp. 10).

Reviewer 2 Report

The article addresses a topic of interest for researchers in the field, is well structured with well-chosen statistical methods and has achieved its objectives. 

Author Response

Thanks so much for your comment.