Teachers’ administrative positions and students’ non-cognitive abilities in China: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

ABSTRACT

This research investigates the causal relationship between teachers’ administrative positions and students’ non-cognitive abilities (NCAs) in China using a quasi-natural experiment of random student-classroom assignment. The results suggest that headteachers’ administrative positions significantly improve students’ NCAs, especially the extraversion and neuroticism. This positive effect is more pronounced in headteachers with higher administrative positions, middle titles, and more teaching experience. Meanwhile, girls and urban students benefited more from headteachers’ administrative positions. Furthermore, the mechanism analysis indicates this positive effect can be explained by the improvement of teachers’ job satisfaction, higher frequency of using more advanced teaching equipment, more parental respect, increased sense of belonging to the class, and peer effects. Our findings further enrich the impact of teacher characteristics on students’ NCAs and highlight the potential benefits of teachers’ administrative positions on student human capital. Also, this paper had policy implications for promoting students’ human capital development by optimizing teacher assignment and allocation.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers’ administrative positions
• students’ non-cognitive abilities (NCAs)
• human capital
• quasi-natural experiment
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• J13

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the National Survery Research Center of Renmin University of China for providing the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors do not have permission to share data.

Ethical statement

This paper does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. The data we used in this study come from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS). This survey and data are publicly released.

Notes

¹ Primary and junior high schools are included in China’s compulsory education system.

² The BFPM consists of five personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, openness, and neuroticism. Conscientiousness mainly reflects the individual’s sense of achievement, competence, and self-discipline etc. Agreeableness is used to measure trust in others, compliance, and modesty etc. Extraversion reflects individual enthusiasm, activity, and positive emotions etc. Openness reflects the individual’s ideas, curiosity and values etc. Neuroticism reflects the individual’s emotional state and usually involves anxiety, depression etc (Costa and McCrae 1992). The mean-level changes in Big-Five personality traits are small and do not vary substantially across age groups (Cobb-Clark and Schurer 2012).

³ Administrative positions in the CEPS primarily fall into three categories: grade team leader (charged with overseeing various grade-related matters), head of teaching and research section (in charge of overseeing the teaching and research of a specific subject), school leader (vice principal and director of teaching affairs).

⁴ The hukou system is a basic national administrative system in China. This system divides household registration attributes into agricultural (rural) and non-agricultural (urban) hukou based on geography and family members’ relationships.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72303090; 72304102]; Jiangsu Education Science Planning Project [C/2022/01/45]; Philosophy and Social Science Program Discipline Co-construction Project of Guangdong Province [GD23XYJ68].