Study On Learning Needs Of Rural Children In The Stage Of Compulsory Education

As a motive power of human being's activity, needs have being researched for a long time. Carl Marx suggested that'Human need is human nature'. In modern, needs have being an important subject researched in many fields, such as economics, management science, politics, psychology, sociology and so on, and flourish findings have been reported, and have comprehensive affect on theoretical development of related subjects and human practice.Needs is regarded as a great original source of educational activity, foundation of constituting educational objectives, and crucial factor on curricula. With the progress in modern curriculum and instructional theories, especially in the sub-disciplines such as instructional designs and pedagogical techniques, scholars are paying more and more attention to needs, especially learning needs. Simultaneously, practitioners are concerning themselves on educational activities, to understand, utilize and satisfy learners' needs, with meaningful theoretical achievements and practice experience.Recently, rural education gains more and more concern from society. Due to its particular educational conditions and circumstance rural education differs from urban education. Accordingly, children who lived in village have particular characteristic, compared with urban children who lived in city. Well then, when receiving compulsory education, there are different learning needs between rural children and urban children, aren't they? What are the learning needs of rural children?Based on the above, this present study focuses on learning needs of rural children, who are receiving the compulsory education, with the combination of documentary analysis, interview, and questionnaire investigation. To realize the present conditions of students' learning needs, this researcher selected a typical rural school, and investigated 658 students from grade 3 to grade 9, 36 teachers, and 298 parents or guardian of the children. The present paper reveals meaningful results as follows.There is a prevalent'village escaping'tendency in career orientation among rural children; and obvious utilitarian tendency in learning goal and course selection, no matter the pupils or their parents or guardian. The learning needs of rural children are complicated and multiplex. Many rural children are at a loss what to do to resolve their learning troubles and meet their learning needs. Moreover, equality seems to be an important need for rural children.In the end, the researcher reanalyzes those phenomena found through questionnaire and interview, and put forward suggestions and enlightens for rural education.