The Comparative Study Of Urban-Rural Difference Of ICT In Basic Education

As a key way to achieve leap development for education, ICT in education is an important way to ensure balanced development of urban and rural, which play an important role to realize equity in education. At present, the ICT in education has made remarkable development achievements, but in recent years the data and statistics show that obvious gap between urban and rural areas lies in level of development of ICT in basic education and has the trend of expanding. In order to narrow the development gap and promote sustainable development between urban and rural areas, it becomes particularly important and urgent to make some relative research. Based on empirical study, this paper want to measure the actual disparity size of urban-rural development level of ICT in education and put forward countermeasures accordingly. The focus of the study is to contrast difference index and development of urban and rural from five different dimensions, and try to analysis and summary what could have contributed to the disparity between urban and rural. I think the research results have important reference significance for reducing the disparity, balancing the development between rural and urban areas in the future.This research has mainly done the following work:First of all, through reading some documents and combining with my focus, I summarized and reviewed the relevant evaluation principle of ICT in education, then decided to evaluate the development degree of urban and rural from the following five aspects:infrastructure, digital resources, applying services, application efficiency and mechanism guarantees. Second, based on related research results about methods for measuring inequality in digital divide, an integrated index system is established in order to evaluating the gap of ICT in education between urban and rural for computing their relative disparity, which is based on the development index of urban and rural. Study selected data form five provinces in central China to make empirical study using established index system, it can get difference index of urban and rural to represent disparity size of every cities in each dimension. The third is mainly analysising concretely the development level and the gap between urban and rural areas from dimension level and the overall level by development index conjoint with difference index. The fourth part of the paper is to explore the reasons which has caused the unbalance between the urban and rural of ICT in education, and proposed the related countermeasure from institutional level, conceptual levels and aspect of practical construction.The paper research conclusion could be summarized as:(1)From the perspective of evaluation result,the development of urban and rural areas emerges in a state of disequilibrium in each dimension, especailly the infrastructure is most unbalanced. (2)From the view of evaluation means, calculated results proposed in this paper is in fair agreement with the actual development. The difference index can accurately reflect the development gap between urban and rural and it is inversely proportional to overall development. (3)From the differences index of urban and rural, the same results may reflect the different development situation. For example, the same degree of difference index to represent the state of equilibrium, but for completely different reasons. Small values of difference index could be due to high development levels both of urban and rural, or just because urban and rural are not very satisfactory similarly. Therefore I think that only the difference index combine with development index can reflect the problem of development of ICT in education.