Research On The Impact Of Peer Effects On The Academic Performance Of Rural Left-behind Childre

In the process of a student’s development,in addition to the school’s teachers and parents,to a great extent,it will be affected by the social circle formed by peers.In the interaction of peer groups,the growth and personal development of children in the same group will be affected by other members’ behavior and performance.In the research of peer effect,researchers always pay special attention to the influence of peer effect on students’ academic performance.Looking back on the previous literature on the peer effect in education,the impact of peer effect on students’ academic performance has received extensive attention from education researchers.In the context of the rapid development of the national economy in recent years,more and more young laborers have poured into cities to seek better job opportunities.Due to our country’s special urban and rural household registration system,the relatively expensive cost of living in cities,and most of these migrant workers in those high level cities are often engaged in basic industries with relatively low incomes.The threshold formed by these factors prevents a considerable part of the children of migrant workers from following their parents to enter the city to study and live,and they can only stay in the place where their household registration is registered.This breeds the problem of left-behind children.Left-behind children are in a sensitive and critical period of growth,but they are faced with the long-term absence of their parents and the inadequate supervision of their grandparents.The influence of peers plays a very important role in their growth.Therefore,it is very necessary to explore the influence of peer effect on the academic performance of those who became left-behind children in rural area.However,the current researches on peer effect rarely centers on left-behind children in rural elementary schools.This research is based on the 2014-2015 survey data of 2,550 students from 60 rural elementary schools in rural areas of Northwest my country that was in poverty.Through the use of students’ peers reported by their selves to identify their friends,explore the impact of individual-level peer effects on students’academic performance and compare the differences in peer effects between left-behind children and non-left-behind children.To solve the endogenous question,this paper uses the average years of education of every students’friend’s father and mother as the instrumental variables(Instrumental Variables,IV)of peer academic performance,and studies individual peers’ academic performance through two-step regression(2SLS)The impact of grades on students’ academic performance.By randomly assigning non-peers in the class and other schools in the county as "false peers",the peer effect is tested for the robustness of the "counterfactual".At the same time,considering the mutual selection and one-way selection between peers,we redefine peers into"reciprocal peers" and "non-reciprocal peers",and test the robustness of peer effects again.Finally,it also explores the difference in peer effect between left-behind children and non-left-behind children through group regression,and gives an explanation for the formation of this difference.The final experimental study found that:First,in rural primary schools,the average performance of self-nominated peers in the class has a significant positive impact on students’ academic performance.Secondly,the regression results of the sample groups of "left-behind" and "non-left-behind" children show that peer academic performance will significantly affect the learning performance of left-behind children,while the learning performance of non-left-behind children is not significantly affected by the average performance of peers.The empirical p-value test constructed by the bootstrap method shows that the impact of peer learning performance on the learning performance of left-behind children is significantly higher than that of non-left-behind children.In addition,we also found that when the parents of the left-behind children have more exchanges with their students in terms of study and life,the academic performance of the left-behind children will be less affected by the performance of their peers.From the above researches’results and the existing literature,based on the current situation of parental companionship of rural children,this article proposes the following suggestions:(1)To the family level,parents should further enhance their awareness of how to accompany their children and attach importance to communication with them.Also,they should strengthen the communication with their children about the study,life and feelings so as to alleviate the adverse effects of the children when they are facing external threats.(2)From the perspective of teachers,teachers should consider increase the guiding role of students who has good academic performance and life style to other students in the process of seating arrangements and building learning interest groups.Especially the guiding role for left-behind children in order to improve the academic performance of rural left-behind children.