Research on Non-Cognitive Ability Disparity of Chinese Adolescent Students: A Rural-Urban Analysis

ABSTRACT This paper has examined rural-urban Chinese student’s non-cognitive abilities using the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) by employing include Two-Sample t-Test, Regression analysis, and Oaxaca–Blinder Decomposition analysis. The results reveal a significant gap in the non-cognitive abilities of rural and urban students in which that of the urban students is higher. Furthermore, irrespective of whether rural or urban, male students have higher non-cognitive ability than female students. Moreover, it discovered that about 52% of the rural-urban non-cognitive abilities gap accounted by the following factors, namely region, gender, whether the student is the only child, school grade, and ethnic minority.