Tony Xing Tan’s research while affiliated with Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and other places

With the growing awareness of the value of earning postsecondary degrees to increase an individual’s chances of attaining better workforce outcomes and a higher chance of gaining a quality life, school administrators have embraced a college and career readiness agenda. The adoption of career academies as a model for high schools across the nation is one strategy designed to provide the learning contexts students need to fulfill their quests to successfully transition from secondary schools to college and/or into the labor market, thus preparing them to be college and career ready. Using data from the National Student Clearinghouse, we examined the college enrollment likelihood and matriculation rates of 15,851 U.S. high school graduates who participated in NAF (formerly known as the National Academy Foundation) academies in 2019. We analyzed how these rates differ by NAF student characteristics, school programmatic quality measures, and student participation in dual enrollment courses. Multilevel modeling revealed that NAF academy students who completed NAF courses, internships, and participated in dual enrollment were significantly more likely than their NAF academy peers—who did not experience those components of the NAF academy model—to matriculate into college.

In this study, we investigated how teachers at a preschool in Beijing, China, implemented a government-mandated obesity intervention. We analyzed interviews with 10 teachers and two directors, the children’s physical examination records, the school’s menus, intervention protocol, and intervention records for 21 overweight and obese children. We found that the teachers largely followed the government mandates by modifying overweight/obese children’s dietary intake and physical activity level, and initiating school-family partnerships, monitoring intervention progress, and documenting the targeted children’s weight status. Noticeably, over the course of 10 months, seven children reached normal weight, two changed from overweight to obese, and 12 remained overweight/obese. Challenges of implementing the obesity intervention program include struggling with uncertainty about individual children’s weight loss needs and the fragility of school-family partnerships resulting from a lack of tailoring of the intervention, inadequate training and inadequate school capacity. These challenges were the main threats to implementation fidelity. To increase the intervention effectiveness, we recommend adopting tailored intervention strategies, offering hands-on training opportunities for teachers, strengthening school-family partnership and creating more flexible policies that empower schools to make the necessary adjustments to government-mandated school-based obesity intervention protocol.

Aims To determine the associations between COVID‐19 school closures and school readiness skills for Chinese kindergarteners. Design We utilized the natural experimental condition created by local COVID‐19 outbreaks in 2022 (Study 1) to compare school readiness skills of children whose kindergartens were closed for 5 months (Group 1) with children whose kindergartens stayed open (Group 2). We further compared the school readiness skills of one pre‐COVID‐19 cohort (Cohort 2019) with one COVID‐19 cohort (Cohort 2021) from a fifth kindergarten (Study 2). Samples For Study 1, Group 1 included 445 children and Group 2 included 584 children aged 4–6 years. For Study 2, Cohort 2019 included 156 children and Cohort 2021 included 228 children aged 3–6 years. Measures For both studies, survey data on four school readiness skills were collected from parents. Additionally, Study 1 collected parental locus of control data from parents. Results Controlling for covariates, Study 1 revealed that Group 1 and Group 2 did not differ in terms of language and emergent literacy or approaches to learning. However, Group 1 scored lower than Group 2 on health and well‐being and arts and imagination. Study 2 revealed that Cohort 2021 scored higher than Cohort 2019 on language and emergent literacy but lower on the other three skills. Conclusions The associations of COVID‐19 school closures with Chinese children's school readiness skills were not uniform, with a positive relation with language and emergent literacy and negative associations with health and well‐being, approaches to learning, as well as arts and imagination.

Purpose We tested the role of age and sex in surgery following pediatric TBI hospitalization. Methods Records of 1745 children hospitalized at a pediatric neurotrauma center in China included age, sex, cause of injury, diagnosis of injury, days of hospitalization, in-house rehabilitation, Glasgow Coma Scale score, mortality, 6-month post-discharge Glasgow Outcome Scale score, and surgery intervention. The children were 0-13 years (M= 3.56 years; SD = 3.06), with 47.4% 0-2 years of age. Results The mortality rate was 1.49%. Logistic regression on 1027 children with epidural hematoma, subdural hematoma, intracerebral hemorrhage, and intraventricular hemorrhage showed that controlling for other variables, the odds for younger children to receive surgery was statistically lower for epidural hematomas (OR = 0.75; 95% CI = 0.68–0.82), subdural hematomas (OR = 0.59; 95% CI = 0.47-0.74), and intraventricular hemorrhage (OR = 0.52; 95% CI = 0.28-0.98). Conclusions While severity of TBI and type of TBI were expected predictors for surgery, a younger age also predicted a significantly lower likelihood of surgery in our sample. Sex of the child was unrelated to surgical intervention.

Background: Long-term child-parent relationship quality following hospitalization for pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) remains poorly understood. Objective: We tested whether current child-parent conflict and closeness were related to the children's history of TBI-related experiences and contemporary child/family characteristics. Methods: The sample included 202 Chinese children (Boys: 60.4%) with a history of hospitalization for TBI. On average, the children were 11.2 years old (SD = 1.59) and sustained TBI at 8.5 years old (SD = 1.6). TBI-related data were obtained from hospital medical records. Parents provided data on child-parent closeness, child-parent conflict, and parental efficacy 2-4 years (M = 2.7, SD = 0.7) after discharge. Results: Forty-nine children (24.3%) had mild TBI, 139 (68.8%) had moderate TBI, and 14 (6.9%) had severe TBI. Surgical intervention occurred among 128 (63.4%) of the 202 children. Contemporaneous child and family characteristics explained 19% of the variance, history of surgery, length of hospitalization, and recovery status explained another 7%, and the interaction between length of hospitalization and parental efficacy explained another 4% in child-parent conflict. Contemporaneous child and family characteristics explained 29% of the variance, and TBI-related variables explained another 2% in child-parent closeness. Conclusion: Post-TBI child-parent relationship was more associated with child/family characteristics than with TBI variables. Practitioners and families should be aware of the long-term challenges to child-parent relationship following hospitalization for pediatric TBI.

Due to China???s three years of ???Zero Covid??? containment policy, the vast majority of vocational and technological education (VTE) high school students could not participate in work-based learning, had to take classes online, and often were isolated from their families. Although the impact of the unprecedented disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic on students??? wellbeing has been well documented, little is known about the experiences of vocational and technical high school students whose vocational identity development depends heavily on work-based learning experiences. In the following study, we applied a risk and resilience framework to examine Chinese VTE student burnout following the exposure to the ???Zero Covid??? policy for their entire high school career. Specifically, we tested how variations in Chinese vocational and technical high school students??? perceived impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, career adaptability, psychological capital, academic performance, and parental career guidance were related to differences in their sense of burnout. Regression results showed that paternal education level and perceived impact of Covid-19 pandemic positively and significantly predicted burnout, while academic performance and parental career support negatively and significantly predicted burnout. Age, sex, internship participation, career adaptability and parental career interference and parental lack-of-engagement did not predict burnout. Overall, the variables accounted for 53.6% of the variance in student burnout.

Screen devices are an integral part of many young children's lives but less is known about how child and parent/family factors contribute to young children's screen habits. Our study examined the contribution of child and family demographic and behavioral factors for Chinese children's weekday screen time, weekend screen time, daily frequency of using five devices, and purpose of screen device use. We collected baseline and follow-up data from parents of 255 children at a preschool in Beijing with an interval of 3 months (9/2021 and 12/2021; M = 4.41 years, SD = 0.80 at Follow-Up; Boys: 54.9%). Multiple regression analyses with the four outcome variables against six child-level and eight parent/family-level factors revealed that parent/family-level factors accounted for far more variance (10.1%–32.5%) than child-level factors (3.6%–5.0%) in predicting the outcome variables (βs = 0.19, p