Disseminating and Extending the Gansu Survey of Children and Families

Few studies of educational barriers in developing countries have investigated the role of children’s vision problems, despite the self-evident challenge that poor vision poses to classroom learning and the potential for a simple ameliorative intervention. We address this gap with an analysis of two datasets from Gansu Province, a highly impoverished province in northwest China. One dataset is the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF, 2000 and 2004), a panel survey of 2,000 children in 100 rural villages; the other is the Gansu Vision Intervention Project (GVIP, 2004), a randomized trial involving 19,185 students in 165 schools in two counties.