Abstract：There is constant controversy about the impact of teachers’ praise and criticism on students’ performance. As the final stage of the nine-year compulsory education, the quality of junior middle school education is of great significance for the improvement of national quality and the accumulation of human capital. Teachers should implement effective educational means for junior middle school students to improve their academic performance. However, regardless of the educational stage of the research sample, the existing research on the impact of teachers’ praise and criticism on students’ performance has been controversial. So, what is the actual effect of praise and criticism? How do praise and criticism affect the performance of junior middle school students? How do teachers’ praise and criticism affect the academic performance of different types of junior middle school students? What are the differences in the effects of teachers’ praise and criticism in different subjects? In order to answer the above questions, based on reinforcement theory and attribution theory, this paper clarifies that praise and criticism are the essences of reinforcement behavior. Using China Education Panel Survey data (CEPS data) of the 2013—2015 academic year, this paper comprehensively adopts the instrumental variable method, three-step mechanism analysis method, and causal mediation effect model to overcome the potential reverse causality problem. It obtains the causal effect of the frequency of head teachers’ praise and criticism on the academic performance of junior middle school students. Meanwhile, it puts forward and verifies the influence mechanism mediated by self-discipline. On this basis, this paper also systematically analyzes the heterogeneous impact of the frequency of head teachers’ praise and criticism on junior middle school students’ academic performance.
The results show that frequent praise and criticism by head teachers can significantly improve the performance of junior middle school students; Students’ self-discipline efforts play an essential positive intermediary role. This paper further considers the heterogeneity of students and finds that, compared with criticism, there is no significant difference in the role of head teachers’ frequent praise in improving the performance of junior middle school students with different characteristics. However, criticism can significantly improve the performance of junior middle school students with local household registration or high self-expectation. At the same time, it does not affect students’ performance with non-local household registration and low self-expectations. Finally, considering the heterogeneity of the subjects taught by the head teacher, the frequent praise of the Chinese head teacher significantly improves the grades of the praised students. However, the frequency of criticism does not affect their grades. For math head teachers, whether they often praise or criticize students or not, they only significantly improve students’ math scores. The frequency of praise and criticism of English head teachers has no effect on students’ grades in all subjects.
The possible innovations of the article are as follows. Firstly, given the lack of consensus on the influence conclusions of teachers’ praise and criticism in the existing literature research, this paper systematically analyzes them and extracts five possible reasons. With the real data, we deal with the reasons one by one and identify the causal effect of the frequency of teachers’ praise and criticism on the academic performance of junior middle school students. This is an attempt to solve the research disputes about praise and criticism in the academic circles at home and abroad. Secondly, taking the praise and criticism (specific reinforcement means) of middle school teachers as the starting point, this paper analyzes the comprehensive effect of reinforcement frequency in the teaching process and students’ self-attribution. It provides new supporting evidence for the reinforcement theory and attribution theory based on China’s middle school education practice through the heterogeneous results of students’ different characteristics. Finally, to a certain extent, this paper opens up the “black box” of the interaction between teachers and students in the “junior middle school class”, a socializing organization. It directly and clearly shows the reinforcement influence of teachers’ praise and criticism, which affects students’ academic performance through students’ self-discipline. The research conclusion is significant for improving the quality of middle school education and human capital accumulation in China.
