The purpose of this study is to systematically showcase and evaluate how students’, schools’, and countries’ Information and Communication Technology (ICT) development levels influence students’ digital reading literacy by using the data of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 and the multi-level model approach. It is found that the ICT development at each level has a significant positive effect on students’ digital reading literacy, and there is a significant interactive moderating effect between different levels. The gap in ICT development levels between the countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and developed economies has a “Matthew effect” in widening the digital reading literacy gap in the short term, but in the long run, the faster growth of the countries participating in BRI in ICT development levels will narrow the gap and alleviate the effect. China should make use of its advantages in ICT development to engage in global education governance, facilitate the co-development in both the ICT development level and the digital reading literacy for the countries participating in BRI, and contribute to the development of global education by opening up a new way of development.

The introduced policy of “synchronized enrollment of public and private schools” has once again triggered the debate on the effectiveness of public and private schools. Based on the data of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 from four Chinese provinces and municipalities, this paper explores whether private schools gain a relative advantage in student academic performance through student “screening” or academic “meritocracy,” through a hierarchical linear model (HLM) and an empirical test of the propensity score matching (PSM). It has been found that the academic performance of students in private schools is significantly better than that in public schools. But with background, metacognitive ability, and learning hours of students in private schools controlled for, such academic performance is not significantly superior, suggesting that private schools rely heavily on student “screening” to achieve a relative advantage in student academic performance. This finding has also verified the scientific nature of the above policy.

The quantitative and qualitative supply of teachers has a significant influence on student academic performance. Based on the samples collected from four provinces and municipalities in China for the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018, this study analyzes the effects of the supply of teachers on the academic performance of 15-year-old students through a hierarchical linear model (HLM) as well as a quantile regression model. The study has found that the shortage of teachers and the proportion of teachers with a master’s degree significantly affect student academic performance, and the supply of teachers with higher degrees has a decreasing marginal benefit on student academic performance; its best marginal benefit on student academic performance is achieved when the proportion of teachers with a master’s degree reaches about 75%. For students in different academic performance subgroups, the marginal benefit of an increase in the proportion of teachers with a master’s degree in schools is higher for “top students” than for “students with learning difficulties.” In terms of the difference between urban and rural areas, the shortage of teachers in rural schools is more prominent than that in urban schools, and teachers with higher degrees tend to cluster in core cities. The marginal benefit of an increase in the proportion of teachers with a master’s degree is higher for improving student academic performance in rural areas. Therefore, it is recommended to design a policy of differentiated compensatory earnings for rural teachers, and efforts should be enhanced to promote programs for supporting high-quality teachers. In addition, the allocation of teachers should follow the principle of “differentiated equity,” and more differentiated teaching strategies should be adopted for students with different academic abilities.

This paper analyzes the performance of China’s anti-bullying efforts with the data on school bullying in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 and PISA 2018. It is found that China has fully demonstrated its high performance in anti-bullying actions with all three key performance indicators dropping dramatically, namely the prevalence of bullying, the index of exposure to bullying, and the percentage of frequently bullied students. Further, from the perspectives of personal characteristics and school features, two rounds of PISA data are adopted to make the longitudinal diachronic comparison and the cross-national horizontal comparison, followed by the analysis of the occurrence and development patterns of school bullying. Five suggestions are put forward for the deployment of China’s anti-bullying action plan.

The outstanding performance of students in four Chinese provinces and municipalities in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 is inextricably linked to local resource support, excellent education traditions, and ongoing curriculum and teaching reform. However, deepening education reform requires attention to existing challenges, including large inter school gaps, the shortage of teachers in urban and rural areas, as well as students’ heavy schoolwork burden and low level of well-being. Therefore, several policy suggestions are proposed accordingly: gaining insight into and developing higher quality and fairer education, pursuing effective actions of education reform, and exploring innovative pathways to address educational problems.

Teaching autonomy is an important power of teachers as professionals and also a key factor affecting instructional quality. Based on the relevant data of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018, this study analyzes teachers’ teaching autonomy and its effect on instructional quality. It finds that, firstly, as compared to those in the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), teachers in Shanghai, China, have greater teaching autonomy, but there is still room for improvement in this regard. They have sufficient autonomy in determining the instructional content and disciplining students, but not in assessing students’ learning. Secondly, increasing the teaching autonomy in Shanghai can significantly improve instructional quality. Increasing their autonomy in assessing students’ learning has the greatest effect on improving instructional quality, while increasing the autonomy in choosing teaching methods has the least effect, which is culturally different from the situation in OECD countries. Thirdly, the influence of teaching autonomy on instructional quality is positively moderated by teaching efficacy, which means that teachers need to have the “ability” in addition to the “autonomy.” Based on this, suggestions are also made.

The 5G communication technology serving a wide range of vertical industries is maturing, which provides a possible boost for the development of smart education and lays a foundation for solving the principal contradiction in current education. With the characteristics of ultra-high speed, low latency, low energy consumption, massive network capacity, and high reliability, the 5G technology is applied with other technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), big data, and blockchain to promote the application upgrading of intelligent education technology. This paper analyzes the intelligent education technology and its eight typical applications in the 5G era, which include smart safe campus, integrated learning spaces, synchronous cyber classrooms, teachers’ professional development, robot learning partners, mobile and ubiquitous learning, virtual simulation training, and smart e-textbooks. Then, it discusses how intelligent education technology promotes changes in the modes of learning and teaching in the 5G era from three dimensions: individual learning, collaborative group learning, and classroom-based collective teaching. At last, the framework of smart education in the 5G era is proposed from the perspectives of intelligent education technology and its typical applications, changes in learning and teaching, and the new ecosystem of smart education.

Digital educational resources have become essential elements of modern educational public services. China’s national program on new educational infrastructure construction has proposed to take new infrastructure construction of digital educational resources as one of the critical tasks. This paper aims to provide a theoretical basis for advancing the reform and development of digital educational resources in the new era. It classifies the current development and realistic challenges of China’s digital educational resources, and summaries and interprets the directions of the three construction projects of new type resources and tools, the resource supply system, and the resource supervisory system. It depicts the prospect of digital educational resource construction in the intelligent era in the combination of the strategic layout of the policies on new educational infrastructure construction. It also discusses such key technologies supporting new infrastructure construction of digital educational resources as multimodal learning analytics, disciplinary knowledge graphs, machine learning, and blockchain. It finally proposes a specific development path for new infrastructure construction of digital educational resources.

Digital and smart education has become the new orientation of educational reform. Further promoting the application of the pilot Smart Education of China platform is one of the effective means to implement the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Informatization, an essential deployment of China’s strategic decision on digital education and a pivotal move to stimulate the construction of digital China. With the Smart Education of China as the research object and based on its strategic superiority and connotation of construction, the paper analyzes the current status and development of the construction and application of smart education platforms and resources, explores the patterns and methods of provincial promotion with Jiangsu Province as an example, and puts forth countermeasures and suggestions in terms of platform interconnection, resources construction, innovation mechanism, digital transformation, and safety specification. This paper aims to provide reference and experience for the provincial promotion, application, and practice of the Smart Education of China. It also targets at facilitating the interconnected promotion and innovative application in different places, establishing the “extensively accessible” smart resource public service system at the country, province, city, county, and school levels .

In education, digitalization has become a pivotal force to promote educational reform in the new era, featuring demand-driven development of digital transformation in education. Digital transformation in higher education aims to reshape its new capabilities based on next-generation digital technologies concerning the quality of development of higher education. As per the scope of services and composition of responsible subjects like personnel, digital transformation in higher education should focus on three key areas: talent development, scientific research, as well as management and services. In addition, digital transformation should be structured based on several types of content: essential data, environments, operational functions, organizational structure, and systems. Moreover, paths of guarantee, action, and operation should be taken concurrently to facilitate digital transformation in higher education.

At present, intelligent digital technology is irreversibly influencing all levels of the education field. The construction of an education system serving lifelong learning has also become an essential field of digital transformation. In the face of the impact of marketization, aging, and networking, as well as the update and iteration of intelligent digital technology, the construction of the lifelong learning system not only needs to realize the transformation with the help of digital technology but also needs to clarify the internal correlation of transformation goals, computing power support, multiple collaboration, and learning evaluation from the framework structure. At the same time, it is necessary to realize that the penetration of technology into lifelong learning may cause the misunderstanding of technology supremacy and the trap of tool rationality. Therefore, technological empowerment and enablement can accelerate the digital transformation of the lifelong learning system and coordinate with community education, elderly education, vocational education, higher education, and other fields to construct an integrated environment. Additionally, being critical issues requiring attention from society, they are also vital ways to overcome the above dis advantages, promote interactions between communities, governments, and professional education organizations, and improve the digital and intelligent learning environment.