About Journal of Chengdu Normal University

Journal of Chengdu Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Chengdu Normal University is the Chinese-language, education-focused academic journal of Chengdu Normal University in Chengdu, Sichuan. Its identity is unusually well documented for a university journal: it carries ISSN 2095-5642, attested through numerous article digital object identifiers in the form 10.3969/j.issn.2095-5642, and it had reached volume 40 in 2024, a numbering sequence that carries its history back well before the university took its present name in 2012. It is, as its contents demonstrate, a journal devoted principally to education research — the scholarly counterpart of a university whose entire institutional identity is built on the training of teachers.

The 2024 citation that anchors its recent record is characteristic of its pages: Zhao and Guo's study of the relationship between family functioning and adolescents' prosocial behaviour tendencies, examining the mediating role of moral identity and the moderating role of self-control, published in volume 40, issue 3, pages 63–72, DOI 10.3969/j.issn.2095-5642.2024.03.007. Educational psychology of that kind — empirical, school-focused and concerned with children's development — is the journal's home ground.

The sponsoring university

Chengdu Normal University is a public full-time undergraduate university sponsored by the Sichuan Provincial People's Government and supervised by the Sichuan Provincial Department of Education. Its predecessor was the Sichuan Education Administration School, founded in 1955. It passed through the stages of the Sichuan Education Cadre Training College in 1964, the Sichuan Education College in 1978, and the Sichuan Education College under a renewed form in 1984, before the Ministry of Education approved its restructuring in March 2012 as a full-time general undergraduate college under the name Chengdu Normal University. The university is headquartered on its Wenjiang campus, with campuses also at Xindu and elsewhere in Chengdu.

The university's motto is rendered as love, truth, devotion and action, and its stated philosophy is to make a student's life at Chengdu Normal University a valuable journey in life. Over nearly seven decades, in its own summary, the school has been established by teachers, has thrived by teachers, has been strengthened by teachers and is proud of teachers. It has trained more than 150,000 graduates, including more than sixty national outstanding teachers, national model teachers and advanced workers in the national education system, more than 150 heads of municipal, prefectural and county education departments, more than 1,100 principals of secondary vocational schools and primary and secondary schools, and more than 10,000 senior and special-grade teachers. It has sixteen secondary colleges and thirty general undergraduate majors covering nine disciplines, and it serves as a demonstration unit for the Ministry of Education's teacher team building work and a pilot unit for artificial-intelligence-assisted teacher training.

A journal for teacher education

Chengdu Normal University exists to build what it calls the core base of teacher education: the cultivation of teachers' morality, of teachers' abilities and of teachers' knowledge, integrating pre-service training with in-service training and promoting the deep integration of information technology with education and teaching. Its provincial research centres map directly onto the concerns of its journal: the Sichuan Primary and Secondary School Teacher Professional Development Research Center, the Sichuan Primary and Secondary School Teacher Ethics Research Center, the Sichuan Education Informatization Application and Development Research Center, the Sichuan 0–3 Year Old Children Early Development and Education Research Center, the Sichuan Primary and Secondary School Safety Education and Management Research Center, and centres for labour education and international education development.

A journal published by such a university is therefore not a general xuebao that happens to include education; it is the publication of an institution whose research centres, training programmes and provincial responsibilities all converge on schooling. The university reports having undertaken 705 scientific research projects at all levels in a recent five-year period and published 2,305 papers, including 404 in national Chinese core journals and 119 indexed by CSSCI — a research output in which education scholarship predominates by design.

The double reduction dossier

The journal's most distinctive documented contribution is the sustained attention its pages gave to China's "double reduction" policy. Introduced in July 2021 through opinions issued by the general offices of the Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council, double reduction sought to reduce the homework burden on students in compulsory education and to reduce the burden of off-campus, subject-based tutoring. It was the most consequential Chinese school policy of its decade, and the Journal of Chengdu Normal University followed its implementation in schools, in families and in local government through a run of studies in volume 38, in 2022.

That run included the practical problems and optimisation strategies of after-class services under double reduction, published as the opening article of issue 6 in 2022; Fang and Liu's analysis of parents' educational anxiety in the perspective of the double reduction policy — its manifestations, causes and relief — in issue 9; Chen, Ma and Gao's analysis of the factors influencing parents' educational anxiety among urban and rural middle school students, based on a survey of four cities in Zhejiang Province, in issue 12; Gao and Chen's survey-based study of English homework design for primary school students under double reduction, in issue 7; and a survey study of the governance of shadow education institutions in a county setting, examining the current situation, problems and countermeasures for implementing double reduction at county level, in issue 1. Further studies in the same vein addressed the causes of parents' educational anxiety and the ways of relieving it.

What the dossier shows

Taken together, those articles amount to a dossier on a national policy as seen from a teacher-training university in Sichuan: how after-school services were to be staffed and improved once tutoring was curtailed; how homework — in English teaching specifically — was to be redesigned rather than merely reduced; how county governments were to govern the shadow education sector the policy restricted; and, above all, how parents' anxiety persisted and mutated even as the burdens the policy targeted were lifted. Parents' educational anxiety is the dossier's recurring note, examined from policy perspective, from urban-rural comparison and from family functioning alike, and it connects the 2022 double reduction studies to the journal's later educational psychology, such as the 2024 study of family functioning and adolescents' prosocial behaviour.

The numbered issues attested for 2022 — issues 1, 6, 7, 9 and 12 among them — also document the journal's rhythm in that year: a periodical appearing in at least twelve numbered issues across the year, able to follow a fast-moving policy debate in something close to real time. For a university journal, that frequency is itself a finding, marking the title as one of the more actively published education journals in its sector.

Scope and character

Beyond the double reduction dossier, the journal's scope is the field its university inhabits: basic education research, teacher professional development, educational psychology, early childhood development, education informatics and school management, together with the wider scholarship of a nine-discipline university whose centre of gravity is pedagogy. Its articles are empirical in the manner the citations show — surveys of parents in four Zhejiang cities, studies of county-level implementation, questionnaire-based analyses of family functioning — reflecting the applied, school-facing research culture of a normal university charged with guiding the development of basic education in Sichuan.

That provincial charge is written into the university's mission: to serve the needs of basic education and of regional economic and social development, and to guide the development of basic education in Sichuan. The journal is one of the instruments of that charge, carrying Sichuan-based and nationally sourced education research to the teachers, principals and education administrators the university trains and serves.

Place in Chinese academic publishing

With its ISSN, its standard Chinese DOI pattern and its volume 40 reached in 2024, the Journal of Chengdu Normal University stands as a fully regular member of China's education journal sector. Its numbering predates the university's 2012 renaming, which means the journal carried the scholarship of the former Sichuan Education College before it carried that of Chengdu Normal University — a continuity of publication across an institutional transformation, common among Chinese university journals, in which the periodical is often the most stable element of the institution's identity.

For researchers outside China, the journal's double reduction studies are a primary-source record of how Chinese educators themselves analysed the policy in its first full year: not commentary from outside the system, but survey evidence and implementation analysis produced within a provincial teacher-training university. Anyone studying the gap between the policy's aims and parents' lived anxiety will find the journal's 2022 issues a documented starting point.

Why the journal matters

The Journal of Chengdu Normal University matters first as the education journal of Sichuan's specialist teacher-training university, an institution founded in 1955 as an education administration school, renamed in 2012, and responsible for more than 150,000 graduates across the province's schools. It matters second for its ISSN-documented regularity — volume 40 in 2024, monthly-numbered issues in its policy years — within the Chinese education periodical system. And it matters third for its double reduction dossier of 2022, a concentrated, citable body of research on parents' educational anxiety, after-class services, homework design and shadow-education governance that records, from inside Chinese teacher education, the human consequences of the country's most debated school reform.