Effectiveness Evaluation of the Group-Based Paired Education Assistance Program between Shanghai and Yunnan

Abstract

Group‐oriented educational assistance constitutes a vital institutional innovation meant to boost balanced high‐quality regional education within east‐west collaborative frameworks. Traditional performance assessment approaches mostly focus on indicator weighting and ranking outputs, which fail to reveal how multiple interacting conditions jointly produce satisfactory assistance outcomes. This paper takes Shanghai‐Yunnan group‐based high‐school educational pairing support as its empirical context. Valid questionnaires were collected from 52 local teachers at beneficiary high‐schools in Yunnan Province and 40 supporting teachers dispatched from Shanghai. Individual‐level questionnaire answers were aggregated to construct 11 school‐level case units for analysis. After constructing a performance assessment indicator framework, this paper carries out configurational empirical tests via fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). Findings show that no single condition can independently bring about high‐quality assistance performance. Long‐run institutional arrangements and two‐way Shanghai‐Yunnan teaching‐research cooperation function as core foundations for desirable support effects. Four alternative pathways may generate high‐quality outcomes, namely comprehensive coordination‐balanced mode, resource‐collaboration‐oriented mode, policy‐teacher adaptive mode, and long‐term‐institution‐guaranteed mode. Beneficiary schools with varied internal resource endowments can achieve satisfactory support results through different factor combinations. Accordingly, authorities should consolidate institutional safeguards, strengthen two‐sided teaching‐research links, and deliver classified support according to actual school‐level conditions. This work offers empirical references for improving cross‐provincial educational pairing practices between eastern and western China.