The study, published in the journal Large-scale Assessments in Education, was led by Guanyu Chen of the University of British Columbia together with colleagues at Iowa State University and the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority. Rather than treating the two systems as interchangeable examples of East Asian achievement, the researchers directly compared them within a single analytical framework, using Walberg’s theory of educational productivity to organize factors into four domains: student characteristics, student attitudes and behaviors, family background, and school context.

The technical backbone of the analysis was hierarchical linear modeling, or HLM, a statistical approach designed for data in which students are nested within schools. Because PIRLS samples intact classrooms rather than independent individuals, traditional regression would underestimate uncertainty and blur the distinction between student-level and school-level effects. The team used the EdSurvey R package, applying sampling and replicate weights and analyzing five plausible values per student to capture measurement uncertainty in the achievement scores. After listwise deletion of cases with missing data, the final models included 3,619 fourth-graders in Hong Kong and 5,734 in Singapore.

One of the most consistent findings concerned absenteeism. In both systems, students who reported missing school at least once every two months scored substantially lower in reading, with gaps of roughly 24 points in Hong Kong and nearly 30 points in Singapore in the fully adjusted models. This is notable because both jurisdictions tightly regulate attendance: Hong Kong legally obliges parents to ensure schooling during prescribed hours, while Singapore enforces mandatory attendance under its Compulsory Education Act. Despite these structures, around 11 percent of Hong Kong students and 18 percent of Singaporean students reported absences, and their underperformance suggests that digital learning infrastructure alone cannot compensate for lost in-person instruction.

Reading confidence emerged as the single strongest attitudinal predictor in both systems. Students with high confidence scored 47.52 points higher than low-confidence peers in Hong Kong and a remarkable 77.88 points higher in Singapore, effects that remained stable even after family and school factors were added. The researchers frame this through the lens of social-emotional learning, linking self-efficacy and self-management to academic engagement. Moderate amounts of reading outside school, between 30 minutes and two hours daily, also predicted higher scores, though the benefits appeared to plateau or diminish for students reading more than two hours a day, possibly because PIRLS is calibrated to the average global reader.

Not every behavioral factor behaved the same way in both places. Library use was consistently and positively associated with reading achievement in Singapore, where even occasional users outscored non-users by 11 to 16 points, but showed no significant relationship in Hong Kong. Classroom engagement mattered modestly in both systems, while self-reported enjoyment of reading was not significantly associated with achievement in either. These divergences hint that identical interventions may not transfer cleanly between superficially similar systems.

The starkest contrast appeared in the family and school domains. Home socioeconomic status was a strong predictor everywhere, but its estimated effect was more than twice as large in Singapore, where high-SES students outscored low-SES students by about 45 points, compared with roughly 21 points in Hong Kong. Intriguingly, only 5.52 percent of Singaporean students came from low-SES households versus 17.43 percent in Hong Kong, and the authors suggest that Hong Kong’s smaller SES coefficient may reflect greater equity in how educational resources are distributed, a pattern consistent with OECD findings on Hong Kong’s performance in PISA 2022.

Parental reading habits, parental satisfaction with the school, and a school’s emphasis on academic success all predicted higher reading scores in Singapore but were weak or nonsignificant in Hong Kong. The authors caution that these relationships may partly reflect broader differences in school resources and academic culture rather than independent causal effects. Still, the descriptive gaps are telling: 42.25 percent of Hong Kong students attended schools with a low emphasis on academic success, compared with just 15.72 percent in Singapore. The study points to Singapore’s School Excellence Model and initiatives like Read@School as examples of deliberately coordinated family-school alignment, while Hong Kong has pursued parent education through a 2017 task force, Parent-Teacher Associations, and a territory-wide Positive Parents Campaign.

Demographic patterns also diverged. The gender gap favoring girls disappeared in Hong Kong once attitudes and behaviors were accounted for, but remained significant in Singapore even after full adjustment, at nearly 8 points. Age mattered only in Singapore, where older students within the grade cohort scored up to 14 points higher, and birthplace effects were sensitive to which other factors were in the model. At the school level, resource shortages and teacher job satisfaction showed no significant associations with achievement in either system, though the authors note large standard errors that suggest more complex underlying mechanisms.

The authors are careful to stress that the study is cross-sectional and identifies associations, not causes, and they call for causal inference methods and qualitative research to unpack the mechanisms at work. The models explained about 59 percent of school-level variance in Singapore but only about 32 percent in Hong Kong, hinting that unmeasured factors, from peer dynamics to school leadership, may be especially important there. The overarching lesson is that even top-performing systems diverge in meaningful ways: both must support absent students and narrow gaps between privileged and underprivileged learners, but the levers that work in Singapore’s tightly coordinated ecosystem may not map directly onto Hong Kong’s more heterogeneous landscape. For any system hoping to emulate the world’s best readers, the message is that excellence is not a single recipe but a family of locally tuned strategies.

Subject of Research: Comparative analysis of student, family, and school predictors of fourth-grade reading achievement in Hong Kong and Singapore using PIRLS 2021 data

Article Title: Educational productivity in high-performing systems: a comparison of Hong Kong and Singapore on PIRLS 2021

Article References: Chen, G., Qi, Q., Jin, K.-Y., Wang, Z., & Xi, X. (2026). Educational productivity in high-performing systems: a comparison of Hong Kong and Singapore on PIRLS 2021. Large-scale Assessments in Education, 14(1), Article 50. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40536-026-00316-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40536-026-00316-8

Keywords: PIRLS 2021, reading achievement, Hong Kong, Singapore, hierarchical linear modeling, educational productivity, literacy, socioeconomic status, absenteeism, family-school collaboration, social-emotional learning, large-scale assessment

The study, led by Haruka Kato of Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Human Life and Ecology, examined how city-level population change influences the relationship between everyday living conditions and life satisfaction. Researchers analyzed responses from 5,645 people living in small and medium-sized cities across Japan, using data from the country’s 2024 Survey on Satisfaction and Quality of Life. The analysis focused on whether factors such as employment, health, housing, finances, community connections and caregiving became more or less important depending on how quickly a city was losing population.

To investigate these relationships, the researchers used hierarchical linear modeling, a statistical technique designed for data in which individuals are nested within larger groups. In this case, residents were studied within their respective cities. This approach allowed the team to separate individual-level influences—such as a person’s health or work-life balance—from contextual influences linked to the city itself. It also enabled the researchers to test cross-level interactions, revealing whether the importance of a particular life condition changed as a city’s population decline became more severe.

The results showed that population decline was modestly associated with lower life satisfaction. However, the most significant finding was not simply that residents of shrinking cities reported lower well-being. Instead, the analysis indicated that some aspects of daily life became increasingly important under conditions of demographic stress. In other words, the same factor did not have an identical effect everywhere. Its relationship with life satisfaction strengthened or weakened depending on the broader population trajectory of the city in which a person lived.

For working-age adults, work-life balance emerged as a stronger predictor of life satisfaction in cities experiencing sharper population decline. The finding suggests that employment conditions may become especially consequential when local economies are losing residents, businesses and labor-market diversity. In a shrinking city, people may face fewer nearby job opportunities, longer travel distances, reduced access to specialized services or increased pressure on the remaining workforce. Under these circumstances, the ability to manage work alongside family and personal life may have an amplified influence on overall well-being.

A further analysis of work arrangements pointed to fully remote employment as a particularly important potential buffer. In cities declining more rapidly, residents who worked entirely remotely tended to report more favorable life satisfaction. Remote work may help disconnect economic opportunity from local job availability by allowing residents to remain in smaller communities while accessing employers, clients and professional networks elsewhere. The result does not prove that remote work directly causes higher life satisfaction, but it suggests that digital connectivity may help reduce the economic isolation associated with shrinking local labor markets.

The pattern was different among older adults. As population decline intensified, caregiving support became more strongly associated with life satisfaction. Among the specific factors examined, satisfaction with long-term care costs showed a particularly strong relationship with well-being in more rapidly shrinking cities. For older residents, predictable and manageable care expenses may provide more than financial relief. They may also reduce anxiety about whether local welfare systems, care providers and family networks will remain capable of meeting future needs as the population ages and the number of available caregivers falls.

These findings challenge a narrow interpretation of “Smart Decline,” a policy approach that generally emphasizes adapting infrastructure and public services to a smaller population. Compact urban development, the consolidation of facilities and the right-sizing of physical networks may be necessary, but the study suggests that demographic adaptation must also include social and digital protections. For adults, this could mean expanding high-speed internet access, remote-work facilities and digital skills programs that connect residents with opportunities beyond their immediate region. For older adults, it could involve stabilizing long-term care costs, strengthening household caregiving support and improving confidence in the continuity of local services.

“Our study suggests that Smart Decline policies should move beyond a narrow focus on physical right-sizing and compact city strategies,” Kato said. “For adults, this may mean investing in digital infrastructure and remote-work environments that expand access to economic opportunities beyond the local labor market. For older adults, it may mean stabilizing long-term care costs and supporting household caregiving arrangements.” Published in the journal Cities, the research offers a more targeted way to think about resilience in shrinking communities: rather than applying one solution to every resident, policies may need to strengthen the specific life domains that become most important as demographic decline accelerates.

Subject of Research: Not applicable

Article Title: Well-being amidst population decline: Contextual effects of population change on life satisfaction in shrinking small and medium-sized cities in Japan

News Publication Date: 20-May-2026

Web References: Osaka Metropolitan University; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2026.107231

References: Kato, H. “Well-being amidst population decline: Contextual effects of population change on life satisfaction in shrinking small and medium-sized cities in Japan.” Cities. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2026.107231

Image Credits: Osaka Metropolitan University

Keywords: population decline, shrinking cities, Japan, life satisfaction, well-being, remote work, long-term care, Smart Decline, urban policy, aging populations