This study aims to understand how socioeconomic status and the family environment impact students’ academic achievement through the mediation of parental involvement in rural China. To achieve this, a cross-sectional design was adopted, and a total of 525 parents of rural junior high school students from S province in southwest China were surveyed. The proposed conceptual framework was tested by structural equation modeling. The results claimed that both socioeconomic status and the family environment are important factors affecting the academic achievement of rural students, and the role of the family environment is more pronounced. Furthermore, parental involvement has a significant mediating effect between socioeconomic status and academic achievement, especially between the family environment and academic achievement. The findings highlighted the importance of the family environment and parental involvement to compensate for the negative impact of disadvantaged family socioeconomic status on academic achievement.

Internet access for adolescents is becoming more prevalent around the world. Although video game playing has been verified to be negatively related to adolescent academic achievement, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are also unknown. Using a nationally representative sample of adolescents from the China Education Panel Survey (2014–2015), this study aims to explore the parallel mediation roles of self-educational expectation and learning attitude in the link between video game playing and academic achievement, and whether the direct and indirect effects are moderated by parent-child relationship. The results indicate that video game playing in adolescents is both directly and indirectly related to their academic achievement, and self-educational expectation and learning attitude partially mediate this association. Moreover, the results reveal that parent-child relationship moderates the direct association between video game playing and academic achievement as well as the indirect association of video game playing on academic achievement via self-educational expectation, respectively. By showing empirical evidence for the usefulness of social cognitive theory to adolescents’ academics in the Internet Age, our research provides a supplement to existing literature.

With the rapid development of China, parents are placing higher and higher expectations on their children’s education. Drawing upon baseline data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS2013), this study delves into the mechanisms through which the learning attitude of junior high school students affects the association between parental educational expectations and academic performance. The results of the present study show that students’ learning attitude is a significant factor that impacts the academic performance of junior high school students and plays a substantial mediating role in the relationship between parental educational expectations and academic performance. Our analyses reveal that parental educational expectations have a greater impact on test scores compared to cognitive ability. Additionally, the mediating effect of learning attitude on the relationship between parental educational expectations and test scores is considerably stronger than the relationship between parental educational expectations and cognitive ability. These results contribute to a better understanding of the mechanism by which parental educational expectations affect children’s academic performance, which has implications for educational policy and practice in China.