Decent Education in China: Context, Conceptualization, and Assessment

Decent education has been theorized as a foundation for career development, yet its measurement has not been validated outside Western contexts. Across two complementary but non-equivalent studies, we adapted the Decent Education Scale (DES) for 457 Chinese senior high-school students and the Retrospective Decent Education Scale (RDES) for 661 university students recalling high school. Confirmatory factor analyses and nomological-network tests provided initial structural and construct-validity evidence. Brief open-ended responses, analyzed as an exploratory content-validity component, broadly supported the six-domain framework and highlighted extracurricular enrichment, study-life balance, physical infrastructure, and personal development as contextual expressions or candidate areas for future item development. By illuminating how these two scales operate in China, this study extends the assessment of decent education beyond its original Swiss and U.S. validation contexts, and establishes a foundation for future cross-cultural, longitudinal, and equity-oriented research in career assessment.