0 Rural-urban Migration and Cognitive Skills among Middle Schoolers in China 1 Lingxin Hao and Xiao Yu Pui-Wa Lei and Weiyi Cheng Department of Sociology Department of Educational Psychology Johns Hopkins University Pennsylvania State University hao@jhu.edu, xyu26@jhu.edu puiwa@psu.edu, wuc131@psu.edu Short Abstract (150 words) China’s unprecedented rural-urban migration adds profound complications to the entrenched rural-urban spatial inequality in cognitive skills among middle schoolers. Despite the nine-year compulsory education law, parents’ rural-urban migration and institutional barriers of rural household registration (hukou) have created “brought-along” (to cities) and “left-behind” (in villages) student bodies. While governments and schools gradually adjust policies and measures to serve these fast growing, sizable, nontraditional student bodies, these students may be growing up with delayed cognitive skill development. We capitalize on the longitudinal, IRT-guided standardized cognitive ability assessments of a nationally representative sample of 10,279 7 th graders in 221 classrooms, 112 schools in 2013-14 with a follow-up in 2014-15. This paper examines whether and how government and school institution responsiveness to rural-urban migration plays a decisive role in reshaping the disparities in multidimensional cognitive skill level and growth. 1 Prepare to present at the PAA 2016. This research is supported by an NSF Grant SES-1259530.