Abstract: In order to reduce the drowning accidents of pupils in China, the water safety education of the pupils must be strengthened.The paper compares the differences in water safety KSAB among pupils from different sexes, ages, resident and areas in China. 2 554 pupils from Yunnan, Hubei and Zhejiang provinces were surveyed by means of questionnaire and the analyses of variance were carried out. The results show that boys are better than girls in water safety skills, girls better than boys in attitude, boys take more high-risk behaviors, that knowledge, skills and attitudes of urban pupils are higher than those of rural pupils, and the urban pupils having high-risk behavior are less than the rural pupils having the behavior, that levels of the knowledge and the skills of pupils in the eastern region are higher than those of pupils in the middle and the lowest in the west, while for the high-risk behavior there is a negative correlation, that knowledge, skills and attitudes increase with the grade, and that the rural male pupils being young in age in the underdeveloped economic areas should be the focal point of the water safety education.

Key words: pupil, knowledge,skill,attitude and behavior(KSAB), water safety, sex differences, urban and rural differences, regional differences, grade differences