Shadow Education

日本の塾教育の研究を始めて６年以上経つが、何を研究しているのか説明しようとすると、けげんな顔をされることが多い。自国以外の教育制度を研究する必要性や価値を感じる者は比較教育学者を除いてあまりいない。しかも比較教育研究界においてすらその研究対象は公教育に置かれる。塾を研究対象とする研究者は一部に限られ、その一人が香港大学のマーク・ブレイ教授であるが、私が日本の塾の研究をしていると知り、（カナダのブリティッシュ・コロンビア大学のジュリアン・ディレケス教授－のちに私の博士論文のアドバイザーになるのだが－の他に）「もう一人、ドイツ人」が日本の塾研究に加わったことはいいことだと私に言った。このような経緯から、ごく一部の外国人研究者の他に、日本の塾研究は主に日本人の手で行なわれていると思っていたが、日本に来て、博士論文のテーマは「日本の塾教育」であると宣言すると、日本人の研究者はみな一歩引いたのだった。「影の教育」や「塾」の定義、そしてなぜドイツ人の私が興味を持つのかの説明で一苦労である。西欧の研究者は「塾」という言葉にあまり馴染みがないが、日本人研究者は研究が進められてないにもかかわらず、塾が何かよくわかっている。初めて日本の塾業界の規模を知った時、研究する人があまりいないことに驚いた。2012年から13年に掛けて、同志社大学大学院に在籍したが、当時の指導教官だった尾嶋史章教授には、塾教育をテーマにするのはそもそもタブーなようなものであり、研究基金を得ることも難しいであろうことを指摘された。このような現状では、日本でどのようにして現在のような塾教育が成り立ったのか、なぜ現在でも盛んなのか、公教育にどのような影響を与えているのか、教育機会の公平性は、といった疑問に答を見出す研究ができるわけがない。そこで、塾をテーマにした研究が国内外双方の研究者とって興味深いばかりでなく、いかに必要であるかを述べていきたい

Since I entered the “shadow” of the Japanese education system some 6 years ago, I received a lot of strange looks when trying to explain what my research was about. Aside from comparative educationalists, only few understand the importance and merits of studying foreign systems of education. But even in comparative education research, outside of school realities are still rarely focused on. With the exception of Mark Bray (University of Hong Kong), who is the leading scholar on worldwide shadow education and with whom I seek counsel as often as I can, very few made shadow education their major research focus. As Mark heard that I was researching juku in Japan, he said that it is good to have “another German” interested in the field, referring to Julian Dierkes (University of British Columbia), one of the few foreign experts on juku, who later became one of my advisors for my doctoral thesis. So besides a few foreign researchers, most research on the topic was likely to be carried out in Japan itself – or so I thought. Even in Japan, many looked rather puzzled when I told them that the topic of my doctoral thesis would be Japanese “shadow education”. It was always a struggle to explain what shadow education is exactly, and why anyone from Germany would be interested to learn more about the Japanese shadow system, the “juku-industry”. Western researchers are generally neither familiar with the terms shadow education nor juku. In contrast, all Japanese seem to somehow know what juku are, even though there is little research on this topic in Japan. When I first heard about the scale of private tutoring in all its forms in Japan, I was surprised to learn that only few would have interest in analyzing this second schooling system, as I came to call it. During my time at Dōshisha University in Kyoto 2012/13, my advisor Fumiaki Ojima told me that juku are considered a topic almost taboo in academics and that it would be impossible to actually get research grants on the matter per se. This, of course, does not help to understand why shadow education in Japan exists in the way it does, why it remains very successful, and what the existence of such a system means for the state of education in general and, in particular, for equality of educational opportunities in Japan and beyond. What is it that makes the Japanese juku-industry a topic not only interesting but essential to analyze for Japanese and non-Japanese researchers? These are the issues I will address in this paper.

Private tuition is the practice of academic teaching and learning from outside of the school with a fee but a few of studies acknowledged what private tuition provides to the receivers beyond the teaching of academic subjects. This study explored the intensity and nature of private tuition through 1119 Grade 9 students’ survey reports and 18 interviewees’ responses. The study revealed the common practice of private tuition in Myanmar and 69.5% of the participants are in private boarding tuition. Moreover, it concluded that students get supportive services for learning in private tuition in addition to academic teachings.

In view of the popularity and continuous expansion in the scale of shadow education (private supplementary tutoring) all over the world, research in this field has recently received more attention. However, the study of English language learning in this context has been rather limited although it is the subject having the greatest demand in Hong Kong. This study aimed to fill part of the research gap by focusing on the experience of learners of English under shadow education in Hong Kong. It investigated, from the learners’ perspective, why they received English tutoring, the strategies tutors used and how their motivations and attitudes were influenced. It also explored what learners ‘wanted’ and ‘needed’ in English learning under shadow education, and whether their ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ were satisfied.
A qualitative study was carried out. Data were collected using background questionnaires and one-to-one semi-structured interviews. Fourteen Year One university undergraduates were recruited as interviewees to narrate their experience of English learning through tuition in their whole life before they were admitted to university.
The data showed that learners participated in four types of tutoring, namely one-to-one, small-group, large-group and star-tutoring. The frequency, duration, costs, learners’ attitudes, motivation and reasons for receiving tutoring changed in different periods. A theoretical framework was developed to investigate how learners were motivated under shadow education. The data also suggested that learners’ ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ overlapped to various degrees in different periods.
The study has indicated that shadow education has had a significant impact on the mainstream education system. While shadow education seems to be developing in an opposite direction to the current education reform, there is clearly something that mainstream schoolteachers and curriculum developers can learn from it. It would be wise to look at the issue seriously instead of ignoring it.

This chapter is about the shadow education system of private supplementary tutoring. It addresses the nature and implications of extra lessons in academic subjects for pupils attending primary and secondary schools. The chapter is only concerned with extra lessons that are provided in exchange for a fee, in contrast to lessons provided free of charge by family members and community bodies and by schools as part of their regular duties. Such activity has become widely known as shadow education because its content mimics that of the regular schools: as the curriculum changes in the schools, so it changes in the shadow. Also, as the school sector expands, so does the shadow sector.

To set the stage, the chapter sketches the scale and nature of shadow education in selected countries. It then considers some of the driving forces for demand. In general, families invest in supplementary tutoring because they do not consider regular schooling adequate to meet their needs and aspirations. The question then is whether the schooling is of poor quality, or whether schooling could be described as strong but insufficient to meet all aspirations of families in the increasingly competitive environments in which they find themselves.

Common Rooms as outpost of daily support are places, where are attending children and young people of all ages. They come often from disadvantaged backgrounds, difficult backgrounds as well as marginalized and excluded backgrounds. In order to conduct efficient and effective process to aid and support children and young people, classes and free time are organized by tutors in Common Rooms. However, legal regulation in Poland do not regulate all the issues associated with the practice tutor in Common Room. In this paper, I would like to present the current profile of tutor in Common Room, based on the results of own research. At the end I would like to present my proposals for methods and forms how work with children and young people, that makes that pedagogue do not remain in a shadow, but he or she could be pleased and satisfied from work with children and young people in Common Rooms.

Expanding numbers of researchers are focusing on the scale and impact of private supplementary tutoring. Such tutoring is widely called shadow education, since much of its curriculum mimics that of regular schooling. Although shadow education has expanded significantly worldwide and is now recognized to have far-reaching significance, research faces methodological and conceptual challenges. This article focuses on analyses of shadow education data from the Third (or Trends in) International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA). An initial problem arises from definitions of shadow education and therefore from research focus. Further challenges arise from the initial phrasing and
then translation of items in international questionnaires. The article notes that some studies have been grounded in problematic data, which has led to misleading pictures.
Methods and approaches are maturing, but much refinement remains necessary for an adequate understanding of the nature and implications of shadow education.

This study aims to investigate the effect of shadow education on students’ self-efficacy.
Shadow education or tutoring mimics the mainstream form of education (Bray, 1999) while
self-efficacy is a personal judgment of one’s capability to plan and execute a course of action
to achieve a certain goal (Bandura, 1977 as cited by Zimmerman, 2000). Results of this study
described the tutorial background of the respondents and their self-efficacy levels. It has been
found out that students’ self-efficacy due to exposure to shadow education is high. The
self-efficacy of students does not necessarily vary when compared by gender, grade level, and
the length of time that respondents have been going to tutorial sessions.

Private tutoring has become a widespread phenomenon worldwide, partly due to the global trend of marketisation and commodification of education. Informed by a discursive view of identity and through multimodal discourse analysis, this study aims to unveil part of the shadow education discourse by investigating the identities of 41 English language tutors portrayed in their biographies on the websites of six leading tutorial schools in Hong Kong. The findings suggest that the tutors project identities as (1) an authoritative exam expert, (2) a popular star, and (3) a well-qualified English language teacher. These multiple identities overlap and collectively create an ‘exam expert-star-teacher’ hybrid identity. The study sheds light on how implicit values and beliefs about shadow education are created and manifested in educational and social discourses, particularly when biography in tutorial advertisements is a prevailing commercial genre with promotional purposes.

Private supplementary tutoring has long existed in Bangladesh, as elsewhere in the world, but in recent decades has become much more visible. Much tutoring ‘shadows’ or reproduces formal schooling as fee-based academic teaching outside school hours. This paper focuses on school factors that shape demand for private supplementary tutoring in English at the secondary level. It presents data gained from both quantitative and qualitative methods, and highlights disparities between urban and rural areas. Some mainstream teachers stimulate students’ demand for supplementary tutoring in the context of teachers’ low salaries and creating sources of extra incomes. The paper considers urban and rural variations, perceiving that school socio-economic situations and geographic considerations impinge upon learners’ engagement in fee-paying supplementary tutoring. Notable that this paper will not be limited only to geographical dissimilarities because in some cases, urban and rural school factors have unavoidable similar perspectives that encourage private supplementary tutoring. Private tutoring in English, a subclass of private tutoring, is popular; because English is a non-native language and compulsory course in curriculum of secondary education in Bangladesh.

How children spend time outside of school has consequences for their learning and development. Research on extracurricular participation has focused primarily on school-aged children and youth in Western societies. Yet, extracurricular activities are a common but understudied context of early development in Mainland China. In the present study, we employed the developmental model and the threshold model as a lens to examine the linear and nonlinear impact of extracurricular participation on three domains of development among 695 Chinese preschoolers. There are three main findings. First, there was partial support for the linear effect model (i.e., the developmental model). After controlling for demographic variables and children's prior performance, extra-curricular involvement was positively associated with children's cognitive and language development, but not to social-emotional development. Second, there was also partial support for the overscheduling hypothesis (i.e., the threshold model). The results showed a quadratic effect of intensity, breadth, and total number of extracurricular activities on children's social-emotional development, as well as a quadratic effect of the breadth of extra-curricular participation on children's language development. Finally, we extended the traditional overscheduling hypothesis by examining how duration of extracurricular involvement interacted with three other dimensions of involvement. The results suggest that increasing the number or intensity of extracurricular activities would benefit children's language development when participation duration was relatively short. However, these influences became neutral at average levels of duration and harmful in cases of very long duration. Implications of our findings are discussed.

Ethical considerations arise at every stage in the research process - planning the study, recruiting and engaging participants in data collection, analysing the data, and publishing. The principal ethical considerations are causing no harm to participants and a commitment to moral integrity and participants’ rights, consent and confidentiality (Watts 2006; Vainio 2013). However, researchers face dilemmas if strict adherence to specific ethical rules affects what is being studied – perhaps even to the extent of making it impossible to conduct research of the type envisaged (Homan 1991; Wiles et al. 2006; Hammersley 2015). Social research, particularly qualitative research, has experienced controversy because ethical guide-lines are sometimes intentionally vague to allow researchers flexibility to adopt a “situational relativist” approach in which researchers make ethical decisions based on their own ethical or moral standards. Yet while ethical issues have been considered important and influential in research, they “usually remain detached or marginalized from discussions of re-search projects” (Hesse-Biber & Leavy 2011, p.59).
This chapter discusses ethical issues in a one-year qualitative study of Secondary 6 students’ English learning experiences in lecture-type tutor-ing in Hong Kong. As ethical dilemmas are usually context-specific in social research (Goodwin et al. 2003; Wiles et al. 2006), the chapter first describes the context of the study. It then outlines the research design, and describes the data collection process in the pilot and main study. The section on ethical issues includes focus on informed consent, incentives, building relationships, researcher positioning, and confidentiality and anonymity.

The aim of this paper is to clarify in what ways school performance and out-of-school lessons are linked, with special emphasis on social disparities in educational attainment. Previous research about shadow education indicates that out-of-school education may indeed be a factor to improve the academic achievement of school students. On the other hand, it is stated nearly without exception that the socioeconomic background of a student plays a significant role for academic achievement as well. Using data of the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), this paper shows new findings in comparing effects of shadow education investments on students’ performance in Japan and Germany. I found that out-of-school education investments in both countries led to four significant outcomes: (i) in Japan, high school students’ academic achievement is increased due to out-of-school lessons; (ii) in both countries there is great variation in how out-of-school lessons affect academic performance according to the types of out-of-school lessons and the living area; (iii) out-of-school education determines higher
achievement scores in international comparison in a decisive way and therefore provides a reasonable explanation for the Japanese success in PISA; and (iv) since the mid-1990s the system in Japan has advanced from a mixed to a predominantly enrichment out-of-school education system, while the German out-of-school education system is still of remedial character.

Shadow education has become a common phenomenon in urban Dhaka, where patterns and scale of tutoring in English have been remarkable in recent years. Private supplementary tutoring with an additional fee is generally called shadow education. This study used a mixed-methods approach that included quantitative and qualitative data collected from the survey and individual interview. Tutoring in English has been a regular feature of the teaching profession in this urban area. The paper examines various patterns of private tutoring in English and focuses on the amount of tutoring including the tutoring received and not received by students in urban Dhaka. It shows the variations of scale regarding tutoring in English between male and female students. The study also identifies different types of private tutors who deliver supplementary tutoring. Finally, the choices pupils make regarding their evaluation on the effectiveness of shapes of tutoring in English are discussed.

The paper focuses on teacher-supplied private tutoring in the context of post-Soviet Georgia, and elucidates the ways in which teacher-supplied tutoring can be related to educational corruption. It attempts to contextualize the notion of teacher corruption in Georgia by identifying ethically acceptable and unacceptable educational practices based on cultural constructs and assumptions. Further, it explores as how both client-initiated (students and families) and provider-initiated (teachers) forms of corruption can affect the quality of education and distort moral values of young people.
The paper draws on data from in-depth interviews of 18 public and private school teachers in different parts of Georgia in 2013. The findings of the qualitative study indicate challenges that teachers face as a result of their dual lives between schools and private tutoring. The challenges include moral dilemmas related to tutoring their own students for whom they are already responsible in mainstream schools. The benefits of tutoring are mainly associated with financial gains, which, in the context of low salaries from schools, become crucial for everyday survival. The paper discusses as how private tutoring becomes a “survival strategy” in the education system with low teacher pay, weak accountability system, and lack of monitoring efficacy. The findings also demonstrate the ways in which shadow aspects of tutoring affect human relationships as well as teacher collaboration in schools. Further, the findings provide insights into the social reality structure in Georgia, particularly showcasing strong social networks of obligation leading to favouritism.
The paper highlights that the widely accepted and normalized practice in the Georgian society, teachers’ tutoring their own students, is not necessarily a form of corruption. However, it includes a high risk of corruption because of a thin line existing between teacher professional ethics and a professional misconduct. Data from teacher interviews demonstrate how teacher-student negotiation for education in the unregulated tutoring market increases the risks of corruption, which can lead to eroding professional credibility of teachers and, in a broader sense, undermine public trust in the education system. No matter the degree of teacher corruption, the quality of public education suffers from the lack of teacher investment in and commitment to public education.
Understanding how teachers themselves rationalize tutoring own students, what private tutoring means to them in the course of their professional lives, contributes to the international research agenda by exploring teachers’ perspectives on private tutoring i.e., the supply side of the phenomenon that contrasts with much of the existing research, which focuses on the demand side. Further, the findings offer insights into what constitutes teacher corruption in post-Soviet Georgia, which makes an important contribution to the international scholarship on the educational corruption. The study is among the first to investigate the issue of teacher corruption from the perspectives of teachers themselves in Georgia.

Along with the dramatic expansion of private tutoring around the world, a significant body of literature has been produced to understand this phenomenon. While many studies consider the issue of geographic location, the spatial dimension tends not to be 10 a central focus of private tutoring studies. In contrast, the present essay applies mobility theory to research from Cambodia, where private tutoring is essential to student success. It does so in order to place private tutoring provision into a broader perspective that includes but moves beyond the economic dimensions of supply 15 and demand and the sociological dimensions of economic, cultural , and social capital to include consideration of how private tutoring provision is constrained by a multi © dimensional spatial field of possibilities and how private tutoring participation is enabled by one's position and abilities in relation to that field. 20 The paper argues for increased attention to 'spatial capital' in studies of private tutoring and education generally.

This project addressed the role of foreign language (FL) classes in a successful first-year student experience at one Japanese university. I assessed six dimensions of this experience: Match between high school FL classes and university FL classes, role of first-year FL course grades for academic progress, role of first-year FL classes in later studies, students’ attitudes toward the classes, promotion of language learning, and the success of these classes in fostering international peer interactions. Employing a mixed methods approach with one year of on-site fieldwork, I observed 78 FL classes, interviewed 40 students, five university and nine high school FL teachers, and analyzed teaching materials, homework, and student grades from 58 FL classes. Results indicated that, although these classes did not detract from students’ overall academic goals mainly due to the classes’ modest aims and lack of connections to later academic work, they largely failed to promote robust language learning, positive affect, and international peer interaction. This study especially indicates the need for improved connections between high school English and college-level EMI courses. Also, students with previous costly English learning opportunities fared better in English classes which suggests the importance of greater attention to equity in language education.

Private Supplementary Tutoring (PST) have attracted enormous attention in recent days. Bangladesh experiences both forms of PST – formal and informal. There is a considerable amount of research based on the demand-side of PST. The tutors, who are the suppliers of PST in the market, are the center of attention in this paper. The forces that affect the satisfaction of a tutor from providing tuition have been investigated here through factor analysis and stepwise regression. Analyzing a set of tutors from University of Dhaka, tutoring environment and financial independence are found to have a positive relationship with the satisfaction level of a tutor. Transportation costs as well as disadvantageous factors of tutoring as in wasting productive time, hampering academic results, lack of recreation pull the level of satisfaction down. Tutors are thought to be self-concentrated since result and improvement of the tutees are absent from the formulation of their satisfaction. Driving a wedge of fellow feeling between tutors and tutees will enhance the quality of education.

Why does educational success correlate with parents’ socio-economic status and educational level? Family background inequalities are transmitted to children’s educational outcomes through family strategies that are the transmission of cultural capital by parents and their investment in shadow education. In this paper, I investigate the effects of cultural capital acquired during childhood and experiences of shadow education on educational attainment and academic performance for the past half century, using data from the 1995 SSM survey in Japan. I created indexes of embodied cultural capital, objectifi ed cultural capital, and shadow education. The index of embodied cultural capital during childhood is measured by the experiences of fi ne art culture and reading culture with the family. Fine art culture consists of two items: participation in classical music and visit to art museums/art galleries with the family in childhood. Reading culture is measured by the experience in which a ...

Purpose
Private supplementary tutoring, which is common in many countries, has mixed (both positive and negative) dimensions that impact students’ learning. Private supplementary tutoring runs parallel to mainstream schooling and provides lessons before or after school hours in exchange for additional fees. This paper focuses on how private supplementary tutoring benefits students’ learning in secondary education. It also identifies the drawbacks of tutoring, and shows variations in/between urban and rural locations.
Design/methodology
The paper employed a mixed methods approach using a survey and individual interview collected from two different research settings: urban and rural. Grades 8 and 10 were purposefully chosen for data collection. A sample of 802 participants including 401 students and their 401 parents (either mothers or fathers) participated in the survey as well as 48 interviewees comprising students, parents and teachers provided their information.
Findings
At times, pupils’ educational perspectives are influenced by the conflicting (positive/negative) standpoint of tutoring issue. The paper finds mixed impacts of private tutoring with a focus on disparities of implications between urban and rural locations. It identifies positive aspects including learning attainment, exam preparation, relationship growth and lesson practice as well as negative perspectives comprising examination-centered aim and hamper of mainstream school learning.
Value
The study contributes to awareness of private supplementary tutoring that benefits students’ learning and brings disadvantages at the same time. It shows implications of fee-charging tutoring which may relate to students’ family socio-economic situations. The paper addresses private tutoring in general (including English and all other subjects) in most cases, and more specifically private tutoring in English a subject in some cases.

Why does educational success correlate with parents’ socio-economic status and educational level? Family background inequalities are transmitted to children’s educational outcomes through family strategies that are the transmission of cultural capital by parents and their investment in shadow education. In this paper, I investigate the effects of cultural capital acquired during childhood and experiences of shadow education on educational attainment and academic performance for the past half century, using data from the 1995 SSM survey in Japan. I created indexes of embodied cultural capital, objectifi ed cultural capital, and shadow education. The index of embodied cultural capital during childhood is measured by the experiences of fi ne art culture and reading culture with the family. Fine art culture consists of two items: participation in classical music and visit to art museums/art galleries with the family in childhood. Reading culture is measured by the experience in which a ...

Recent years have brought a major shift in the field of international comparative education with the rise of quantitative assessments of student achievement. Within these studies, outside-school-time (OST) as a supplement and complement to schooling has been included. However, OST is difficult to define and measure; and challenges multiply when comparisons are made across countries and cultures. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) managed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has sought to confront these challenges. It has had some success, and the 2015 PISA iteration showed advances over its predecessors but also showed significant shortcomings. With a methodological thrust, this paper examines the challenges of preparing appropriate questions in English, translating those questions into other languages, and preparing meaningful cross-national comparisons. The paper has pertinence not only within the specific domain of OST studies but also the wider thrusts of quantification in international comparisons.

This is a translation of my original paper published in 2001 in the Japanese Journal Kyoikugaku Kenkyu. The original paper is as follows: Emi, Kataoka.  2001. “ Kyoiku tassei katei ni okeru kazoku no kyoiku senryaku: Bunka shihon kouka to gakkou-gai kyoiku toushi kouka no gender-sa wo chusin ni” (Family Strategy in the Educational Attainment Process in Japan: Gender Differences in the Effect of Cultural Capital and Investments in Extracurricular Education), Kyoikugaku Kenkyu
( The Japanese Journal of Educational Research ), Vol. 68. No. 3, 259-73.
Abstract:
Why does educational success correlate with parents’ socio-economic status and educational level? Family background inequalities are transmitted to children’s educational outcomes through family strategies that are the transmission of cultural capital by parents and their investment in shadow education. In this paper, I investigate the effects of cultural capital acquired during childhood and experiences of shadow education on educational attainment and academic performance for the past half century, using data from the 1995 SSM survey in Japan.
I created indexes of embodied cultural capital, objectified cultural capital, and shadow education. The index of embodied cultural capital during childhood is measured by the experiences of fine art culture and reading culture with the family. Fine art culture consists of two items: participation in classical music and visit to art museums/art galleries with the family in childhood. Reading culture is measured by the experience in which a family member reads books aloud to the respondent during childhood. Objectified cultural capital is measured by the cultural possession of the family when the respondent is 15 years old, such as a piano, literature collection and art works or antiques.  Investment in extra-curricular education, namely shadow education, is measured by the number of extra-curricular lessons (cram schools, private tutors, and correspondence courses). I estimate the coefficients of structural equation models using the LISREL software package to analyze the causal relationship between family backgrounds and educational attainment. The analysis is conducted separately for men and women at each birth cohort , i.e., 20-34, 35-49, 50-69 years old. The analysis shows that the respondents’ cultural capital and academic performance at ninth grade (the third year of middle school in Japan) had strong effects on final educational attainment. Though meritocratic selection permeates the educational system in Japan, family backgrounds also affect academic performance at the ninth grade. Controlling by family backgrounds, the functions of family strategies such as cultural capital, on educational outcomes differ by gender and birth cohort. For women, cultural capital increased their academic performance at the ninth grade and final educational attainment, but not for men. Embodied cultural capital during childhood has a strong direct effect on women’s educational outcomes, because cultural capital is converted to the academic performances at middle school. Its effect was minimal for men and decreased in men’s younger cohort. Social background variables measured by father’s occupation and financial resources  measured by the number of siblings as a proxy variable, have a strong impact on the educational attainment for men and women. Women have achieved their education by merit and cultural capital. Cultural selection functions for women’s educational attainment process. The impacts of cultural capital on men’s educational outcomes, however, have diminished, and shadow education that is converted from family background inequalities still has effects on the educational attainment of men.

Abstract How children spend time outside of school has consequences for their learning and development. Research on extracurricular participation has focused primarily on school-aged children and youth in Western societies. Yet, extracurricular activities are a common but understudied context of early development in Mainland China. In the present study, we employed the developmental model and the threshold model as a lens to examine the linear and nonlinear impact of extracurricular participation on three domains of development among 695 Chinese preschoolers. There are three main findings. First, there was partial support for the linear effect model (i.e., the developmental model). After controlling for demographic variables and children’s prior performance, extracurricular involvement was positively associated with children’s cognitive and language development, but not to social-emotional development. Second, there was also partial support for the overscheduling hypothesis (i.e., the threshold model). The results showed a quadratic effect of intensity, breadth, and total number of extracurricular activities on children’s social-emotional development, as well as a quadratic effect of the breadth of extracurricular participation on children’s language development. Finally, we extended the traditional overscheduling hypothesis by examining how duration of extracurricular involvement interacted with three other dimensions of involvement. The results suggest that increasing the number or intensity of extracurricular activities would benefit children’s language development when participation duration was relatively short. However, these influences became neutral at average levels of duration and harmful in cases of very long duration. Implications of our findings are discussed.

Recent years have brought a major shift in the field of international comparative education with the rise of quantitative assessments of student achievement. Within these studies, outside-school-time (OST) as a supplement and complement to schooling has been included. However, OST is difficult to define and measure; and challenges multiply when comparisons are made across countries and cultures. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) managed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has sought to confront these challenges. It has had some success, and the 2015 PISA iteration showed advances over its predecessors but also showed significant shortcomings. With a methodological thrust, this paper examines the challenges of preparing appropriate questions in English, translating those questions into other languages, and preparing meaningful cross-national comparisons. The paper has pertinence not only within the specific domain of OST studies...