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Abstract
Studies of parental involvement and children's education in a variety of contexts can provide valuable insights into how the relationships between parental involvement and student outcomes depend upon specific local contexts of family and education. Korean education is distinctive with its high prevalence of private tutoring, which not only imposes an economic burden on parents but also requires parents' time and efforts to select the best kind of private tutoring for their children and to keep track of their academic progress by interacting with private tutors. Here, data from a longitudinal survey in Korea that has traced 7th-graders for two years were used to investigate the determinants and the effects of parents' private tutoring-related activities in comparison to other types of home-based and school-based parental involvement. Multivariate analysis shows that parents' efforts in selecting and monitoring private tutoring are significantly associated with increased math and English test scores. Features of Korean education in which private tutoring becomes an important strategy for parents to enhance children's education are described, and the broader implications of the findings, beyond the local context, are discussed.
Keywords
parental involvement; private tutoring; academic achievement; South Korea
As a way to improve children's academic outcomes, many policy efforts in the United States have resulted in programs designed to promote parental involvement in children's education across local, state, and federal levels (Domina 2005; Epstein 2001). A fundamental assumption underlying such educational policies for parental involvement is the supposedly positive effect of parental involvement on children's educational outcomes. In contrast to the expected positive effect, however, previous studies of U.S. schools have produced somewhat mixed evidence regarding the effectiveness of parental involvement (Downey 2002; McNeal 1999). Studies have often found no strong support for positive associations between parental involvement and children's educational outcomes, especially for cognitive outcomes (Fan 2001; Keith 1991), whereas the relationships between parental involvement and children's behavioral outcomes seem more consistently positive (Domina 2005; McNeal 1999). To better understand how parental involvement is associated with children's education, studies have simultaneously considered different dimensions of parental involvement and also various kinds of outcomes across students of different ages (Desimone 1999; Ho and Willms 1996; Müller 1993).
An important way of expanding the literature on parental involvement is to examine how...