Shadow schooling

: an international comparative analysis using data from PISA

Abstract

Shadow schooling is a phenomenon that has been growing both in importance and extent in the past years. Whereas its development in East Asia has been intense for many years now, in Europe, for example, its development is much recent and less explored. Even though there is a general growth trend, its extent and “form” may differ across countries. Despite being more generalized, there are not many countries collecting official data on the topic, mainly due to the unimportance given by policy analysts to shadow education. However, there are data collected by OECD containing information on the topic that can be valuable for cross-country comparison, allowing us to map the phenomenon and try to understand differences and similarities between education systems around the world. To achieve these goals, we collected data from PISA 2009, 2012 and 2015, starting by a descriptive analysis of the data and then, benchmarking countries to compare their schools’ performances according to their characteristics. The results obtained point out to a considerable growth of the phenomenon between 2009 and 2015, with a decrease in the PISA scores. According to the correlation between variables, additional instruction seems to be essentially remedial, except in South Korea that leans more towards student enrichment. Also, through the benchmarking analysis only in Korea does it seem that additional instruction is positively contributing to enhance the schools’ performance, whereas in other countries where the phenomenon is intense, like Peru, it seems to negatively contribute to their performance. This should be considered by national entities regarding their education system policies.

Date of Award	1 Jul 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria Silva (Supervisor)