About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 8. Education, Schooling

Abstract

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Backgrounds: How different social classes realize intergenerational transmission through education is a critical issue in education studies. Extracurricular tutoring is becoming increasingly important for family to invest in education, especially in East Asia (Bray M. et al., 2012). However, it hasn’t been fully discussed what effects has been reached through such investment. Most studies point out that extracurricular tutoring has a positive effect on students' academic development (Chen I. et al., 2021), while some conclude that it only works for some subjects (Zhang Y. et al., 2016) and some even show negative effects (Sun L. et al., 2019).
Research Questions: The main reasons for the difference in conclusions may lie in two aspects. First, the effect of tutoring varies among different groups. The difference in sample structure may affect the conclusion. Second, the effect may contain the implication of selection bias (Choi Y. et al., 2016). Thus, we raise our research questions: Who will benefit more from extracurricular tutoring? And try to overcome the endogeneity problem.
Population: This study is based on China Education Panel Survey (CEPS). 8957 seven-grade students from 112 junior high schools in 28 areas are included in the study, and they did the follow-up survey in grade eight. Both surveys collected their tutoring participation and scores of each subject (NSRC, 2014).
Methods: We use PSM-DID method to overcome endogeneity problem by comparing students’ variance in their performance between the 2 phases who didn’t participate in tutoring at baseline. Furthermore, we use grouped regression to examine which group benefits more from tutoring and finally use Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Model (HTE) to summarize the feature of heterogeneity. The treatment variable is whether the student participates the tutoring of each subject, and the outcome variables are the standardized scores of corresponding subjects. Among all 6,141 students who did not participate in the tutoring at baseline, 1,228 of them reported extracurricular tutoring in the follow-up survey. The students' backgrounds are used as covariates to predict the propensity score.
Results: PSM-DID results indicates that participation in extra-curricular tutoring has a significant effect on academic performance in all corresponding subjects (i.e., Chinese, mathematics, English) at the degree of 0.137SDs, 0.165SDs and 0.130SDs. Next, grouped PSM-DID is used to examine heterogenous effects. It can be seen from figure 1 that low and middle income, rural identity, non-elite careers, and low-quality schools predict more growth in students’ academic performance. Thus, we demonstrate that students with fewer resources will gain more from extracurricular tutoring. HTE Model is conducted to further test the results and we find negative selection effects. As figure 2 shows, the students more unlikely to choose extracurricular tutoring benefit more, who are indeed from families with fewer resources.
Conclusion: The finding of this research suggests that students from weak families will benefits more from extracurricular tutoring. More stimulations are needed to guarantee their access to the relevant resources.

Author information

Author	Role
Dr. Ming LI, Tsinghua University	Presenting author
Prof. Si Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong	Non-presenting author
Dr. Ming Li, Tsinghua University	Non-presenting author

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