The Impact of Private Supplementary Tutoring Time on Adolescents ' Scientific Literacy in Science Education: An Empirical Comparative Study from China and South Korea
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/PPS.2025.21.57465Keywords
science education, scientific literacy, shadow education, private supplementary tutoring, multiple linear regression modelAbstract
Along with the rapid development of knowledge-based economy, the competition in education has become more and more intense, and the system of "shadow education" characterized by private extracurricular tutoring has been expanding in East Asian societies where peer pressure gathers, especially in representative countries such as China and South Korea, but it is not clear how the investment of time in shadow education affects young people's performance in core literacy. There is a relative lack of empirical analysis of shadow education in basic education, and even rarer research on shadow education involving science subjects and their time investment, which cannot provide reliable guidance for government intervention in science shadow education. Based on the PISA2018 Chinese and Korean assessment data, multiple linear regression equations were set up to analyze the effects of the time spent on science shadowing on adolescents' scientific literacy based on the full consideration of the endogenous factors, and it was found that: the time spent on science shadowing is a key factor influencing the adolescents' performance in scientific literacy; the effects of the time spent on science shadowing on the Chinese and Korean adolescents' scientific literacy differ significantly, and it shows a significant positive effect on the Korean students. There are significant differences in the effects of science shadow education on the scientific literacy of Chinese and Korean youths, with a significant positive effect on Korean students but a significant negative effect on Chinese students; science shadow education has the social risk of expanding the inequality of education. For the future direction of science shadow education in basic education, we should objectively and rationally evaluate the feedback effect of the variable "time" on the performance of youth's scientific literacy based on the measurement of learning efficiency.
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