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Building on my earlier work (Dang, 2007, 2008), this chapter provides an updated review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam including the reasons, scale, intensity, form, cost, and legality of these classes. In particular, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of the trends in private tutoring between 1998 and 2006 using all available data.

This chapter analyzes data from different sources, including (i) the 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standards Measurement Survey (VHLSS), (ii) the 1997–1998 Vietnam Living Standards Measurement Survey (VLSS), (iii) the 2008 Vietnam Household Testing Survey (VHTS), and (iv) local press in Vietnam. Quantitative methods are used.

Several (micro-)correlates are examined that are found to be strongly correlated with student attendance at tutoring, including household income, household heads’ education and residence areas, student current grade level, ethnicity, and household sizes. In particular, I focus on the last three variables that received little attention in the previous literature on the determinants of tutoring.

This chapter provides an updated and systematic review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam. Findings are highly relevant to the ongoing debates on private tutoring among all stakeholders in Vietnam, as well as policymakers/researchers in other countries. Suggestions are proposed on current gaps in the literature for future research.

Private supplementary tutoring, common in many countries, has mixed (both positive and negative) dimensions that impact student learning. Private supplementary tutoring runs parallel to mainstream schooling and provides lessons before or after school hours in exchange for additional fees. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how private supplementary tutoring benefits students’ learning in secondary education. It also identifies the drawbacks of tutoring, and shows variations in and between urban and rural locations.

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, in addition to 48 interviewees comprising students, parents and teachers.

At times, pupils’ educational perspectives are influenced by the conflicting (positive/negative) standpoints of tutoring issues. The paper finds mixed impacts of private tutoring with a focus on disparities of implications between urban and rural locations. It identifies positive aspects such as learning attainment, exam preparation, relationship growth and lesson practice, as well as negative perspectives, such as an examination-centered aim and hamper of mainstream school learning.

The study contributes to the awareness of private supplementary tutoring that benefits students’ learning while also bringing disadvantages. 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 as a subject in some cases.

This piece of research provides an overview on supplementary education in Brazil based on the available literature.

Literature review.

In a country plenty of social and educational contrasts, student failure and high repetition rates in basic education are the main factors of supplementary education flourishing. Additional factors are the quick expansion of access at all levels of schooling and the ascension of a new lower middle class that can afford to pay for supplementary tutoring. Tutors at their homes and in small offices are still one of the most common means for students who want to overcome their difficulties and improve their knowledge and skills. However, franchising outlets have grown since the 1980s and in particular the 1986 with the winds of globalization. Their most important branches are foreign languages and preparatory courses, especially for college entrance and public servant selection examinations. This branch of business has been financially very attractive for entrepreneurs. Official data on family budget show that families spend each year a significant amount of resources, impacting the sophistication and complexity of the supplementary education market. In sum, supplementary education is a result of quality deficiencies and inequity. At the same time, it increases the lack of equity between students from different human capital backgrounds.

Main limitation is that research on supplementary education in Brazil is still recent and scarce. On the other hand, till now, no public policy has paid attention to this phenomenon.

Public policy, research, and evaluation fields must consider the phenomenon of supplementary education in Brazil as an important variable contributing to inequity and to academic performance. This chapter calls attention to the need of increasing research on this issue.

As it is more valued and easily available to relatively more privileged social groups, supplementary education in Brazil contributes to increasing education inequity.

This chapter contributes to improving knowledge on supplementary education in Brazil, and its causes and implications. This portrait of the Brazilian scenario can also be instrumental for comparative education purposes at regional and global levels.

This chapter aims to provide the recent developments on the supplementary education system in Turkey. The national examinations for advancing to higher levels of schooling are believed to fuel the demand for Supplementary Education Centers (SECs). Further, we aim to understand the distribution of the SECs and of the secondary schools across the provinces of Turkey in order to evaluate the spacial equity considerations.

The evolution of the SECs and of the secondary schools over time are described and compared. The provincial distribution of the SECs, secondary schools, and the high school age population are compared. The characteristics of these distributions are evaluated to inform about spatial equity issues. The distribution of high school age population that attend secondary schools and the distribution of the secondary school students that attend SECs across the provinces are compared.

The evidence points out to significant provincial variations in various characteristics of SECs and the secondary schools. The distribution of the SECs is more unequal than that of the secondary schools. The provinces located mostly in the east and south east of the country have lower quality SECs and secondary schools. Further, the SEC participation among the secondary school students and the secondary school participation among the relevant age group are lower in some of the provinces indicating major disadvantages.

The review of the most recent developments about the SECs, examination and comparison of provincial distributions of the SECs and of the secondary schools are novelties in this chapter.

The chapter highlights some of the challenges of research on supplementary education, and indicates ways in which the challenges were tackled in one particular study on Chongqing Municipality, China.

The Chongqing research investigated the determinants of demand for shadow education by Grade 9 students, using a mixed-methods design. A questionnaire was used to collect data from students and parents on various background details and on the nature of the tutoring that they or their children had received. Interviews of a smaller number of respondents provided qualitative data that supplemented and illuminated the quantitative responses.

Different methodological decisions may have different implications. The sampling strategies in the study limited the generalizability but increased the feasibility of the fieldwork and comparability of findings. The top-down strategy of gaining access secured high response rates in the surveys, but to some extent decreased some participants’ willingness to provide information on gray areas. Interviews generated deep and detailed data, but some sensitive topics were intentionally avoided. Informal chats with note taking were constrained in depth and breadth by random time slots and venues, and some details were difficult to record. However, the approach expanded the horizons and facilitated the triangulation of information.

Discussion focuses on collection of data, and stresses the importance of cultural, social, and economic contexts. The chapter may be seen as a case study that provides insights into methods for researching forms of supplementary education. Methodological lessons from the fieldwork in Chongqing have wider relevance, particularly in settings where regular teachers provide extra private classes.

Private supplementary tutoring is expanding fast around the world. Recognising that examination boards are major shapers of curricular load, the purpose of this paper is to identify the roles of examination boards at Grades 8, 9 and 10 in Bengaluru, India. Two boards were chosen, with one having a heavier perceived curricular load than the other.

The study used mixed methods with a questionnaire survey of 687 students in Grades 8, 9 and 10, and 51 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews.

Perhaps surprisingly, the findings did not reveal significant differences in tutoring demand by students. Both groups viewed the board examinations as having high stakes, and accordingly invested in extensive private tutoring. Competition emanating from credentialism was the main driver of the decision to receive tutoring among both cohorts.

Although previous studies have explored various components of demand for tutoring, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first to explore the impact of examination boards on demand for tutoring. Since the system of schools being affiliated to examination boards is common not only in India but also in many other countries, the study has broad international relevance.

In this chapter we draw on research from Canada to develop a framework for understanding the variety of forms of supplementary education and their position within broader organization fields of education. The chapter asks: What is the nature and organizing logic of supplementary education in Canada? and, How does supplementary education relate to public schools in Canada?

Data come from a variety of secondary sources.

Distributed between three relatively autonomous settings – state, market, and nonprofit – supplementary education exhibits tremendous variety in its use value to parents, instructional content, and organizational form. Supplementary education is popular among Canadian parents and appears to be growing, yet it has failed to fundamentally alter the technical core of Canadian schooling, processes that stratify students, and child and family usage of their time or income. Supplementary education’s inability to penetrate these processes reflects its peripheral position within the broader organizational field of Canadian schooling.

The adoption of an organizational field approach generates new ways of thinking about determinants, forming and organizing logics of supplementary education both nationally and comparatively.

The current work aimed to investigate the private tutoring phenomenon among Egyptian medical faculty students.

The present work is a cross-sectional observational study using an online, anonymous questionnaire disseminated to Egyptian medical students and instructors via social platforms and university e-mails. All subjects involved in the survey gave informed consent to begin the questionnaire. No financial incentives were awarded to finish the questionnaire.

In total, 79.2% of the surveyed students (n = 198) admitted taking private medical courses during their medical study courses till the date of the survey. The Egyptian students, 68.4% (n = 171), markedly surpassed the non-Egyptian participants (n = 79, 31.6%). Males were nearly double the female participants (n = 162 and 88 consecutively).The highest academic-level-seeking private medical tutoring was the fifth-year students (n = 66, 26.4%).

A large sample size is needed to strengthen the statistical power and permit the generalization over the population, so more research work in this aspect is recommended. Also, subject-specific data in private medical tutoring need to be investigated in future works. Similar global work is recommended to allow better comparison of data worldwide.

When conceptualizing medical education processes and developing its regulations, the dynamics of private medical instruction should be taken into account, especially concerning socioeconomic inequities and efficiency in medical school systems. This work has been the first to investigate the private tutoring phenomenon among Egyptian medical students to the authors' best knowledge.

This study systematically maps the research trends in the domain of “shadow education” over the last 40 years using metadata extracted from the SCOPUS database. The results reveal that the outputs of shadow education research have grown exponentially within the last decade. Bray and his colleagues from the University of Hong Kong, East China Normal University, and the Education University of Hong Kong have been the most prolific and influential research team. They are followed by Park and Byun from the USA, who have mostly worked on East Asian contexts. The USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, have been the main sources of contributions and the University of Hong Kong has been the leading university in this field. Educational studies, economics, psychology, linguistics, and sociology have been the main disciplines researched within shadow education. Shadow education studies have revealed how shadow education can be a major instrument for maintaining and exacerbating social inequalities. They have also largely focused on the tangible (quantifiable) benefits related to improving students’ examination results. This study’s results stress the importance of regulating the private tutoring market, suggesting areas for ongoing research.

The extent of Private Supplementary Tutoring (PST) upon higher education has received little attention in the academic literature. This study endeavours to discover the extent of the PST phenomenon and the socioeconomic determinants behind the demand for it amongst students in science-related disciplines at Kuwait University (KU).

A quantitative research paradigm was employed. By using a questionnaire survey method, data was collected from 475 participating students from twelve different colleges at KU. The questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS.

The findings showed that 50.1% of students employing PST in KU to some extent. The study also found that PST is more important in certain subjects than others. The students and/or their families also bear the cost of these extra educational expenses. The findings also indicated that a college student’s gender, the academic year of study, university allowance, alternative income sources, family financial status and monetary support all play a statistically significant role in whether they receive PST.

deeper analysis of these factors, which underly the demand for PST, may offer a better understanding of its role in higher education, the functionality of higher education as a whole, and the effects of current policy and the political landscape.

While significant attention has been given to PST in K-12 education over the last few decades, this study is extended significantly into the as-yet uncharted waters of higher education. This study focused on PST in higher education and the socioeconomic determinants behind its demand.