Investigating the intersection of school academic position and student background on Japanese tenth graders' educational choices and study habits

Abstract

This study investigates tracking effects on students' educational choices and behavior that shape their educational trajectories. It represents an initial attempt to document how high school students' tracking location and other features of their schools influence their choice of obtaining additional learning opportunities inside or outside of their formal high school settings and how these choices may explain how much effort students exert in learning math. More specifically, the study investigates whether three tracking locations (i.e., school rank, school socioeconomic status, and curriculum tracking) and student background (i.e., student socioeconomic status and academic attitude) influence students' likelihood of obtaining instructional lessons additional to their regular lessons (i.e., shadow education and supplemental free lessons) and the length of self-studying hours they report spend learning math during the first semester of their three-year high school education. This study utilizes data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This is a nationally representative data set consisting of 5,952 tenth grade students in 185 high schools in Japan, which has a well-defined high school hierarchical academic structure, and a substantial number of students who obtain supplemental instruction. Based on theory of practice by Bourdieu (1984), multilevel logistic and ordinal regression analyses were conducted. Results of the study suggested that (1) the three tracking factors along with students' socioeconomic status affect students' pursuit of family-paid shadow education lessons; (2) students' academic attitude influences their attendance at free-of-charge additional lessons provided by school teachers; (3) a significant interaction term between student SES and School SES was identified suggesting, more specifically, that higher SES students who attend high-SES schools are more likely to obtain both types of extra lessons; and (4) gaining additional lessons influenced students' reported self-study-hours net of other contextual and school factors. In the final chapter, these results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.