The surveys undertaken in this research, both among elementary school students and university students, confirm that supplementary education is a significant element of the direct experience of education for a majority of Taiwanese children. The surveys also confirm that this significance is not limited to the years of high school, where
competition for prestigious university entry is well documented in Taiwan (Bray, 2006), but that the influence and importance of supplementary education extends to the
beginning of elementary school, and even at the level of kindergarten age children. Thus, as shown in the present research, the rate of attendance in supplementary classes for 5th and 6th year elementary school students was over 70 percent in a major southern city in Taiwan. Over 60 percent of the university students reported that they had attended supplementary English education for at least 5 years during their school career, and as many as 95 percent reported attendance for at least one year. With such a high
proportion of students reporting participation in the shadow education sector, it would be foolhardy to ignore the phenomenon when giving any account of the education system in Taiwan. Equally, attempting to account for the observed scale of the phenomenon becomes a key question when trying to understand the motivations of students and parents in Taiwan.
Although the elementary school survey in the present study was limited to one
particular school in an urban area, from information gathered from interview data and the survey of university students, it is clear that the pattern found in the survey school would be broadly similar to that found in most urban areas in Taiwan, although some interviewees mentioned that the percentage would likely be even higher in the capital
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city, Taipei. In contrast, although no surveys were conducted in rural areas, it is expected that, according to information from interviews with teachers, parents and students, participation in supplementary education is substantially lower in rural areas than in urban areas. Thus the uptake of supplementary education may well be
predominantly an urban phenomenon, and while it is not clear from the present research the exact reasons for this difference, presumably financial and logistical considerations would rank high in the explanation, although there may also be other urban-rural differences which have not been explored in this research. Despite this uncertainty, given the highly urbanized nature of the Taiwanese economy, the description of the urban situation is clearly the most salient target for a basic understanding of the Taiwanese educational system.
In terms of the taxonomy of different kinds of supplementary education to be found in Taiwan, the present research has identified a range of different kinds of establishment involved in elementary school age supplementary education. From the surveys of both elementary school and university undergraduates, and supported by the information gleaned from promotional literature, elementary school age supplementary education can be divided into roughly four kinds of establishment, as listed below, although there is of course much variety within each category.
1. Traditional buxiban – supplementary instruction in particular subjects, especially English and mathematics – to help children prepare for junior high school
curriculum
2. Specialist English buxiban – for early start children’s English programmes – extra exposure to wider curriculum than school
3. Anqinban – elementary school age children’s after-school organization, specializing in homework supervision and child-minding
4. School organized ‘after-school club’ – offers homework supervision for children of working parents
The interviews and survey data revealed a juxtaposition of reasons for participation in supplementary education, with the traditional ‘cramming’ style buxiban approach being contrasted with the more adventurous ‘Children’s English’ approach, and these two styles may also reflect the different kinds of organization involved, with the traditional high school preparation buxibans offering more narrow short-term performance targets, while the specialist English buxibans offer a more complementary contribution to
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language instruction. The range of provision is further varied by the scale of the businesses involved, with some highly-resourced national chains being able to offer a wide variety of courses and approaches to suit different parental or children’s demands for supplementary education, while smaller, independent businesses are relatively constrained in their services.
The further study of the motivational characteristics of participation in supplementary education, and of the influences of the phenomenon on the education system will therefore need to look more carefully at the different sectors of the industry, as there may be quite distinct characteristics involved. To illustrate the point, interviews
revealed that for some parents there is a conscious acknowledgement of the contrasting styles of particular buxibans, and parents will tend to choose a buxiban according to whether they have a preference for either short-term school test performance gains or for long-term learning goals. This clear distinction between different characteristics both of buxibans and also the reasons for selecting them suggests that more
sophisticated means of enquiry than are presented here would be needed to investigate how participation in supplementary education may relate to other factors discussed in the present study. Thus, the lack of any particular correlations between buxiban attendance and students’ reported achievement goal orientation could reflect the likely confounding of contrary motivation themes.
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