Korean Educational Development Institute(KEDI)

OECD/PISA assesses academic achievements of 15-year-old students and offers a variety of information on student and school factors. Therefore, in addition to the overall picture of the academic performance of Korean students in this age group, it provides information that helps Korean education policy makers analyze the effects of its secondary education policies on student achievement. The educational policies which we investigated in this paper include 1) the impact of the number of students per teacher on academic performance, 2) the effects of private tutoring on academic achievements, 3) the effects of teaching to students’ ability on academic achievement and 4) the comparison of school performance of students between educationally equalized and non-equalized school districts. In order to analyze these four policies, this study adopted Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM). The subjects were 5,371 15-year-olds who participated in the PISA 2003 study. The results were as follows. First, the number of students per teacher should be reduced through constant efforts. Second, enrichment and remedial classes at school need to be increased as a way of addressing social problems associated with private tu-toring, in that enrichment and remedial classes have positive influence on students’ academic performance. Third, even though we have found that the effects of three teaching-by-ability variables were not statistically significant, they may still be worth studying in the future considering the fact that the emphasis on teaching-by-ability only started recently in practice. And above all, what’s really important seems to be the government’s strong commitment to offer a better educational environment to all students such as, improving the teacher-student ratio, rather than to change the school equalization policy.