Studies of parental involvement and children’s education in a variety of contexts can provide valuable insights into how the relationships between parental involvement and student outcomes depend upon specific local contexts of family and education. Korean education is distinctive with its high prevalence of private tutoring, which not only imposes an economic burden on parents but also requires parents’ time and efforts to select the best kind of private tutoring for their children and to keep track of their academic progress by interacting with private tutors. Here, data from a longitudinal survey in Korea that has traced 7th-graders for two years were used to investigate the determinants and the effects of parents’ private tutoring–related activities in comparison to other types of home-based and school-based parental involvement. Multivariate analysis shows that parents’ efforts in selecting and monitoring private tutoring are significantly associated with increased math and English test scores. Features of Korean education in which private tutoring becomes an important strategy for parents to enhance children’s education are described, and the broader implications of the findings, beyond the local context, are discussed.

The concept of cultural capital has proved invaluable in understanding educational systems in Western countries, and recent work seeks to extend those insights to the diverse educational systems of other geographic regions. We explored cultural capital in South Korea by investigating the relationships among family socioeconomic status (SES), cultural capital, and children's academic achievement using data from the 2000 Programme for International Student Assessment. South Korea was compared with Japan, France, and the United States to understand how institutional features of South Korean education shape the role of cultural capital in academic success. Results showed that family SES had a positive effect on both parental objectified cultural capital and children's embodied cultural capital in South Korea, consistent with evidence from the other countries. Moreover, parental objectified cultural capital had a positive effect on children's academic achievement in South Korea. In contrast to other countries, however, children's embodied cultural capital had a negative effect on academic achievement in South Korea controlling for the other variables. We highlighted several institutional features of South Korean education including a standardized curriculum, extreme focus on test preparation, and extensive shadow education, which may combine to suppress the effect of children's embodied cultural capital on academic achievement.

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