Effect of extracurricular tutoring on adolescent students cognitive ability: A propensity score matching analysis

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of adolescent students attending extracurricular tutoring. However, extracurricular tutoring, being a distinct form of education, may have varying effects on cognitive capabilities compared to conventional education. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a thorough examination of the effects of extracurricular tutoring on cognitive abilities among adolescent students. The study utilized national data from the China Family Panel Study 2018 to explore the relationship between involvement in extracurricular tutoring among students and cognitive abilities. The study included 2567 valid respondents. A binary logistic regression model was built to determine the factors associated with tutoring involvement while controlling for 19 individual, family, and school factors. Furthermore, a propensity score-matched analysis was conducted in order to mitigate potential bias by using confounding variables identified in the previous step. The study results show that participation in extracurricular tutoring can significantly increase the level of cognitive ability of adolescent students, with adjustments made for age, gender, ethnicity, number of family members, net family income per capita, education and training expenditure in the past years, change of residence for enrollment, change of domicile address for enrollment, locality of the current school, class size, hold a position as a class cadre, average daily study time on weekdays, average study time per day during weekends. The findings imply that the government should provide tutorial subsidies to disadvantaged groups of adolescent students, allocate educational resources equitably, and invest more in education resources in less developed regions to foster fair and healthy development of education and improve the cognitive abilities of young students in the long-term.