The Effectiveness of Single‐Sex Schools through Out‐of‐School Activities: Evidence from South Korea
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12266 |
| Author | Youjin Hahn,Liang Choon Wang |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
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©2018 The Department of Economics, University of Oxford and JohnWiley & Sons Ltd.
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICSAND STATISTICS, 81, 2 (2019) 0305–9049
doi: 10.1111/obes.12266
The Effectiveness of Single-Sex Schools through
Out-of-School Activities: Evidence from South
Korea*
Youjin Hahn† and Liang Choon Wang‡
†School of Economics, Yonsei University, Yonsei-ro 50, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea
(e-mail: youjin.hahn@yonsei.ac.kr)
‡Department of Economics, Monash Business School, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria
3800, Australia (e-mail: liang.c.wang@monash.edu)
Abstract
Students’ out-of-school activities and time use can play a crucial role in facilitating the
effect of schools on students’ achievement. Using data from Seoul, South Korea, where
students are randomly assigned into schools, weshow that when single-sex schools improve
students’ test performance, their effect is positive on students’ time spent on study-related
out-of-school activities. Our results indicate that out-of-school activities explain roughly
21%–30% of the effect of single-sex schooling on test performance.
I. Introduction
Numerous initiatives that aim to make school more effective in improving student out-
comes have been implemented in various countries over the past few decades. Prominent
examples include class size reduction, the charter school movement and de-tracking prac-
tices. In particular, emerging evidence on the effectiveness of ability and gender grouping
on academic outcomes and their relatively low implementation costs has led to renewed
interest and debate in this area (Sullivan, Joshi and Leonard, 2010; Duflo, Dupas and
Kremer, 2011; Jackson, 2012; Park, Behrman and Choi, 2013). There is also growing in-
terest in many countries in using single-sex schooling as a wayto improve overall academic
achievement. For instance, the number of single-sex schools and single-sex classrooms in
coeducational schools has increased dramatically in the United States after amendment of
Title IX of the US Education Act in 2006, which gave school districts more flexibility to
provide single-sex education (Doris, O’Neill and Sweetman, 2013).
While the efforts to improve student outcomes continue, students, especially those
at the secondary level, are increasingly spending less time on after-school educational
JEL Classification numbers: I21, I28, J22.
*Weare grateful to the editor of this journal, James Fenske, anonymous referees, Julie Cullen, and Russell Smyth
for detailed comments and suggestions which significantly improved the paper. We also thank seminar participants
at Flinders University of South Australia andYonsei Universityfor helpful comments.
370 Bulletin
activities, such as doing homework and reviewing learning material at home. For example,
the proportion of American high school seniors spending no time on homework increased
from 33% to 38% between 1984 and 2012, and the proportion of those spending 6 or more
hours per week on studying or doing homework decreased from 49.5% to 38.4% between
1986 and 2012 (Loveless, 2014). There has also been talk about banning homework. Most
notably, in 2012, then French President Francoise Hollande advocated banning homework
for elementary (age 6–11) and lower secondary school students (age 11–15) (Rosenbaum,
2012).1If school inputs and out-of-school activities are complementary, the decrease in
study-related out-of-school activities may undermine efforts aiming to improve school
effectiveness, given the connection between out-of-school time use and human capital
accumulation (Anderson, Wilson and Fielding, 1988; Dolton, Marcenaro and Navarro,
2003; Cooper, Robinson and Patall, 2006; Grave, 2011; Suziedelyte, 2015).
This paper focuses on how children’s time use interacts with single-sex schooling to
influence academic achievement. Specifically, we examine the role of students’ outside-
school activities in mediating the effectiveness of single-sex high schools on academic
achievement using a unique setting in Seoul, South Korea, where students are assigned
randomly into single-sex and coeducational schools. Most studies examining the effects of
single-sex schooling focus on students’ test performance and other outcomes, but ignore
the potential mediating role of students’ out-of-school activitiesand time use. Ignoring the
interaction between students’ out-of-school activities and school inputs would be incon-
sequential if school inputs are independent inputs in the education production function.
If these inputs are not independent, then the effectiveness of policy reforms will depend
crucially on the extent to which they are interrelated. We fill this gap in the literature by
showing the extent to whichthe effects of single-sex schooling on student outcomes depend
on how students vary their efforts and activities after school.
Schools may implement or experiment with various educational inputs and manage-
ment styles to improve students’ learning outcomes. The effectiveness of these efforts
may be better facilitated by the gender segregation of students (Pahlke, Hyde and Alli-
son, 2014). For example, the competitive yet cooperative single-sex schooling environ-
ment may encourage students to devote more time to learning activities and less time to
entertainment after school, in addition to its positive effects on students’ concentration
in class. The learning of students in single-sex schools might also be less disrupted than
those in coeducational schools (Hill, 2015), and may encourage students to spend more
time studying outside school. On the other hand, if students cut back the complementary
out-of-school activities and spend more time on entertainment after school when they learn
well in school, these activities may instead undermine the effectiveness of school. The net
effect of differences in school inputs and practices between single-sex and coeducational
schools would thus depend on how, and to what extent, students’ out-of-school time use
and behaviours respond to them.
We use data from Seoul, South Korea to perform our analysis. The data are useful for
our study for a number of reasons. First, under the Korean government’s ‘equalization
policy’, most high school students in Seoul are assigned randomly into schools within
1The anti-homework movement dates back to 1900 in the United States and there have been several episodes of
the movement in the past century (Loveless, 2014).
©2018 The Department of Economics, University of Oxford and JohnWiley & Sons Ltd
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