Effects and Consequences of Shadow Education: A Systematic Review

The shadow education is a set of extracurricular educational activities and this type of education has been very popular in the world during the last century. This kind of education has been designed to improve chance of students for successfulness movement in education process. On the contrary, some scholars have considered the shadow education as a threat and introduced it even as a kind of child abuse. Numerous studies have examined the effects and consequences of the shadow education. The purpose of this study is to review systematically the effects and consequences of the shadow education. The research method is a systematic review based on the model of Wright et al. (2007). A systematic search according to the keywords in reputable databases resulted in 940 researches during the period 2010 to 2021. Considering the inclusion and exclusion criteria; finally 40 articles were selected as the sample for in-depth analysis of the research purpose. According to the analysis of the research, the identified effects and consequences in the field of shadow education were positive effects (positive educational and psychological effects for the students and positive effects for the teachers) and negative effects (for the students, society, official education system and parents) and also some research have shown that the shadow education is ineffective. The most well-known positive effects in this field are related to students' educational achievement, and the most mentioned negative effects have been the intensification of social and educational inequalities.