Scholarly Sources

For any high-level academic paper, one must acquire a plethora of sources. But not any piece of information in the world is considered "good-enough" to be a source for an academic paper. Because papers build on top of papers, it is very important that the building blocks are accurate. Therefore, papers either use direct evidence or a scholarly source to verify the information presented.

For my upcoming research paper on the subject of South Korean education, I was tasked with finding several scholarly sources that will help me with my argument. Using the Texas A&MN library database search, I found the following article: Does Cram Schooling Matter? Who Goes to Cram Schools? Evidence from Taiwan. First, I had to verify that the source is scholarly. I concluded that it was based on two things: The style of writing, and the publisher. The writing style was written using academic jargon, with an abstract, outline, and its own list of scholarly sources. The article was published by the Department of Sociology on Tung-Hai University in Taiwan. Based on those two pieces of information, I naturally concluded that the article was scholarly. But now I must find out if the article will help me for my topic.

The article has four main points. I will list them here: The first main topic is how these "cram schools" got started in Taiwan. The article lists the reasons they think the schools started, and how they developed over time. The beginning is necessary to discover their purpose today, and whether or not it may be different than the purposew was originally. The second main topic is how the cram schools help/hurt students' grades. The point of cram schools is obviously to help, but a good evaluation of cram schools is necessary to determine whether or not they are doing their job. The third main topic is similar to the fourth: Who attends cram schools? Not all students do, but are there any socioeconomical patterns? This relates to the fourth topic: How family status is no longer an indicator of what kind of private, extra schooling (re: cram schools) a student may attend.

Overall, I think this article will be of great help, even though this article covers Taiwan and my paper covers Korea. The culture and ideas are similar enough to apply some of the reasearch done in Taiwan to South Korea.