Impact of Private Tuition on the Mathematics Achievements of Secondary School Students

Abstract

Private or additional tutoring has a greater impact on learning. It is more frequent among the secondary school students of Science and Mathematics. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of additional tutoring on the academic achievements of Grad 9 students in Mathematics. In this study, there was one independent variable i. e. additional tuition, and one dependent variable academic achievement. A self-developed questionnaire was administered to conveniently sampled students of three public and one private school from district Sargodha. In total 118 students responded. The research hypothesis was ‘there is no significant relationship between additional tuition and academic achievement’. Collected data were analyzed at α=0.05 (the level of significance) to test the hypothesis. Although nonparametric statistic (Spearman rho and Kruskal-Wallis) was suitable to the type of data we had; nevertheless, we calculated parametric statistic (Pearson r and ANOVA) as well, using SPSS to have a comparative look at the two different types of statistic. Based on our analyses we reject the null hypotheses i. e. there is no significant relationship between additional tuition and academic achievement. We, henceforth, conclude that the additional tuition has a greater impact on the achievement of 9^th graders in Mathematics. Thus, we recommend increasing the sample size. A similar investigation in other institutes of higher education could also be an extension to our study. The study may be carried out by adding more variables to academic achievement.