The factors why grade one students in a Male' school seek tuition / Fathimath Ibrahim

Abstract

This paper presents a research aimed to discover if the Grade one students of school X seek private tuition and the reasons why they seek private tuition. There is a great amount of research and literature available worldwide on private tuition, but very little literature is available on this aspect in the Maldivian contexts.
This research uses a qualitative approach to explore the answers for the research question why grade 1 students of a Male' school seek private tuition. This design is a case study and uses a purposive sampling technique to select five students for focused group discussion and two parents from grade one from one to one interview. Moreover, a teacher, and two management members were randomly selected and interviewed from the population of the school. The instrument used for this research was interview protocol. Data was collected through interviews and a focused group discussion. Interviews were transcribed, analyzed and interpreted to reach results. The analyzed data showed that the students of the school seek tuition and the following results as why grade one students of this Male' school seek tuition.
One of the major reasons for parents to engage students in private tuition are their awareness of inadequacies in mainstream schooling. The other reasons found out were for the purpose of remediation, enrichment, homework help, and child minding and due to the examination oriented school culture. The implications of the findings are that it will help educators to make significant improvements in educating young children and will enable them to find out ways to make primary education more productive and enjoyable.