The reasons for private tuition : perpectives of parents and students in a secondary school of Maldives / Mariyam Aneela

Abstract:
Private tuition is being widely practiced in this small country, the Maldives. However, there is lack of literature available in relation to this topic especially, in relation to the reasons for private tuition. Hence, the purpose of this study was to explore the reasons for private tuition from the perspectives of parents and students.
To achieve the study objectives phenomenology in qualitative research approach was employed. A secondary school was selected to conduct this study and the target population was the students of grade 8, 9, and 10 who are taking private tuition and parents from same grades who are spending on their children's private tuition in the secondary school selected. Five parents and five students were selected from the target population by using purposive sampling. Qualitative data was collected by using in-depth interviews and before the collection of data, the participant consent and ethical issues were well addressed. The interviews were recorded and transcribed for the purpose of data analysis.
The data was analyzed using inductive content analysis in which, the transcribed interviews were coded, categorized and the related themes and subthemes were identified. To address the trust worthiness of the data, the credibility, transferability, dependability and conformability of the data were ensured.
The findings from this study revealed that the reasons for private tuition from the perspectives of parents and students mainly falls into three main categories namely, classroom factors, teaching and learning factors and personal factors. The reasons falling into classroom factors include not getting individual attention due to large classroom size in regular schools and the inappropriate learning environment in regular classes. Reasons related to teaching and learning factors include ineffective teaching in regular school, for remedial and better understanding of the subject matter knowledge. The reasons identified under personal factors include lack of confidence both by the parents and students, increasing students' motivation, competition to achieve the highest from the examinations and the belief that private tuition improves the result.
Further research need to be done on this topic to explore and investigate the phenomenon well. The positive side of private tuition should not be overlooked however, providing better learning environment, employing variety of teaching models could help in minimizing the wide growth of private tuition.

Keywords: private tuition, reasons for private tuition, perspectives, nature of tuition, forms of tuition.