The Use of Private Tutoring and Its Relationship to Primary-School-Age Children’s Academic Achievements in Nigeria

Abstract

Hiring private tutors is causing a financial burden on parents, as they are made to pay high tutoring fees in Nigeria. Yet, Nigerian parents continue to invest heavily in financially burdensome private tutoring amid high poverty levels. This evident paradox between high poverty levels and the widespread use of financially burdensome private educational support in Nigeria has received little attention.

This gap motivated me to use in-depth qualitative interviews to explore why parents often pay high tutoring fees to support their children’s education, despite the financial burden it creates, and how parents perceive the academic impacts of private tutors. In light of this contradiction, this study also uses a cross-sectional survey to examine whether there is a relationship between children having a private tutor to assist with homework and their reading and numeracy outcomes.

A total of 18,737 primary-school-age children in a nationally representative household survey data set was used as the analytic sample for the quantitative arm of this mixed-methods study. A total of 15 parents who hire private tutors to assist their primary school-age children in doing their homework were selected for the qualitative phase of this study. Thematic analysis and binary logistic regression were used to analyze the qualitative interview data and quantitative survey data, respectively.

This study found that hiring the service of private tutors created a financial burden on parents. This study asked why parents continued to invest in private tutoring. This study found that the major reason parents hired private tutors to guide their children in doing their homework was to ensure they grew academically. Since the major reason why parents invested in private tutoring for their children was to ensure they would grow academically, this study asked the parents about the perceived impacts of private tutors assisting their children in doing their homework on their children’s academic outcomes. Nigerian parents perceived that private tutoring improved their children’s reading and numeracy outcomes as well as the outcomes of their children in other academic subjects. However, the parents’ perceptions might be subjective, and the private tutors who were the classroom teachers of the children they tutor in this study might have engaged in unethical activities that led to improvement in the children’s reading and numeracy outcomes.

This plausible subjectivity of parents’ and teachers’ unethical activities made this study take a step further to use a cross-sectional, descriptive design to investigate the relationship between children having a private tutor to assist with homework and their reading and numeracy outcomes. In contrast to parents’ stated beliefs, the findings of this study’s quantitative phase revealed no statistically significant relationship between children having a private tutor to assist with homework and their reading performance. In addition, this study found that children having parents, other family members, and neighbors assisting them with their homework was significantly related to reading outcomes. However, in line with parents’ stated views, a statistically significant positive relationship existed between having a private tutor to guide children with homework and their numeracy outcomes.

Based on these findings, this study recommends that policies be developed to ensure high-quality private tutoring is accessible to all children to improve their numeracy outcomes. Also, educated families and neighbors should be encouraged to guide their children in their homework to improve their reading outcomes.