Do School-Related Factors Affect Private Tutoring Attendance? Predictors of Private Tutoring in Maths and German among German Tenth-Graders

ABSTRACT

Private tutoring is part of the everyday life of hundreds of thousands of students all around the world, and its prevalence is growing. However, despite a proliferation of research on private tutoring, little is known about the role that school plays in shaping the phenomenon. This study investigates school-related factors that may affect private tutoring attendance in maths and German using two German nationwide samples of Grade 10 students (over 15,000 participants in total). These factors are: teacher support in the classroom, classroom management, teacher collaboration with the teacher body and teacher-family communication. We also verified the role of various individual factors, including student helplessness and the subjective task values. Two-level logistic regression analyses did not confirm the role of school-related factors. However, private tutoring attendance was affected by student helplessness, subjective task values, past school achievement, cognitive ability, gender, mother tongue and type of school attended, although the pattern of results differed between subjects. The results highlight the role of motivational factors behind the decision to take private tutoring, which has been rarely inquired into, and the remedial nature of private tutoring. They also show that school contribution to the decision remains elusive, at least for maths and German.

KEYWORDS:

• Private tutoring
• shadow education
• motivation
• teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data are available from the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (https://www.neps-data.de/Data-Center/Data-Access). Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which is the reason why they cannot be provided by the author of the study. Survey questionnaires are available on the NEPS study website (https://www.neps-data.de/Data-Center/Data-and-Documentation).

Informed Consent

Written informed consent was obtained from all participants of age and from legal guardians of underage participants prior to study enrolment. All participants could withdraw from the study at any time. There is no ethics committee at the LIfBi and no ethics approval was required for the analyses presented in the paper. All the analyses are secondary analyses of data published previously.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2022.2089209

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Hawrot

Anna Hawrot is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories in Bamberg, Germany. Her research interests include the role of various school and family factors for cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.