The Effect Of Private Tutoring On Students’ Academic Achievement

Private tutoring has become a global phenomenon recently, which not only occupies a great deal of after-class time, but also becomes an important component of household expenditures. As a complement to school education, private tutoring, as parents would like, can play its proper effect, improving students’ academic achievement, previous study results have still been inconsistent. Therefore, this study aims to explore whether or not private tutoring does improve academic achievement after students participate in extracurricular, also providing an overall effect size of tutorial influence on academic achievement.Due to the empirical inconclusive results, this study firstly makes use of meta-analysis method, analyzing tutorial impact on the academic achievement, getting the comprehensive effect size, which cannot be obtained from a single study. Next, reflecting the meta-analysis results, as analyzing methods of some literatures including in the meta-analysis are not appropriate to infer casual effect, namely they cannot correct selection bias. As a result, the second study adopts propensity score method, further analyzing tutorial casual effect on students’ academic achievement.Research results have shown that the private tutoring effect on students’ academic achievement is fairly small, that is, tutoring cannot significantly improve academic achievement. Specifically, it included three aspects:Firstly, meta-analysis containing 25 empirical papers shows that tutorial effect on students’ academic achievement is about 0.27, which almost disappears, only 0.056 after deleting an effect size outlier.Secondly, Different forms of academic achievement measures and grade display moderating effect on private tutoring. When academic achievement is measured as subject grade, tutoringeffect is bigger, which is about 0.564. However, tutorial effect approximately equals to zero when large international survey test or national entrance test scores is an indicator of academic achievement. Meanwhile, tutorial effect is different for students in different grades. In this regard, primary students benefit most whereas junior and senior high school students improve little.Thirdly,propensity score analysis has shown that as to seven or eight grade students attending private tutoring, whose academic achievements were not significantly improved than those who do not.Based on the research process and the above findings, this study proposes three aspects of enlightenment: correctly understanding and rational treatment of private tutoring; improving and optimizing school education comprehensively; strengthen research on private tutoring.