Back in the
1990s, when I was a secondary school student, only a few of my
friends had access to private tuition. Today, however, it is not
uncommon for the majority of one's classmates to have this. Some
may even have tuition in several subjects.
In 2011, 71.3
per cent of secondary school students received some form of tuition
- defined as receiving out-of-school extra lessons, whether paid
for or otherwise. By contrast, only 33.9 per cent received tuition
in 1995.
Three
questions arise:
• 1. Why are
tuition rates so high and increasing in Singapore?
• 2. Who are
the children that attend tuition?
• 3. Do these
children perform better than their peers who don't?
To answer the
first point, tuition rates tend to be high in countries where
high-stakes exams prevail because parents see a need to prepare
their children adequately for these assessments.
Because
performance in exams such as the Primary School Leaving
Examination, O and A levels plays an important role in determining
admissions to selective schools and universities, it is not
surprising that parents in Singapore focus a lot of attention on
programmes they perceive will ensure their children's academic
success.
So the growing
prevalence of tuition has largely been demand-driven, but part of
the increase is likely also due to peer pressure. When parents see
others enrolling their children for tuition, they worry that their
child might be at a disadvantage if they do not act likewise.
Consequently, some may enrol their children even when they are
doing well academically.
To answer
questions 2 and 3, I analysed data from the 2012 Programme for
International Student Assessment (Pisa). This is a large-scale
international survey (see separate commentary on Page A30)
involving 15-year-old students.
A comparison
between children who received tuition and children who did not
reveals that the former are more likely to be from affluent
families. For instance, those who received tuition were more likely
to be from families who owned at least one car and are
English-speaking.
This finding
is consistent with the fact that richer families are able to afford
more educational resources for their children.
A more
pertinent question is whether children who choose to receive
tuition actually perform better than their peers who choose not
to.
Surprisingly,
a simple comparison indicates that this is not the case. In fact,
children who received tuition actually scored about 0.256 standard
deviations lower on their tests than those who did not (standard
deviation is a measure of how spread out test scores are from the
average).
Even after
adjusting for differences in students' age, gender, home language,
family structure, native-born status, material possessions,
grade-level and schools, as well as parents' education levels and
employment status, those who received tuition were found to perform
0.133 standard deviations worse.
The same
findings emerge even when comparisons are made within-students
(when test scores were compared across subjects for the same
students, if they had tuition in one subject but no tuition in
another). Although these results pertain to mathematics
achievement, similar results are found for science and English.
These findings are consistent with those found earlier by
professors Euston Quah and Roland Cheo in a 2005 Singapore-based
study.
There several
explanations for the negative association between tuition and
performance. The first is that students who receive tuition choose
to receive it precisely because they are not doing well in school.
In other words, weak performance may be what is driving students to
enrol for tuition.
An alternative
explanation is that tuition is counterproductive. How can this be?
Well, students might end up disliking the subject if they are
forced to attend extra classes. This might be especially true if
they are subject to long hours of tuition every week. Indeed, the
benefits of an additional hour of tuition might fall, and even
become negative at some point as the number of hours spent on it
increases.
Another
possibility is that the mere access to a tutor may alter the
learning attitudes of students. They might reason: "I don't have to
pay much attention in school since I always have my tutor to depend
on." Thus, there may be a tendency to slack off on regular classes,
to their detriment.
While it is
unclear which of the explanations is correct, the negative
association is clearly large and highly statistically
significant.
Do the results
imply that all parents should now stop sending their children for
tuition?
Not really. As
mentioned, the results show only that a relationship between
tuition and performance exists. However, this relationship may not
necessarily be causal (tuition may not cause weaker
performance).
Secondly, even
if the results were causal, they reflect only the average effect of
tuition across all 15-year-olds. The precise effect of tuition for
any one child could still be positive, depending on factors
specific to the child, such as the quality of his tutor and how the
child responds to tuition.
In making
decisions, parents should consider questions such as:
• Does the
tutor have the relevant skills to guide my child well?
• Does the
tutor possess a proven record?
• Will tuition
help to clarify my child's misconceptions?
• Or will it
simply cause him to become confused and lose interest in the
subject? Answering these questions will help focus a parent's
decision on the question of tuition.
• The writer is a lecturer in the department of economics,
National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the
economics of education.