The Importance of After-School Private Tutoring for the Chinese Reading Attainment of Grade 4 Primary Students in Hong Kong

Abstract

Students receiving private tutoring after-school is a very prevailing phenomena in East-Asian countries, where very strongly competitive education system and performance-based open examinations are highly advocated. This study utilized the survey data of 4700 sampled Primary 4 students and their reading comprehension score of the Hong Kong section in Progress in International Reading Literacy Study at 2006 (PIRLS 2006) to look into the situation of tutoring in Hong Kong, including the participation rate, the tutored subjects, the activities in tutorials, students’ attitude towards the tutoring they received, how the choices of tutored subject linked to parents’ background and others. Further analysis on how the difference in tutoring issues related to students reading comprehension score will also be provided in this paper. The study found that students’ tutored subjects were in a certain extent subject to parents’ education attainment, especially in the fathers’ side, and no significant difference in the reading comprehension score existed between tutored and untutored students.