Effect of Extra Classes after School to Academic Performance

Abstract

In most East Asia and South-East Asia nations, extra classes after normal school hours, known as "tuition”, has become a must for most urban and sub-urban medium-low all the way to high income families. Most parents send their children to these tuition classes with the aim of improving their academic performance, although some may have done so for other reasons such as peer pressure or convenient to have somebody to look after their kids while they are working.

Just how effective are those tuition classes? This is a million-dollar question for this billion-dollar industry. To look into this question, a full-factorial experiment with three independent variables, namely tuition hours per week, parents' education levels and parents' combined income, was designed and the single measurable output variable was chosen to be year-end mean test score. However, this experiment was not carried out in a normal sense but rather, passive data was collected and analyzed according to the 3-variable 2-level full-factorial experiment matrix.