Abstract
The objective of the study is to perform a "diagnosis" (provide basic descriptive information about the nature and characteristics) of private tutoring lessons taken by upper-secondary school students, to discuss their implications for the formal education system and elaborate on future research directions. In the first part, the author defines basic concepts and describes private tutoring lessons in a comparative perspective.
The second part describes the mixed-method design of the research, which consisted of a quantitative questionnaire survey of students in their last year of upper-secondary studies (n = 1265) and qualitative in-depth interviews with private tutors (n = 22). In the third part, the study presents findings on the scale of private lesson usage, the subjects taught, the various forms of private lessons, and their providers.
The findings suggest that a tight link exists between the formal education system and private lessons. Mainstream school teachers constitute an important group of private lesson providers; this finding relates closely to the teachers' professional ethics.