Abstract:

The phenomenon of private tutoring has become widespread worldwide along with the formal education system since the beginning of the 21st century. Many families invest in supplementary education for their children in the hope of securing a promising future for them. However, it is difficult to say unequivocally whether tutoring is effective - this topic is the most controversial in this research area, since the studies have shown controversial results. What all these studies have in common is that they focus on the presence or absence of a quantitative effect on students' test scores and often do not take into account factors such as the portrait and qualifications of the tutor. This is a major oversight as the services provided by private tutors can differentiate greatly. Due to the unclear legal status of tutors in Russia, we cannot always determine the quality of the services they provide.

This paper is aimed at assessing the quality of tutoring services and determining how existing tutors meet expectations and whether they help their students to achieve educational results. An analysis of the profiles of 13260 tutors in main school subjects from Moscow, Russia was conducted. One of the largest websites for finding tutoring services (profi.ru) was used as a data source. The main focus was made on the analysis of tutors' personal and professional characteristics as well as on the text analysis of the testimonials that parents leave after working with the tutor.

The results show that the majority of parents are satisfied with the quality of the services provided (average tutor rating is 4.76 out of 5) and are willing to pay for it. As for the text analysis of testimonials, the findings show that the most frequent characteristics of a tutor were associated with a positive impression of cooperation, a description of the tutor's professionalism, high intellectual abilities of a specialist, as well as compliance with established agreements.

Keywords:

Private tutoring, customer satisfaction.