Identifying and Prioritizing the Most Important Influencing Factors Leading Students to Go to Private Institutions for University Entrance Exam Preparation

The aim of the research is to identify and prioritize the most important affecting factors that lead students to approach private institutions for University Entrance Exam Preparation. According to its objectives, this is an applied research conducted using mixed (qualitative and quantitative) and exploratory methods. The population of the qualitative part includes the institutions’ officials and experts of educational system, which make up a sample of 15 people in a purposeful snowball method, and, in the quantitative part, 119 were selected by means of accessible sampling of students in Tehran’s private Institutions. In the qualitative part, the researchers employed semi-structured interviews to collect the data. Then, through the content analysis of the interviews, the most important concepts (according to the goals) were detected and then assessed applying a researcher-made questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was calculated through the analysis of the confirmatory factor and the reliability was calculated 86/0 by means of Cronbach's alpha coefficient. In the qualitative part, the data analysis software (Nvivo) was used and, in the quantitative part, SPSS was applied to analyze the data. According to review literature and the qualitative and quantitative findings, the most important reasons for volunteers to go to private institutions in order to get ready for University entrance exam is their dissatisfaction with the results of previous years, and lack of effectiveness of schools’ curriculum and inadequate formal education