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Why is private tutoring effective? Insights from research on one-to-one tutoring
Abstract
Private tutoring is an effective means to improving students' academic achievement. This article gives an overview of different explanations for tutoring effectiveness showing that tutors' pedagogical moves, students' learning activities and the interaction between tutor and student are all important factors in explaining the effectiveness of tutoring. For tutoring to be beneficial, students' meaningful learning activities, however, seem to be of particular relevance, irrespective of whether they are initiated by themselves or by the teacher. Shortcomings of previous research and desiderata for future research are presented. Practical implications are discussed.
... The second, and by far more popular, category of research addresses the effectiveness of private tutoring (Deke et al., 2014;Ha & Park, 2017;Hof, 2014;Ireson, 2004;Kim, 2015;Luplow & Schneider, 2014;Popov et al., 2002;Prakhov, 2017;Wittwer, 2008Wittwer, , 2014Zhan et al., 2013;. One of the most frequently asked questions in these studies is whether tutoring actually helps students improve their academic performance, get higher test scores, and enrol in desired institutions. ...
This dissertation aims to provide a genealogy of the relations between the public and the private in education. It does so by the exploring how public education and private tutoring form and transform each other and why they are seen as legitimate or problematic in different historical and cultural contexts. Drawing on curriculum theory and Foucault’s genealogical approach to history, the study examines how private tutoring has been problematised in Imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and discusses how these problematisations reflect and shape the dominant visions of education.
The results show that norms and values in relation to which private education has been problematised and addressed in Russia have varied in line with nationalist, communist and neoliberal visions of education. Although most questions, such as tutor competence, individual privilege, inequality, ethics, governance, and ideological conformity, have constantly been in the focus of critical reflection, they were ‘answered’ differently in different historical periods. Others, such as spatial inequality and ethical concern for corrupt tutoring practices, are of more recent origin. In contrast to previous research into shadow education, the study argues that the mimicking character of supplementary tutoring is not its natural feature. Rather, in the Russian case, it is the result of constant problematisation and the corresponding regulation of its conformity with what is regarded as ‘sacred’ national values.
In general, private tutoring in Russia has often been treated as a ‘symptom’ of other educational and societal problems, and addressed indirectly, through reforms in public education. Paradoxically, in fighting against undesirable effects of private tutoring, Russian schools had to adopt some of the traits commonly associated with just that industry, namely individualisation, exam drills, and the promotion of private and positional good. Conversely, changes in the structure, content, pedagogy, or assessment procedures in the mainstream system have provoked considerable changes in tutoring practices, which, however, are not limited to imitation and supplementation. The study concludes that this symbiotic relationship cannot be reduced to imitation, reproduction, or supplementation. Rather, it changes like shifting shadows reflecting and ultimately shaping the dominant perceptions of what education is and ought to be.
PurposeThe chapter examines the attendance, cost, structure and nature of demand for supplementary education in Germany.
Design/methodology/approachThis chapter reviews a variety of secondary sources.
FindingsBetween 20 and 30 percent of German students use “Nachhilfe” (supplementary education). This chapter argues that a complex combination of perceptions of poor school quality and parents’ fears push German students and their parents into the supplementary education sector. It also finds that Nachhilfe providers have very effectively altered the nature of their services in light of these demands.
Originality/valueThis chapter articulates the underlying “push” and “pull” factors that shape the nature and popularity of supplementary education in Germany.
Human one-to-one tutoring has been shown to be a very effective form of instruction. Three contrasting hypotheses, a tutor-centered one, a student-centered one, and an interactive one could all potentially explain the effectiveness of tutoring. To test these hypotheses, analyses focused not only on the effectiveness of the tutors' moves, but also on the effectiveness of the students' construction on learning, as well as their interaction. The interaction hypothesis is further tested in the second study by manipulating the kind of tutoring tactics tutors were permitted to use. In order to promote a more interactive style of dialogue, rather than a didactic style, tutors were suppressed from giving explanations and feedback. Instead, tutors were encouraged to prompt the students. Surprisingly, students learned just as effectively even when tutors were suppressed from giving explanations and feedback. Their learning in the interactive style of tutoring is attributed to construction from deeper and a greater amount of scaffolding episodes, as well as their greater effort to take control of their own learning by reading more. What they learned from reading was limited, however, by their reading abilities.
Developers of intelligent tutoring systems would like to know what human tutors do and which activities are responsible for their success in tutoring. We address these questions by comparing episodes where tutoring does and does not cause learning. Approximately 125 hr of tutorial dialog between expert human tutors and physics students are analyzed to see what features of the dialog are associated with learning. Successful learning appears to require that the student reach an impasse. When students were not at an impasse, learning was uncommon regardless of the tutorial explanations employed. On the other hand, once students were at an impasse, tutorial explanations were sometimes associated with learning. Moreover, for different types of knowledge, different types of tutorial explanations were associated with learning different types of knowledge.
Research examining differences between expert and novice teachers is reviewed through the lens of cognition to outline and establish how features of the classroom are mentally represented. Studies are reviewed under Shulman's (1986b) framework characterizing knowledge bases necessary for teacher effectiveness, including content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and general pedagogical knowledge. Inferences are made as to how teachers, varying in experience level, represent classroom events including curriculum planning, instruction, management, and communication. Implications for teacher education and professional development programs are discussed.
One-on-one tutoring is a particularly effective mode of instruction, and we have studied the behavior of expert tutors in such a setting. A tactic commonly used by our expert tutors is hinting, that is, the prompting of a student to recollect information presumed to be known to him or her, or the prompting of a student to make an inference needed to solve a problem or answer a question, or both. Hints may directly convey information or may point to information the student already possesses. Another tactic prompts the student in a step-by-step manner (in a directed line of reasoning) to an answer. Our tutors generated 315 hints and directed lines of reasoning in 30 hr of tutoring. The surface structure of hints is complex and varied, reflecting, in part, the fact that the utterances making up hints often serve multiple functions. Hinting is triggered by student errors but ceases when it appears that the student is unable to respond appropriately. Hints encourage the student to engage in active cognitive processes that are thought to promote deeper understanding and long-term retention. It is our intention to apply our knowledge of tutorial dialogue generation to the building of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS).
Students learn more and gain greater understanding from one-to-one tutoring. The preferred explanation has been that the tutors' pedagogical skills are responsible for the learning gains. Pedagogical skills involve skillful execution of tactics, such as giving explanations and feedback, or selecting the appropriate problems or questions to ask the students. Skillful execution of these pedagogical skills requires that they are adaptive and tailored to the individual students' understanding. To be adaptive, the tutors must be able to monitor students' understanding accurately, so that they know how and when to deliver the explanations, feedback, and questions. Before ex-ploring whether in fact tutoring effectiveness can be attributed to tutors' pedagogical skills, we must first ascertain the accuracy with which tutors monitor their students' understanding. This article thus investigated monitoring accuracy from both the tu-tors' and the students' perspectives. By coding and recoding some data collected in a previous study, the article shows that tutors could only assess students' normative un-derstanding from the perspective of the tutors' knowledge, but tutors were dismal at diagnosing the students' alternative understanding from the perspective of the stu-dents' knowledge. Human one-to-one tutoring has been shown to be a very effective form of instruc-tion. The average student in a tutoring situation achieved a performance gain rang-ing from 0.4 to 2.3 SD above the average student in a traditional transmis-sion-based classroom (Bloom, 1984; Cohen, Kulik, & Kulik, 1982). A meta-analysis of around 100 studies showed that in educational settings, everyday tutors are often peers and other paraprofessionals with little experience in tutoring (Cohen et al., 1982), although they are almost always knowledgeable about the COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION, 22(3), 363–387 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
It is often assumed that engaging in a one-on-one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested the interaction hypothesis under the constraint that (a) all students covered the same content during instruction, (b) the task domain was qualitative physics, (c) the instruction was in natural language as opposed to mathematical or other formal languages, and (d) the instruction conformed with a widely observed pattern in human tutoring: Graesser, Person, and Magliano's 5-step frame. In the experiments, we compared 2 kinds of human tutoring (spoken and computer mediated) with 2 kinds of natural-language-based computer tutoring (Why2-Atlas and Why2-AutoTutor) and 3 control conditions that involved studying texts. The results depended on whether the students' preparation matched the content of the instruction. When novices (students who had not taken college physics) studied content that was written for intermediates (students who had taken college physics), then tutorial dialogue was reliably more beneficial than less interactive instruction, with large effect sizes. When novices studied material written for novices or intermediates studied material written for intermediates, then tutorial dialogue was not reliably more effective than the text-based control conditions.
According to the theories of educational choice, private tutoring contributes to an increase in educational inequality. On the basis of data presented by the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), it can be shown that every fourth adolescent has had recourse to private tutoring at least once during his or her educational career. In West Germany, private tutoring is used to realize higher educational aims; this is not true for East Germany, where no corresponding tradition of private tutoring exists. Furthermore, the parents' financial situation decides to a great extent whether private tutoring is being sought or not.
This paper presents results of two empirical studies conducted as part of the research project «Working at Home for School (WHS)». Study 1 focused on the prevalence rates of tutoring, in particular paid tutoring. The sample consisted of 456 students from Hauptschule and Gymnasium from grades 5 to 11. Results showed a prevalence rate in paid tutoring of 21 percent and no differences between Hauptschule and Gymnasium. In the second study 348 students from Hauptschule and Gymnasium from grades 6 to 7 participated. Here, the focus was on motives for and the contents of tutoring. To get better grades is the main motive for paid tutoring. During tutoring the highest amount of time is used to prepare for tests. Application of cluster analytic procedures identified three types concerning motivational variables, intelligence, and school achievement. Differences in prevalence rates of tutoring were observed between those types.
Whereas it is well documented that student question asking is infrequent in classroom environments, there is little research on questioning processes during tutoring. The present study investigated the questions asked in tutoring sessions on research methods (college students) and algebra (7th graders). Student questions were approximately 240 times as frequent in tutoring settings as classroom settings, whereas tutor questions were only slightly more frequent than teacher questions. Questions were classified by (a) degree of specification, (b) content, and (c) question-generation mechanism to analyze their quality. Student achievement was positively correlated with the quality of student questions after students had some experience with tutoring, but the frequency of questions was not correlated with achievement. Students partially self-regulated their learning by identifying knowledge deficits and asking questions to repair them, but they need training to improve these skills. We identified some ways that tutors and teachers might improve their question-asking skills.
This study examined how six experienced teachers acquired information about students' knowledge and used that information to adjust their instruction while tutoring. Each teacher tutored five simulated students and one live student in the algorithm for whole number addition. A diagnostic/remedial perspective in which the teacher forms a detailed model of the individual student's knowledge and misconceptions was assumed in the early stages of the study, but did not describe adequately the tutoring of the teachers. Diagnosis was not their primary goal. Rather, each teacher appeared to move through a curriculum script-a loosely ordered but well defined set of skills and concepts students were expected to learn, along with the activities and strategies for teaching this material.
Individualized instruction significantly improves students' pedagogical and motivational outcomes, In this article, we seek to characterize tutorial behaviors that could lead to these benefits and to consider why these actions should be pedagogically useful. This experiment examined university students learning LISP programming with the assistance of a tutor. Tutoring sessions were audiotaped, allowing us to analyze every verbal utterance during the sessions and thereby to identify the conversational events that lead to pedagogical success. This discourse analysis suggests that tutors are successful because they take a very active role in leading the problem solving by offering confirmatory feedback and additional guidance while students are on profitable paths and error feedback after mistakes. However, tutors carefully structure their feedback to allow students to perform as much of the work as possible while the tutor ensures that problem solving stays on track. These results suggest the types of strategies tutors employ to facilitate guided learning by doing.
Although one-to-one tutoring has been regarded as the most effective method of teaching (Bloom, 1984), surprisingly little is understood about tutoring expertise. Much educational research focuses on classroom teaching, whereas the few studies that focus on one-to-one tutoring do not offer a precise information-processing account of this skill. This article describes our initial attempts to study one-to-one tutoring. The goal of our research is to construct a detailed cognitive model of the reasoning and knowledge of an expert human tutor. The method we have employed is a variant of knowledge engineering. We videotaped tutoring sessions with expert teachers, subjecting them to a detailed analysis aimed at abstracting the tutor's knowledge structures. In this article, we describe some important tutoring techniques we have isolated using these methods. We discuss several dimensions along which tutors appear to be intelligent planners and problem solvers. Finally, we note several implications of our research, including its potential impact on the construction of intelligent computer-based tutoring systems.
JUEL (1991) reported that university student-athletes who were poor readers seemed to be effective tutors of first-grade children who were poor readers. The current study explored factors that may account for successful tutoring outcomes when poor readers tutor other poor readers. The form and content of tutoring in 30 tutoring dyads was closely examined. To determine what factors contributed to successful outcomes in individual dyads, tutoring sessions over a school year were tape-recorded and videotaped. Tapes were analyzed into type of verbal interactions (i.e., scaffolded or modeled processes) and time spent engaged in seven tutoring activities (e.g., reading literature, writing, letter-sound instruction). Multiple measures of reading, writing, and attitude towards school were administered at the beginning and end of the school year both to the children and to the older poor reader tutors (who also engaged in additional reading and writing activities outside of tutoring), and to control groups. Both tutors and children made significantly greater literacy growth than their respective control groups. Two activities were found to be particularly important in successful dyads: (a) the use of texts that gradually and repetitively introduced both high-frequency vocabulary and words with common spelling patterns, and (b) activities in which children were engaged in direct letter-sound instruction. Two forms of verbal interactions were found to be particularly important: (a) scaffolding of reading and writing, and (b) modeling of how to read and spell unknown words. A synergistic relationship was found to exist between the form and content of instruction.
Virtually every study of tutoring in reading has found it to be highly effective, but the reasons for its effectiveness are relatively unexplored. We built on a small body of research on the tutoring process in reading and a large body of research from other well-defined domains by collecting and analyzing verbal protocols from 3 more experienced and 3 less experienced volunteer tutors from preexisting dyads as they taught adults with decoding problems. It was found that more experienced tutors used significantly more cognitive scaffolding and significantly less motivational scaffolding than did less experienced tutors. Tutors were similar in their rates of question asking, content errors, and responses to student errors. We suggest some hypotheses for modeling in the design of a computer-based reading decoding tutor and for training human tutors who teach decoding.
The situative perspective shifts the focus of analysis from individual behavior and cognition to larger systems that include behaving cognitive agents interacting with each other and with other subsystems in the environment. The first section presents a version of the situative perspective that draws on studies of social interaction, philosophical situation theory, and ecological psychology. Framing assumptions and concepts are proposed for a synthesis of the situative and cognitive theoretical perspectives, and a further situative synthesis is suggested that would draw on dynamic-systems theory. The second section discusses relations between the situative, cognitive, and behaviorist theoretical perspectives and principles of educational practice. The third section discusses an approach to research and social practice called interactive research and design, which fits with the situative perspective and provides a productive, albeit syncretic, combination of theory-oriented and instrumental functions of research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments, presented within the framework of Activity Theory, deal with the relationship between adult learners' questions and subsequent comprehension in a tutorial learning setting. Students were first given verbal instructions (acquisition) to a novel card game and then asked to play one hand with the teacher (implementation). In Experiment 1, there was no correlation between number of questions asked during acquisition and comprehension, but questions during implementation were negatively correlated with comprehension. In Experiment 2, learners whose questions were answered during acquisition scored higher than those whose questions were not answered. In Experiment 3, learners whose questions were answered during implementation showed greater gains in comprehension than those whose questions were answered during acquisition. Individual differences in question-asking during implementation but not acquisition were significantly related to comprehension. The results confirm the view that questions answered during knowledge implementation more effectively aid comprehension than those answered during acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Naturalistic one-to-one tutoring is more effective than traditional classroom teaching methods, but there have been few attempts to examine the features of normal tutoring that might explain its advantage. This project explored dialogue patterns in two samples of naturalistic tutoring with normal unskilled tutors (as opposed to expert tutors): graduate students tutoring undergraduates in research methods and high school students tutoring 7th graders in algebra. We analysed the extent to which those tutoring protocols manifested components that have been emphasized in contemporary pedagogical theories and intelligent tutoring systems: active student learning, sophisticated pedagogical strategies, specific examples and cases, collaborative problem solving and question answering, deep explanatory reasoning, convergance toward shared meanings, feedback, error diagnosis and remediation, and affect. The most prominent components consisted of collaborative problem solving, question answering, and explanation in the context of specific examples. We identify frequent dialogue patterns that characterize these collaborative processes.
Simulations have established a role in the teaching of medicine, since their dynamic qualities lend themselves to training students to deal with high risk situations in a safe environment. However, when used to teach at a more conceptual level, students often encounter difficulties in learning from simulation. This has led to the conclusion that additional learning support needs to be included. The paper describes a formative evaluation study in which medical students were recorded interacting with a simulation model of calcium balance. Video protocols were analysed according to students' performance on diagnostic and patient management tasks, and the quality of their understanding of the physiological model that lies behind the simulation. The role of dialogue interaction, between students and between experimenter and student, was investigated as a potential source of learning support. Since existing dialogue analysis techniques required extension and synthesis to serve our goals, a specially devised mark-up scheme DISCOUNT was used for the analysis. Insights were gained from an examination of learning in relation to types of dialogue and these were further supported by students' own views concerning the value of the system. Although all students demonstrated learning gains, these were greater amongst single students interacting with the experimenter than amongst students co-operating on tasks in pairs. Dialogue analysis revealed that experimenter-student interaction contained many more inquiries causing students to explain their reasoning, justify their conclusions, or state implications from data. This prompting of reflective activity seemed to result in a deeper understanding of the physiological model. The implications of this are that interaction of an inquiry style needs to be encouraged for maximum learning benefit to be gained and, if support can be built in to the simulation which renders interaction with the system closer to that of inquiry dialogue, then learning at a conceptual level should be enhanced.
The focus of the pap er is on important theoretical perspectives on collaborative knowledge construction: The socio-genetical perspective, the cognitive - perspective of information processing, the socio-cultural and situated perspectives, the perspective of argumentative discoursed and the perspective of collective information processing. Each perspective is, described with respect to its basic idea, main research questions, theoretical aspects of collaborative knowledge construction in discourse, and methodology typically applied. On this background, conclusions for theory building and empirical research are drawn.
Incl. bibl. Les cours particuliers sont une des méthodes principales pour améliorer le rendement scolaire. L'augmentation des enseignements particuliers était confirmé par une étude qui était mené avec 904 élèves luxembourgeois. Au moment de l'étude 23pour cent des participants ont rapporté qu'ils recevraient des enseignements particuliers, principalement en mathématiques. En raison de réflexions théoriques on peut attendre que l'efficacité des enseignements particuliers se manifeste dans une amélioration des facteurs cognitifs et motivationnel et en plus est le résultat d'une augmentation de temps consacré à l'apprentissage. Mais il manque d'études d'évaluation appropriés. Dans une étude empirique on contrôlait l'efficacité des enseignements particuliers avec un avant-après-control-group design. Un groupe qui profitait des enseignements particuliers depuis neuf mois était comparé avec un groupe sans enseignements particuliers. Les résultats montraient que l'amélioration du rendement scolaire était plus grand parmi le groupe qui suivait les enseignements particuliers que parmi les élèves qui n'en profitaient pas. L'article comprend aussi des directions pour d'autres recherches continuantes et une discussion concernant des implications pratiques. [INIST]
The focus of the paper is on important theoretical perspectives on collaborative knowledge construction: The socio-genetical perspective, the cognitive perspective of information processing, the socio-cultural and situated perspectives, the perspective of argumentative discourse, and the perspective of collective information processing. Each perspective is described with respect to its basic idea, main research questions, theoretical aspects of collaborative knowledge construction in discourse, and methodology typically applied. On this background, conclusions for theory building and empirical research are draw. Der Fokus dieser Arbeit liegt auf wichtigen theoretischen Perspektiven zur gemeinsamen Wissenskonstruktion: Die soziogenetische Perspektive, die kognitive Perspektive der Informationsverarbeitung, soziokulturelle und situierte Perspektiven, die Perspektive des argumentativen Diskurses sowie die Perspektive der kollektiven Informationsverarbeitung. Die einzelnen Perspektiven werden anhand ihrer Grundidee und zentraler Fragestellungen, theoretischer Aspekte zur gemeinsamen Wissenskonstruktion im Diskurs sowie der typischerweise verwendeten Methodologien beschrieben. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden Konsequenzen für die Theoriebildung und empirische Forschung gezogen.
To give effective and efficient advice to laypersons, experts should adapt their explanations to the layperson's knowledge. However, experts often fail to consider the limited domain knowledge of laypersons. To support adaptation in asynchronous helpdesk communication, researchers provided computer experts with information about a layperson's knowledge. A dialogue experiment (N = 80 dyads of experts and laypersons) was conducted that varied the displayed information. Rather than sensitizing the experts to generally improve the intelligibility of their explanations, the individuating information about the layperson enabled them to make specific partner adjustments that increased the effectiveness and efficiency of the communication. The results are suggestive of ways in which the provision of instructional explanations could be enhanced in Internet-based communication.