Learning from human tutoring

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. © 2001 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Background and hypotheses 1.1. General findings Three general findings should be noted about the effectiveness of one-to-one tutoring. First, in one-to-one tutoring, students gain greater understanding, are more motivated, and work faster (Slavin, 1987). The average student in a tutoring situation achieved a performance gain ranging from 0.4 to 2.3 standard deviations (usually referred to as the 2 sigma * Corresponding author. Tel.: 11-412-624-7456. E-mail address: [email protected] (M.T.H. Chi). 1 Now at the Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station TX 77843. http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cogsci Cognitive Science 25 (2001) 471–533 0364-0213/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S0364-0213(01)00044-1 effect) above the average student in a traditional transmission-based classroom (with a class size of 30 students; Bloom, 1984; Cohen, Kulik & Kulik, 1982). One main instructional difference between teachers and tutors is that tutors have the opportunity to pursue a given topic or problem until the students have mastered it. Even if we factor out this difference in pursuing mastery, tutoring still produces a gain of about one sigma rather than two (Bloom,