For those of you that have the time to read it, Marie Bjerede’s blog about DIY learning is worth the effort. For those of you that don’t, the crux of her argument is that we’re reaching the point where it’s possible to take the traditional ‘products’ and ‘processes’ of an education, disassemble them and reassemble them in a way that better suits the learner and their circumstances. This is about much more than just home schooling and takes things even further than the ideas of Edupunk. Some of the most eye-catching examples, such as the Stanford Online AI Course, have happened at college/university level, but the principles make sense and it can only be a matter of time before it filters down to secondary and primary education.
Don’t expect the revolution to come from within though. It never happens that way … it will be those who are close to, but not in the education system, that recognise when all the pieces are in place for a new approach. After all, it wasn’t the music industry that brought us iTunes.
In support of our development plans for Tutorhub, I’ve been taking a much deeper look at the world of tutoring recently. My aim was to ignore the popular wisdom and look for hard evidence, not only that tutoring actually works (see my earlier post on this subject) but to get some idea of how it works. This is more than just an academic exercise or background reading for our product development plans. The fact is that tutoring support can make a significant difference to educational performance, but understanding how it works is vital if you’re going to get the most out of your tutoring session, reduce the time spent with a tutor and avoid wasting money on unproductive sessions.
Perhaps the best way to explain this is to imagine a student who is trying to work on a topic or question that they’re struggling with. Cue student:
“Our student encounters a problem that they can’t understand or work through. Frustration begins to build. The tutor will use scaffolding (guided prompting that pushes the students thinking) to encourage them to think about the problem in hand, to use existing knowledge and tools to try to approach the problem. Feedback along the way helps to both monitor the process and guide the student when they are either wrong or unsure. The process is highly interactive, unlike say watching a video or reading a book, which is passive. It is also granular, which means that the problem is broken down in to small steps and at each stage, the student understands if they’re right or that they are wrong and need to repair their thinking. In other words, a student can’t go far wrong. This is an intense process that reinforces existing knowledge, creates new knowledge and repairs faulty understanding.”
It is this process of scaffolding, feedback and interaction that seems to offer the most effective improvement in understanding.
What this means is that we should reconsider how, when and why we use a tutor. Tutoring is typically born of frustration, with “I don’t get Maths” probably being the most common starting point. What follows is a whole series of maths lessons. I believe we should be looking at tutors in a different way, perhaps more akin to an educational Swiss Army Knife. If we want to achieve the best results our native talents will allow, we should realise from the start that we’ll inevitably come across problems that we can’t understand. When that happens and before the frustration builds, we know that we need to work through the problem in a more detailed, intense way, to really understand it. That’s when we reach for the tutor. In some ways, this is an approach that’s an odds with how most tutors currently work, but that’s a problem for another day …
In the competitive world of education, school selection and exams, it’s an article of faith for many parents, tutors and students that tutoring, in conjunction with normal classroom attendance and homework, actually improves educational performance.
Intuitively, you’d assume that one-to-one support from someone who has a good grasp of a subject must help. It’s obvious, isn’t it? People wouldn’t keep paying if it wasn’t delivering results, so you could say that the continued existence and growth of the tutoring industry is a vote of confidence in it’s effectiveness. But up until now, I’d never really thought to ask if anyone had independently tested to see if this was true.
It turns out they have. A number of academic studies have been carried out to gauge how effective tutoring is in improving educational performance, including Bloom (1984, Educational Researcher), Evens & Michael (2006, Erlbaum) and Chi et al (2001, Cognitive Science). The fact that they’ve been published in reputable, peer reviewed academic journals, should give us a fair degree of confidence in the results. They’re certainly not ‘marketing studies’ sponsored by tutoring agencies. These studies compared groups of students who received human tutoring with students who received no tutoring at all and then measured the results. The studies consistently showed that tutoring improved performance and whilst we have to be extremely careful about translating statistical results into real life examples, the studies suggest that in a group of 100 students, tutoring would make the difference between finishing 50th in the class (no tutoring) and 21st in the class (with tutoring).
So in answer to our question, not only can we say, “yes tutoring works”, but by how much. That works for me.
Nations have and always will be in competition. In the past, that competition centred on the ability to build and sustain a dominant military capability, but as we’ve seen in the last few years in Iraq and Afghanistan, that only gets you so far in the modern world. Increasingly, competition between nations is characterised by economic performance and the educational prowess of the population; factors that are of course intricately linked.
Fine tuning economic performance is the subject of endless open debate and ideas, but it always seems to me that education is very much the poor cousin, with the same old tired ideas doing the rounds. If we are going to competitive as a country, we need to find a way to let new ideas see the light of day in our education system. Vinod Khosla, the legendary venture capitalist and backer of many new ideas, put it pretty well in a recent article, ”we have also had too much punditry from experts in education instead of just trying hundreds of new ways of doing things”.
If we are going to give our children the chance to succeed in the modern world, we shouldn’t be prissy about where good ideas come from. It’s too important an issue for vested interests to hold sway. The world’s major corporations realised some time back that you can’t maintain competitiveness by doing the same things in the same way, only a little bit better, you have to constantly rethink what you are doing, why you are doing it and how you are doing it. It’s time for us to embrace this spirit in education and find a hundred or even a thousand new ways of doing things.