Today, students of all abilities work with tutors to improve their performance in the classroom, achieve higher goals, and to make them a more competitive college applicant. The tutoring you choose can be a friend or foe. Many tutoring resources serve as a crutch for students and don't go beyond homework help. Others choose their tutors carefully, build personalized programs to address the goals of each individual student, and teach students to be successful, independent learners. The right tutoring program has lasting impact far beyond an A on one test or in one class.
Whatever it is that is keeping your student from performing at their best, a tutor may be able to help.
Just signing up for tutoring doesn’t guarantee your student will suddenly get all As. It will take some work, but with the right tutor and the right attitude, any student can dramatically improve their academic performance.
For students, a tutor who understands what motivates them, what challenges them, and how they work best will help them develop and practice strategies that make sense of difficult concepts, and prove there are no obstacles they cannot overcome. A good tutor will work with your student to make sure they understand all of the key concepts for tests, even if their teacher did not explain concepts to them in a way that made sense. Most importantly, a good tutor will work with your student to set ambitious goals, and then help them do whatever it takes to reach those goals. Many students report that even working with a tutor in one specific subject makes them feel more confident in all of their classes.
Often, students don't just need help understanding the historical significance of the Gettysburg Address, or using the Pythagorean Theorem; they need help with time management, study-skills, critical reading, and problem solving. A good tutor will work with your student on academic subject-matter, and on the long-term skills that will help them better understand that subject-matter. These skills will help your student improve in all their classes, now and into the future.
For thousands of years, parents have been trying to help their students do better in school. And for thousands of years, students have responded with something along the lines of "C'mon Mom, leave me alone!" We know it's hard to figure out how best to support your student, and we know how students generally feel about their parents helping with their homework. A tutor can help by providing students the help they need and keeping parents in the loop with updates, challenges, and even advice on when and how to get involved. With Academic Tutoring, everyone wins and the dinner table becomes a more peaceful place.
More important than finding the best tutor is finding the best tutor for your student. Your student's tutor should be someone they can relate with and look up to. Someone you will respect, and with whom you and your student feel comfortable enough to talk about goals and challenges. A tutor should also be someone who can provide help in the specific areas in which your student needs it. Think about the teachers and coaches your student has enjoyed and learned from the most. The best tutor for you may not be the person who got a perfect SAT score and never had to study very hard; it might be someone who struggled at times, but found ways to succeed and can share those lessons with your student.
The tutor-student relationship is the key to a successful tutoring experience. Revolution works hard to find the best match for you and your family, and monitors your progress to make sure the relationship stays strong.
Like most things, what you can get out of tutoring is directly related to what you put in. That means your student will need to be prepared and focused during their tutoring sessions, do any work their tutor gives them in between sessions, and they will need to work on the strategies they are learning in class and on tests.
Many of our parents are interested in research about Academic Tutoring efficacy. Here are a few excerpts from relevant studies.
A research study at University of Chicago found that the average tutoring student was about two standard deviations above control students in a conventional classroom covering the same material. Essentially, the tutored students scored above 98% of their peers in the classroom setting.1
Students spend 90% of their time on-task while in tutoring, and only 65% of their time on-task while in the classroom.2
In order to learn higher mental processes, which allow students to tackle not only the problem at hand, but to apply principles in new situations, students must be in a central part of the teaching-learning process, which is what happens with tutoring. Academic Tutoring leads to a higher rate of analytical thoughts.3
In classrooms, Teachers unintentionally provide the students in the top third of the class with a disproportionate amount of attention, opportunity and encouragement. Consequently, "About 80% of students do relatively poorly under conventional instruction as compared with what they might do under tutoring."4
One of the characteristics of highlight effective Academic Tutoring programs is that tutors are professionally trained and supervised and receive ongoing training and feedback.5
Children should be tutored by the same academic tutor for at least one and half to two hours a week for a minimum of twelve weeks for the most significant gains. It should not be a drop-in program. Children, tutors and families need to be committed to regular attendance.6
Structured Academic Tutoring programs demonstrated higher achievement gains than unstructured programs.7
1-4 Bloom, B.S. (1984). The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educational Researcher, 13, 4-16.)
5 Reisner, Petry and Armitage (1990) in a review of college-based tutoring programs that recruit college students to tutor younger children concluded that tutor training was the major factor in success of the programs. Tutors of learning disabled children were effective when they had professional supervision. (Azcoitia,1989)
6 (Brailstord A., 1991).
7 Cohen, Kulik and Kulik (1993) found that structured tutorial programs demonstrated higher achievement gains than unstructured programs in their meta-analysis.
