The Tutorial

(via Wahroongai News, Volume 32, Number 4, April 1998) Grahame Brown writes:

Traditional tutorials were one-to-one periods of instruction given by masters to students at university colleges. Today the role of the tutorial has been expanded to include those small group teaching sessions, of four or less students, that are primarily devoted to a critical and searching discussion of subject matter—but are particularly concerned with developing each student’s independent intellectual powers. The tutor’s principal task in a tutorial is to use subject matter to what he or she considers its best advantage to stimulate, develop, and maximize the individual student’s powers of thought, analysis, and self-expression.

In the tutorial the tutor’s role is likely to be a dominant one; for the tutor’s major task is to direct student understanding, and student learning. To that end, tutor’s must pose relevant searching questions, check and analyze student responses to those questions, and direct student learning to remedy any perceived errors of fact, concept, and/or analysis.

Tutorials serve three broad purposes in authority-based (as opposed to self-directed) learning:
- They provide a regular meeting place for checking student progress.
- They provide a very effective means for discovering misunderstandings in larger format methods of instruction, such as lectures and demonstrations to more than five individuals.
- They provide an opportunity for detailed scrutiny of a particular piece or aspect of the student’s work.

However, the much underrated pastoral role of the tutor never should be neglected; for the tutorial format offers the tutor a unique opportunity to inject some humanity into the educative process. Problems can be discovered, and suitable remedies suggested and implemented—taking into full consideration the personality of the student, their progress in their peer academic group, and any private matters that may or may not be affecting the student’s progress.

Advantages offered by the tutorial are that:
If focuses attention on the work of the individual student and his or her ways of thinking.
It allows the tutor to keep a close eye on each student’s progress.
It provides essential continuity in the tutor-student relationship.

Disadvantages of the tutorial are that:
It can be very demanding of time, both for the student and the tutor.
The tutor has a dominant role in the educative process.

Conclusion
Used intelligently and selectively the tutorial is an effective educational tool—provided tutors are knowledgeable, and adequately trained to pose the right questions required to stimulate the independent intellectual powers of the student. Of course, tutorials will fail if students do not think, research, write answers to the questions their tutors pose.