Tutoring

1
Tutoring
2
Perspective

• What is tutoring?
• How do we characterize the tutorial act?
• What are the respective roles of the
  participants?
• What role can/should technology play in the
  tutorial activity?

3
Coached Problem Solving(1)

• The environment we seek to establish should
  support tutoring as a form of coached problem
  solving.

4
Coached Problem Solving(2)

• Coached problem solving occurs when a tutor and a
  student solve problems together. Sometimes the
  student takes the lead and the tutors merely
  indicates agreement with each step. At other
  times the tutor walks the student through
  particularly difficult parts of the solution.
  However, at all times they are focussed on
  solving the problem. (vanLehn p.1)

5
Coached Problem Solving (3)

• Learning consists of two basic processes
• Practicing the application of existing
  knowledge. This causes the knowledge to become
  easier to recall and apply on subsequent
  occasions.
• Acquiring new knowledge. This often occurs when
  students try to solve a problem, reach an
  impasse, realize that they are lacking some
  domain knowledge, and seek that particular piece
  of knowledge.

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Coached Problem Solving (4)

• The constant focus on solving problems maximizes
  the amount of practice that students get on
  applying their existing knowledge.

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Coached Problem Solving (5)

• The coach facilitates acquisition of new
  knowledge in two ways.
• (a) When the tutor provides immediate negative
  feedback own student errors, students find it
  easier to locate the incorrect or missing
  knowledge that caused the error.
• (b) When students have found a misconception in
  their thinking, the tutor is immediately
  available as a resource to aid the students'
  debugging of their knowledge.

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Types of Learning

• conceptual learning
• which means acquiring the basic concepts of a
  task domain, using them precisely and recognizing
  their applicability in situations far removed
  from those studied in the classroom,
• and
• meta learning
• which means acquiring new strategies for
  studying (learning) that are more effective than
  the ones that the student habitually uses.

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Ideas to Ponder (1)

• Physicists reason qualitatively not only on the
  simple problems used in physics courses but also
  when discussing physics with colleagues or
  presenting their results at conferences.

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Ideas to Ponder (2)

• After students leave their physics courses, those
  who do not become physicists will probably never
  solve another quantitative physics problem.
  Indeed, they probably couldn't even if they had
  to, because they will have forgotten many of the
  algebraic details of principles they had once
  mastered. However, they will have to do
  qualitative analyses.

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Ideas to Ponder (3)

• Many students have misconceptions prior to
  physics courses, and these misconceptions survive
  intact when the instruction allows them to solve
  problems via algebraic reasoning. When the
  instruction stresses qualitative analysis, fewer
  misconceptions escape remediation.

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Misconceptions

• Fundamental to our understanding of tutoring is
  the issue of misconceptions. Important points
• 1) Looking at the answer does not tell us whether
  the person understands, 2) Misconceptions are
  resistant to change through direct instruction,
  3) Misconceptions interfere with learning.
• This makes the tutors job difficult. The first
  impression one has is to simply tell someone the
  correct view. This however is not effective as
  indicated in item 2.

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Ideas to Ponder (4)

• The self-explanation effect
• The students who self-explained the examples
  learned more not only during the example studying
  phase but also during a subsequent problem
  solving phase as well). Thus, there is a
  correlation between a studying strategy,
  self-explanation, and the students' learning.

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Implications (1)

• The tutor must deal with domain knowledge, and
  knowledge of problem solving strategies and
  processes.
• This would encourage tutors to prompt tutees
  regarding both what and how.
• Historical records of problem solving activity
  can be used to review processes used and to help
  student compare methods.

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Implications (2)

• The tutor has to work without the visual clues
  associated with body language.
• This may be the two-edged sword analogy. Since
  the tutor does not have body language to
  facilitate decision making she must rely on other
  clues. This may result in the tutoring
  encouraging more self-explanation on the part of
  the student to maintain a sense of connectedness
  with the tutee.

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Implications (3)

• The tutee has to work without the visual clues
  associated with body language.
• In a similar discussion, the tutee is working
  without the visual clues from the tutor.

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Implications (4)

• Learning under this model is a personal issue
  with the tutee. This, however, may bring with it
  the need to help students adopt a more robust
  learning model, one where their understanding has
  priority over simply getting homework done.

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Implications (5)

• Interpersonal familiarity may influence level of
  interaction.
• This leads to the question of how interpersonal
  familiarity develops in such environments.

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General Remarks

• Will this be seen as a solution to a perceived
  problem?
• Does the increase in timely feedback to impasses
  and difficulties have a positive influence on
  attitude toward learning?
• Is this perceived as a supplement to the normal
  learning activities?

20
Issue

• Should we focus the use of NetMeeting to certain
  classes of problems?
• Should we focus the use of NetMeeting to certain
  tutoring contexts?

21
Note

• Should we gather some data that allows us to view
  body language while tutors/tutees are engaged in
  interaction. The argument here is how body
  language is used during face-to-face tutorial
  sessions, hence what happens when these visual
  cues are removed?