How can we use tutors to effectively enhance student performance?
While I have not had much experience teaching in the classroom yet, I do have a great opportunity to work with remedial math students and their tutors next year. Right now Central Washington University’s remedial mathematics program seems to be producing unsatisfactory results for the CWU mathematics department. It is the job of the remedial mathematics program to get students who have not succeeded in traditional math courses offered in high schools to succeed in the remedial mathematics program at CWU. Next year I will not have any control over the way that remedial mathematics professors will teach their classes, but I will be able to closely work with and monitor the tutors that are working with these remedial students.
In order to make these tutors even more effective I will work with the teachers of CWU’s higher level mathematics education students. These teachers will require their students to tutor remedial mathematics students for at least two hours a week. My job in this is to be sure that the tutors are fully trained and capable of working with remedial mathematics students. They will be expected to support and encourage the students, while building on their content knowledge through constructivist tutoring methods. While I cannot change how the teachers teach their classes, I can change how the tutors work with the students and how the tutoring center is ran. It is my hope that by properly training tutors with specific methods, and matching them up correctly with remedial students, that I will be able to see improvement in the performance of remedial students.
While it may be a process to measure this improvement, I plan to do use qualitative analysis. First I will evaluate studens performance by comparing students that have been tutored (experimental group) and students who have not been tutored (control group). I will put end of course standardized test scores as well as SAT/ACT scores of all students in each group into ANCOVA. If ANCOVA outputs a p-value less than .05 I will assume that tutoring was effective in enhancing performance of remedial mathematics students.
While I do have a partial plan on how to use these tutors and measure success, I could still use any help or suggestions possible. If anyone has any idea of how to use these tutors more effectively please share! Another isssue I am having a difficult time decided is how I will pair the tutor’s up with students from the remedial math center. It would be greatly appreciative and helpful if anyone has ideas on how to do this as well.
Danielle
Back in my undergrad days I did a little tutoring. One the most frustrating things I encountered was a lack of knowledge about the professor. How they taught, what were their expectations, how much of a stickler they were about things being done one way. That kind of stuff. Also, if you and your tutors could meet occasionally and talk about issues with how to teach something and work together to find more methods, might be helpful.
http://oursland.edublogs.org/files/2011/07/Tutor_Training_Powerpoint1-sp33yi.ppt
In any case, hope this helps.
I’m not sure that this would even work out how you wanted it to, and I don’t mean to create more work for you, but maybe if you surveyed the students and the tutors, you might be able to use that as a way of pairing them. Survey questions I’m thinking of are all math and communication related. For example, you could have a question for the student that asked: (On a scale from 1 -5, 1 being not at all, 5 being really well) How well do you feel you can communicate what it is you are struggling with? Then the tutor version of the question could be (on a scale of 1-5) How good are you at determining what students are struggling with? Obviously mathcing a lower student number with a higher tutor number would be helpful in this case.
Other questions could be more specific, maybe even have questions relating to the rule of 4. Ideally, you want someone that is going to be really good at explaining the gaps that these students have. So if you can determine where there gaps are, and determine what tutors feel more confident in those areas it might help in pairing them up. Just a thought… 🙂
Thanks for both of your comments!
I definitely agree that knowing what the remedial teachers were doing and understanding their styles would be beneficial to the tutors. However from what I have heard about some of them, I do question whether they would actually be willing to work with me enough to figure that out. I will definitely look into that though.
Thanks for your idea too Jen. That would not create more work for me at all. As this is the study I have to do I would be happy to do anything that might make it more successful or accurate. I think your idea is great and plan on running it by Dr. Lundin and seeing if he may want to try it out.
Thanks again!
Danielle
Statistically the Math Center classes have done a pretty good job of what they were intended to do, make ill prepared students successful in the first college level math course. The statistics over the years is that the pass rate of students from MATH 100B in the MATH 101 and MATH 130 was always over 90%. To really understand these students it might be a good idea to read the other two MAT projects that researched the Math Center courses. If you do not get a chance, what you will find is that the most important part of the Math Center courses is the basic skill quizzes (must pass at 80% or fail the course) and requirements that they turn in their assignments and come to class. Yes, holding the students accountable for meeting standards and developing good student behaviors have been statistically shown to be the most important indicators of success in the developmental math courses. The tutoring picks up the pieces. Granted most of the students that used tutoring did so on their own but when students could not pass the basic skill tests on the second time they were required to met with a tutor. If were failing they were required to met with a tutor. These were the hard cases and much of the time was spent helping them learn how to be a good student, get by their insecurities, and be willing to learn math.
Keep working with Dr. Lundin on methods of collecting data and I will make sure that you are invited to the meeting were we decide on the tutoring protocol and job descriptions. The trouble is the Math Center just changed bosses and Secondary Math Education program is just adding the tutoring program. It is hard to know how the program will look until October. If you do not hear more, make sure that you check in with Dr. Lundin and me by the Monday before school starts.
My suggestion goes along with the first comment. I would ask all of the tutors which professors that they have taken classes from and then match them with students currently in classes with those professors. Since the tutors would have already seen how the professor teaches and how big a stickler they are on the way they want things done.
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