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