16th September 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Something that casts a shadow over the whole tutoring industry is the difficulty in measuring the extent to which private tuition yields genuine results. Obviously the only evidence we can look at is empirical, since it’s virtually impossible to establish causality links between a tutor’s lesson and an improvement in the student. The other question is what that improvement is; the majority would say it’s exam results, and the truth is that exam results are what most parents and students are looking to improve when they request a tutor. Obviously we hope that people will appreciate a tutor’s ability to develop a deeper understanding within the student too, and this will tend to improve their ability in an exam, but the objective measure has to be improvement in a student’s exam results.
So, how do we start to try and measure a tutor’s ability to improve a student’s exam results? With schools it appears much easier: some schools consistently score among the highest in the country for GCSEs and A-levels, which would suggest that their success isn’t based on luck. However, you could argue that getting the best results each year gives those schools the option to pick the best students to attend the schools, and therefore each school’s position in the GCSE and A-level league tables is simply perpetuated.
Blue Tutors receives so many complimentary testimonials from students, and parents of students all the time, and the general message is that they feel strongly that their high achievements would not have been possible without their tutor. However, to play devil’s advocate it could be argued that a tutor gives a student confidence, rather than actually developing understanding, and it’s this confidence that makes the student feel as though the tutor has really helped. Also, having a tutor means that students are required to sit and think about their subject during a period when they otherwise might not, so it might not be the tutor that creates the better exam results, but simply the fact that the student is spending more time studying. Of course neither of these arguments suggest that getting a tutor is a bad idea, but rather that it might not be the tutor’s ability that’s producing results.
Having said all this, the better tutors definitely stand out as being more effective than others. Maybe the only way to truly measure tutoring effectiveness is to do so relative to other tutors. The difficulty there is that the worst tutor could still be doing a very good job.