9th May 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A study in the US has recently found that teaching assistants are at least as good as classroom teachers when it comes to one-to-one tutoring of school students, and much more effective than volunteer tutors. Published on the Hechinger Report’s website, Robert Slavin, who is a director at the Center for Research and Reform in Education at John Hopkins University was looking into the most effective methods for tutoring school students, and discovered how good teaching assistants can be.
It isn’t clear why teaching assistants performed so well, but Slavin points to the fact that many of them have undergraduate degrees, which is significantly more education than is required to be a volunteer tutor for the same level of students. Fully qualified teachers are paid more than teaching assistants, so it’s costly to ask teachers to do much individual tuition. However, volunteer tutors have been found not to attend the tuition training they’re supposed to, and generally don’t follow a tuition plan as well as professional teachers or teaching assistants.
Another interesting discover made by Slavin was that tuition software which is supposed to adjust the level of tuition to ‘personalise’ it for the students, made little difference compared to a standard structured approach. In fact, he concluded that intelligent software was not nearly as effective as a human tutor, who can adjust their tutoring on a minute-by-minute basis.