Tutors' Assessments of a Tutee's Understanding in One-on-One Tutoring

The goal of this doctoral thesis is to study instruction that is effective in terms of supporting school-aged students’ learning. This instruction, thus, contributes to good education. Instruction is of major interest because it can be modified to improve education. To do so, it is necessary to know as to what forms of instruction are effective. Moreover, it is necessary to know as to which mechanisms underlie these forms of instruction. One prominent form of effective instruction is one-on-one human tutoring. In this context, assessments and assessment accuracy of tutors are deemed central mechanisms with regard to the effectiveness of tutoring. However, these mechanisms have not been intensively studied yet. Therefore, this doctoral thesis investigates the assessments and the assessment accuracy of tutors. More precisely, two types of assessments are examined, namely, assessments that a tutor conducts continuously in the course of a tutoring session (i.e., formative assessment) and assessment that a tutor conducts after the completion of a tutoring session (i.e., summative assessment). In this doctoral thesis, two empirical studies are reported. In both studies more knowledgeable tutors tutored school-aged tutees. It was assumed that tutors with teaching experience are more proficient in assessing a tutee’s understanding than tutors without teaching experience. In the first study, the influence of teaching experience on a tutor’s assessments was investigated empirically. That is, the assessment accuracy of tutors with teaching experience (i.e., teacher tutors) and the assessment accuracy of tutors without teaching experience (i.e., student tutors) were examined and compared with each other. In doing so, the relationship between a tutor’s formative assessments and a tutor’s summative assessments was analyzed. Moreover, the benefits of a tutor’s formative assessments for a tutee’s learning were investigated (see Chapter 1, articles 1 and 2). In the second study, it was experimentally tested whether the accuracy of student tutors’ assessments can be enhanced by a short training method that aimed at fostering an interactive style of tutoring. The idea for the design of the training method was that tutees more likely express their own understanding when tutors implement an interactive style of tutoring. Based on the additional information about their tutee’s understanding, tutors with an interactive style of tutoring should be better able to summatively assess the tutee’s understanding than tutors with a style of tutoring that is less interactive (see Chapter 2, article 3). In the first study (cf. Chapter 1), it was found that tutors were, on average, at best moderately accurate in summatively assessing a tutee’s understanding. However, teacher tutors were more accurate in summatively assessing their tutee’s understanding than were student tutors (cf. article 1). Furthermore, the first study showed that all tutors engaged in interactive instructional strategies to formatively assess their tutee’s understanding. More formative assessment, in turn, enhanced a tutee’s learning. Similarly, larger amounts of formative assessment yielded more accurate summative assessments of a tutee’s understanding. As in the case of summative assessments, teacher tutors and student tutors differed with regard to formative assessments. More precisely, teacher tutors more often engaged in strategies to formatively assess a tutee’s understanding than student tutors. This difference in the amount of formative assessments, moreover, accounted for the difference in summative assessment accuracy between teacher tutors and student tutors (cf. article 2). The results of the first study indicate that tutors, generally, are not very proficient at summatively assessing a tutee’s understanding. Nevertheless, tutors do formatively assess a tutee’s understanding to some extent. As more formative assessments entailed more learning, it can be assumed that formative assessments, indeed, belong to the mechanisms that make tutoring effective. Enhancing formative assessments, therefore, might make tutoring even more effective. Moreover, the observation that formative assessments led to better summative assessments suggests that fostering a tutor’s formative assessments might yield more accurate summative assessments. Finally, teaching experience accounted for better assessments. More precisely, teacher tutors more often employed strategies of formative assessment than did student tutors. This difference also explained why teacher tutors produced more accurate summative assessments than student tutors. Obviously, a more intensive use of strategies to formatively assess a tutee’s understanding is an observable indicator of teaching experience. The second study (cf. Chapter 2) showed that tutors, indeed, implemented a more interactive style of tutoring when they were trained in using the interactive instructional strategies of formative assessment that were observed in the first study. However, trained tutors’ summative assessments did not become more accurate than the summative assessments of untrained tutors. Instead, the trained tutors were less accurate than the untrained tutors in summatively assessing their tutee’s understanding. This unexpected result was explained by the fact that trained tutors more intensively engaged in an interactive style of tutoring than the untrained tutors. The results of the second study are interpreted with respect to possible deficiencies in cognitive processing on the part of the tutors. The tutors in this study were not experienced in teaching. Thus, implementing the newly learned strategies might have put a high burden on a tutor’s cognitive capacity. As a result, although the trained tutors elicited more information from their tutee by engaging in more interactive tutoring, they might not have been able to process this information appropriately. This interpretation explains why a more interactive style of tutoring failed to result in more accurate summative assessments. Consequently, the design of the training method could be modified. That is, the tutors’ processing of information that is gained from the tutee might be enhanced by practicing the strategies of formative assessment more intensively during the training phase. Additionally, the design of the study that had been conducted to analyze the effects of the training method could be changed. Specifically, the timing of summatively assessing a tutee’s understanding should be reconsidered. That is, the tutors’ processing of information might also be enhanced when the summative assessment is delayed and the tutors get the opportunity to practice the strategies of formative assessment during several sessions of in-vivo tutoring. As a consequence, trained tutors might, indeed, excel untrained tutors in accurately summatively assessing a tutee’s understanding. By analyzing a tutor’s assessments, this doctoral thesis contributes to understanding the mechanisms that underlie tutoring. The obtained results can, moreover, be conducive to making tutoring even more effective. This doctoral thesis, thus, provides an important insight into the field of effective instruction.