Tutoring and Learning: Keeping in Step

1. Tutoring and Learning: Keeping in Step David Wood Learning Sciences Research Institute: University of Nottingham

2. My task today • Outline tutoring theory with some illustrative evidence • Outline research on children’s regulation of their own learning environment • Fit together work on tutoring and learning to understand how and when these may move out of step • Or, it takes Two to Tutor.

3. From scaffolding to contingent tutoring • Engage or trap the learner in relevant activity • Focus attention by shielding from distraction • Highlight critical but neglected features of environment and activity • Simplify by reducing scope for next action • Remind learner of previous experiences • Model through demonstration • Maintain engagement though encouragement and feedback • Move on and forward

4. From scaffolding to contingent tutoring TUTORING AS CONTINGENT SUPPORT FOR LEARNING • INSTRUCTIONAL CONTINGENCY (HOW) • TEMPORAL CONTINGENCY (WHEN) • DOMAIN CONTINGENCY (WHAT)

5. Demonstrators, Talkers, Swingers and Angels • Instructional Contingency • Showing and demonstrating • Asking and telling • Asking then showing • Adapt tutorial tactics in response to learner reactions

6. Contingent support for Learning • Levels of helping • 1 General verbal intervention • 2 Specific verbal intervention • 3 (2) plus non-verbal indicators • 4 Prepares for next action • 5 Demonstrates action • Similar categories for verbal interactions

7. Dynamics of contingent instructional support • Offer (more specific) help immediately in response to learner difficulties • Offer less help after a learner accomplishment

8. Instructional contingency • Overall goal: negotiate manageable challenges, and fade support as quickly as possible. • If you could see and hear an angel, you would know an awful lot about the learner.

9. Assessment and Tutoring • DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT – ANNE BROWN AND HER COLLEAGUES • COLLABORATIVE SUCCESS PAINTS A MORE POSITIVE IMAGE OF THE LEARNER THAN AUTONOMOUS FAILURE • THE LEARNER EXPERIENCES COLLABORATIVE SUCCESS IN PLACE OF PERSONAL FAILURE • THE TUTOR LEARNS MORE FROM HOW MUCH HELP IS NEEDED THAN FROM ERRORS MADE • THE LEARNER LEARNS MORE FROM COLLABORATIVE SUCCESS THAN AUTONOMOUS FAILURE

10. Interaction With The Tutor Outcomes After tutoring Off-line Test scores

11. Tutoring as Assessment • The process of interaction between the learner and (instructionally contingent) tutor is predictive of individual differences in conventional tests of achievement. • A knowledge of how the learner uses a contingent tutor provides a better index of learning than conventional tests of achievement. • Contingent tutoring and dynamic assessment are two aspects of the same process.

12. Temporal contingency –when to intervene? • Is timing all that important? • One of the things that computer-based tutors can’t be programmed to do. • Why? • What does a long pause mean? • Is an action an error, slip or an investigation? • Is the learner working at a (for them and now) suitable pace. • Where temperament, mood and state fuse into the process of learning.

13. Driving a tutor • What happens when we let the learner decide IF they will ask for help? • What happens if we let the learner decide WHEN to seek help? • E.g will they take more time before they decide to seek help that they do before making a correct move or committing an ‘error’?

14. Driving a tutor • What do you expect to happen if we let the learner decide if and when to seek help? • Help abusers? • Help “refusers”? • Will help seeking reflect prior knowledge? • Will the speed of tutor-driving reflect prior knowledge? • Will the speed of tutor-driving reflect learning gains?

15. Requesting help Learning Gains Pre-test scores

16. Prior achievement and learning with help • Learners with more prior knowledge/higher levels of achievement • Solicit help less often • Receive less specific help from the tutor • Exhibit less evidence of error and impasse • Learn “more”

17. Learner-tutor interactionand learning outcomes So, an analysis of interactions showed how individual differences were acted out in learner-tutor collaboration. • Does it follow, then, that better learning is fast, error free and autonomous? • Or does this only apply to better performance? • Why is this distinction important? • What do you think children make of it?

18. Collaborative interaction and learning • Consider: we have found a clear pattern of relations between - • Prior knowledge - interaction - outcomes • Remove the effects of prior knowledge from the relations between learner-tutor interaction and outcomes…. and ….

19. Learners who learned more (after factoring out prior knowledge) - • worked more slowly with the tutor • avoided staying locked in an impasse and error on error by seeking help –particularly significant for the lower achieving learners • took time to consider the demands of the problem before seeking help - particularly significant for the higher achieving learner

20. Tutor-driving; Seeking help • learners with lower levels of knowledge/achievement were less likely to seek help when they were in trouble • This has been discovered in studies of help seeking in face to face collaborative learning. • So, does low achievement go hand in hand with weaker skills in self-regulation and less effective collaborative learning?

21. Tutor-driving: speed • Lower achieving children work more slowly with the tutor • Is this a natural phenomenon associated with a generally slow pace of working?

22. “Meta-cognitive” failure: But whose? • Such findings seem to suggest that lower achievers are generally slower and less aware of their own needs for help I.e. have a ‘meta-cognitive’ problem. • But, children who know less are being asked to solve harder problems. • Do harder problems make it more difficult to work out when you should ask for help? • If so, such findings could be due to a failure to offer domain contingent assessment and tutoring.

23. Diagnosis of source of problems • Conceptual, mathematical problems • Procedural problems in doing sumsE.g. difficulty with notation and place value • Reading problemsProblems in relating words to mathematical symbols • Language problems • Various combinations of these factors

24. Domain contingency and self-regulation • The tutor presents learners with problems matched to their current level of performance - i.e it is domain contingent • Nearly all of the relations between prior knowledge/achievement and regulation of self and tutor disappear in this context • Problems in self- and tutor-regulation can be detected in learners with very different levels of prior knowledge/achievement

25. Messages about Learning Implicit messages about what it is to learn and know: Performance oriented testing and tutoring - • Fosters/rewards/favours an ‘aggressive’ approach to learning, in which • Every problem has one known, correct solution • Good performance is fast and error free • Being clever means never having to say you need help and support

26. So…? • How do you know when to move the learner on and to encourage them to speed up? Or to slow down? • How do we encourage a drive for competence rather than create pressure for performance?

27. If we have time • How? – When? – What? • WHAT ABOUT WHY? • WHAT ABOUT IF?