Quasi-experimental Study Of The Influence Of One-on-one Tutoring Moves On Student’s Learning Process And Outcomes

Since the implement of basic education curriculum reform in 2001, national reform waves of curriculum, teaching mode, learning mode have been set off and lots of new teaching & learning environments come up, for example: research-based curriculum, flipped classroom, discovery study, cooperative study, problem-solving learning etc., the reform bring us gains and pains at the same time, gave us the opportunity to see that there are still lots of shortcoming in the current education area: insufficient of knowledge and capacity of students make them still need the guidance of teachers in studying, teachers also found the outcome of one-on-one guidance is not stable. Teachers, especially excellent teachers are very rare in western of China, they are not capable of personalize teaching or tutoring and can’t accomplish personalized teaching or turning goals. Based on all these, the state put forward two ways to improve the current situation: on one hand, emphasize the development of teachers’ pedagogy abilities, including how to guide students’ learning. on the other hand, develop intelligent tutoring system(ITS)to supplementary teaching. the two both point to one question: what is effective instruction.After going through the literatures about the hypothesis of one-on-one tutoring effectiveness, effective tutoring mode and effective tutor instructions, there are two discrepant points of views about one-on-one tutoring from two different research teams. The first team is represented by Chi, they found that scaffolding from tutors could promote more constructive learning which increased student learning performance. But there is a big disadvantage of her study: the research is not experimental deign, in this case, there are lots of irrelevant variables. What’s more, the research didn’t take students’ adaptiveness into consideration. The second team is represented by Nuckle. Unlike Chi’s team, Nuckle’s research took adaptiveness into consideration, and the results show that the adaptive explanations from tutors can increase all students’ learning performance. But they only focused on one tutoring moves: explanation, didn’t check other moves’ effectiveness in tutoring, and didn’t compare the differences of different moves. We put forward our research question based on the past studies: which kind of tutoring move can maximize the promotion of the specific student’s study? There are four hypotheses. Hypothesis One: comparing to adaptive explanation, tutors’ adaptive scaffolding would promote student’s constructive learning activities significantly more. Hypothesis Two: tutors’ adaptive scaffolding can significantly promote good student’s constructive learning actives, and tutors’ adaptive explanation can significantly promote poor student’s constructive learning actives. Hypothesis Three: comparing to adaptive explanation, tutors adaptive scaffolding would significantly improve student’s learning performance. Hypothesis Four: Adaptive scaffolding would significantly improve good student’s learning performance, and adaptive explanation would significantly improve poor student’s learning performance.In this study, we use 2(learner type: good student, poor student) * 2(tutoring moves: explanation, scaffolding) 2-factor quasi-experimental design. Learner type is the between subjects factor(good student and poor student), and tutoring move is the within subjects factor(explanation and scaffolding). The dependent variable is student’s learning activities and learning outcomes. It turns out that:(1) Inscaffolding tutoring group, Tutor gave more adaptive scaffoldings to promote more constructive learning activities, which improved the students’ learning more than the explanation tutoring group.(2) Tutor gave good students in scaffolding tutoring group more shallow scaffolding and less detailed explanation, this made good students made a little but not significant progress than poor students in the same group.(3) Tutor gave good students in explanation tutoring group less explanation, this made them had a little but not significant progress than the poor students in the same group.(4)Different tutoring moves of tutor and learning activities of students made different students gain differently in different tutoring mode.In the research there are some conclusions. First, in one-on-one tutoring, tutor’s scaffolding, especially adaptive scaffolding can promote students’ learning. Second, students still need tutor’s support and help, which in return verified the Student-center Hypothesis and Tutor-Student Interactive Hypothesis of One-on-one tutoring. Third, students’ constructive learning activities is the best to increase students’ learning, then is active learning activities, which verified PACI Hypothesis.