If you are a student of mine (or a potential one), you want to improve your results. Tutoring works, but there are 3 keys to improving your results:
- Understanding
- Practice
- Feedback
You and I both have a role to play in each of these.
Understanding
My first goal is to help you understand something, whether it be how to use Herson’s rule in trigonometry or the role of the scientific method in psychology. I explain and demonstrate things well in a private, one-on-one setting.
Research shows that good explanations and demonstrations will help you learn.
Your first goal must also be to understand something. When I explain something to you, pay attention and think. If you don’t understand something, ask. This includes when you don’t understand something:
- I have tried to explain to you
- Something in class
Research shows that accurately taking in new information requires attention and thinking hard about what you hear.
Practice
Understanding something I show you is important, but understanding does not equal learning. Learning involves remembering, or as the renowned Australian psychologist John Sweller put it, a change in your long-term memory.
One of the best ways to learn is to practice—whether it’s learning your 7x tables or how to drive a car.
I will get you to practise things:
- During our tutoring sessions
- In-between sessions (brief HW)
Your role is to do the practice because practice makes perfect (well, not quite, as I explain next).
Retrieval practice has a large impact on learning, and this impact is made even larger when the practice is spaced out.
Feedback
Practice is paramount, but on its own, it leads to repetition, not perfection.
What’s the difference? If you practise doing something incorrectly, you will learn to repeat those incorrect things.
This is one of the key reasons why practice needs to be followed by feedback. When you get feedback on your efforts and take this on board, you learn from your mistakes.
I will give you feedback on your practice tasks. Feedback that tells you:
- What you did well
- How you can improve
Your role is to accept this feedback as a learning opportunity.
Improving Your Results in a Nutshell
