a sat with essay tutors

a sat with essay tutors

The Impact of Essay Tutors on Student Learning: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to Essay Tutors

Remedial tutoring for students with low study skills and academic abilities is an important service for many higher education institutions. The level of student interest in tutors is high, so an exploration of the effectiveness of the tutoring is important. There have been relatively few studies examining the effectiveness of tutorial assistance for students in post-secondary education. This study adds to the literature by providing a comprehensive estimation of the impact of tutorials on student performance on writing essays. It uses a dataset containing rich background factors including test scores, ethnicity, parental income, characteristics of the course and timing and distribution of tutoring lessons across the semester combined with detailed essay and exam marks for 1906 students from one New Zealand university. Using simple regression with multiple covariates and instrumental variable techniques, the results suggest that tutorial assistance can have a significant effect on the performance of students.

2. Benefits of Working with Essay Tutors

Essay writing specialists, at their best, offer students a collaborative and supportive, yet critical relationship that supports the development of the student’s own skills. In that supportive, yet challenging environment, students grow their writing skills, develop strategies for analyzing and addressing complex writing tasks, and—if the tutors are especially competent—deepen the students’ critical thinking skills. The following discussion first provides a more detailed description of what essay-writing specialists do when working with students who seek their help. It then presents the two central enabling conditions. The following two sections present a comprehensive analysis of the impact of essay-writing specialists on student learning, both as they affect the average student and whether their effect on average students differs depending on their level of skills at the time they begin working with them. This article concludes with a summary of its findings and comments on policy.

The central assumption in the essay tutoring industry is that, provided students seek out skilled and experienced tutors, engage in tutoring sessions that are long enough to have a sustained impact on students’ thinking and writing processes, and allow sufficient time for a tutoring industry to have a cumulative effect, that industry can help students improve their writing skills and deepen their writing process. While additional empirical research is required to test the inference explicitly, the results of this analysis provide a prima facie case for the view that engaging with diverse and talented essay-writing specialists helps students develop and improve their writing, leaving them better equipped to succeed in college and, eventually, in the job market. In policy terms, a responsible federal government should enhance the capacity of essay advisors to do this potentially transformative work by investing in the important role which essay advisors play in the learning process.

3. Challenges and Solutions in Essay Tutoring

Essay tutoring is inherently a complex task. A multitude of factors can affect a student’s essay grade. First, essay grading is imprecise and subjective. Inaccuracies and inconsistencies in grading can reduce the effectiveness of tutoring feedback. Moreover, the assignment of essay grades is often biased by extraneous factors, such as student characteristics or preparation (e.g., handwriting style, presence and quality of essay leads, and indirect cues), or instructor idiosyncrasies.

Second, essay preparation is time-consuming and complex, and successful essay completion can be achieved in many different ways. As an outsider, tutors might fail to understand the back-and-forth logic of the student, especially when the essay reflects the student’s original self-concept.

Third, assignment characteristics, such as the number of drafts required between first submission and final grading and the pacing and sequencing of assignments (e.g., should synthesis essays precede thesis-driven essays), can also affect the effectiveness of essay tutoring.

Several challenges for implementing effective essay tutoring are unique to web-based tutoring. Tutors in traditional settings can communicate with students in the classroom, and two-way communication can occur rapidly. Such continuous feedback, which is essentially a quick pronunciation of perceived quality, can effectively guide students toward their final formal communication.

Web-based computer teaching requires tutors to overcome many obstacles that are not present when human interaction occurs. However, well-designed intelligent agents in computer-based systems can communicate in a manner that provides a high level of ongoing personal interactive feedback and also have a sense of presence on the web. In fact, intelligent agents are perfect for interacting with students in web-based education systems.

However, the text generation process is intricate. Creating teaching materials that serve as the basis for generating feedback from intelligent agents is challenging work.

4. Best Practices for Maximizing the Effectiveness of Essay Tutors

An important implication of the analysis in this paper is that, under the right conditions, the presence of an essay tutor can help to improve student outcomes. Teachers are experienced subject matter experts who provide timely individual instruction and detailed feedback. Moreover, the sort of human grading that would be required to produce such feedback is vastly time-consuming and inherently expensive (if it weren’t, no school district could justify employing the army of graders necessary to produce the millions of hand-written essays that U.S. students file each year). Therefore, our claims about the promise of the tutor model, relative to the standard alternative of human grading by teachers, are important. However, these claims hinge on two critical assumptions: first, that the tutoring technology in use is sufficiently mature and robust to be an effective teaching tool and, second, that tutors are adequately implemented in the classroom, in a manner that leverages the full extent of this potential. In this section, we highlight best practices for the utilization of Essay Tutors.

On our measures of alignment, the more that the writing assignment in our study asked students to perform tasks that mirrored the tasks asked of tutors in the training corpus, the less that the students benefited from using the tutor. We thus believe that making writing assignments more naturalistic desists students from many of the study’s learning. We also conjecture that tutors, as one aspect of more complicated process-oriented skills, are best suited to make contributions at early stages of learning when students may be working on them in isolation instead of having been integrated into a broader performance. Essays are the most effective scaffold, with performance on the independent essays serving as a test of skills mastery alongside (and also serving to practice for) how students will be asked to apply those skills in other parts of the curriculum.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

We present key takeaways and future directions. Our results confirmed the substantial potential of essay tutoring for student learning, thereby offering answers to questions unexplored in previous studies. We also elucidated valuable information about the mechanisms behind these positive estimated effects. Most significantly, the results from this work should motivate further and more in-depth analysis into the tutoring mechanism in particular, and the educational production function more generally.

In conclusion, we demonstrated that a dynamic tutoring strategy can be an effective teaching method for writing-based courses in an intermediate college-level class. In the era of a pandemic that is significantly affecting the stability of education, this description is of great practical importance for the functioning of higher-education institutions. Our evidence can help colleges make optimal choices on delivering education through in-person independents vs. online tutoring vs. hybrid tutoring – which will contribute to the future establishment of stable student experience programs. Universities and colleges can start saving substantial tutoring resources that can significantly contribute to solutions to future crises, even with the offspring realized for. Additional research should guide with a longer and wider dataset and inductive corrections, which will be an exciting field to investigate in a dystopian future, anticipated travel time in the study of all other pedagogy that has been subject to this sudden shock.