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The Impact of Personalized Tutoring on Academic Performance

1. Introduction to Personalized Tutoring

The term “tutoring” is used interchangeably with many other terms, such as “mentoring,” “one-to-one,” or “individualized,” thus for the reader’s convenience we use these terms interchangeably. Even in online learning environments, which are necessarily less intimate, personalized tutor support has been found to have powerful impacts on motivation, engagement, and academic functioning. For instance, cognitive tutor algebra, an intelligent tutoring system in which students receive immediate and personalized support and feedback, has been shown to improve the short- and long-term academic performance and course credits of high- and low-performing urban high school students beyond other advanced curricula.

Introduction. Over the past decade, personalized tutoring has gained steam in the United States and in its raw form of online learning environments, has been developed and deployed internationally. This is partially in reaction to research that has shown the benefits of tutor rapport and personalized, individualized mentoring on academic performance and emotional functioning. At its core, personalized tutoring pairs a child with a caring adult, who serves not only as a positive, stable role model, but also as a source of personalized academic support.

2. Theoretical Frameworks and Research Studies on Personalized Tutoring

A number of empirical studies in highly controlled research environments have demonstrated a positive effect of personalized tutoring on academic performance. However, it is difficult to separate out the effects of personalized learning from other features of the intervention, such as the quality of the learning resources. In addition, the large-scale implementation of personalized tutoring at an individual level remains challenging due to the expense and the requirement of trained personnel. It might be the specific personal relationship between the tutor and student beyond these theories that underpins a positive effect on academic performance. If that is the case, some studies have begun exploring the conditions under which these interventions could be widespread, such as peer tutoring.

There are various pedagogical tools and theories that could potentially be adopted to support personalized tutoring, which occupy different points within the often-considered continuum between standardized education and education wholly tailored to individuals. In the present article, these are categorized into three main groupings – formative evaluation, scripted programs, and teaching to the top. Formative evaluation offers an opportunity for personalized feedback, but this is rarely undertaken in most classroom settings. Scripted programs (often computer-based) can support personalized trajectory of learning. These tools share the idea that by responding to current knowledge and tailor educational provision, students will be more able to understand new material.

3. Benefits and Challenges of Personalized Tutoring

Although personal tutoring is known to be beneficial for academic outcomes, it usually occurs via informal mechanisms, such as teachers staying after classroom hours to support students or, for more advantaged students, via private lessons from tutors. Hence, it is possible that those students who are selected for tutoring have different types of preferences or motivations to learn which are not sufficiently captured by test scores or access to parental resources. These students may also have weaker child and youth development programs. On the other hand, students who receive tutoring may face some disadvantages – for example, they may feel embarrassed or stigmatized by the need for extra help, experience performance and social anxiety, or have less time for socializing or leisure activities.

This work summarizes the main components of the personalized tutoring model, including the underlying challenges and trade-offs, which are largely absent from the personalized education literature. The field of personalized education is motivated by evidence that one-on-one attention, like that from a tutor, can have very large impacts on academic performance. This study aims to provide a thorough understanding of the benefits of personalized tutoring, noting the possible negative correlates accompanying this type of support (e.g., greater anxiety or stigma).

4. Best Practices and Strategies for Implementing Personalized Tutoring

Since implementation strategies were not discovered in the six studies, if success from personalized plans will be considered, it is irrelevant without these key points. Identifying these principles is imperative, as educational institutions and degree programs, specifically higher education, have acknowledged the importance of personalized tutoring. These findings are strong in presenting approaches that one of the variety of short-term intervention strategies may have wider outcomes for implementation, especially since they result in large changes in academic performance.

– Short-term goals: A few mentioned having short-term session content goals (e.g. a couple topics, clarity in this week’s lesson, questions to be posted) and even long-term goal setting (homework goals). – Synergy tutoring: Areas of missed points were reinforced into the session content, the last topic, personal areas of need, missed test problems to review, homework goals to work towards, and topics reiterated in practice. – Individual variation: The main component of personalization differentiated for each student. For tutoring topics, some have been long-standing, whereas others span the series of the current course. For others, correcting habits are reviewed, or strange variations on what to check (keep an eye out for).

From the findings in this study, it is clear that implementing personalized tutoring has had a major impact on increasing students’ academic performance. However, the actual design and delivery of such a personalized tutoring program is significantly less known. The main theme that emerged, scoring the highest in rank, was having individualized teaching/tutoring points, strategies, and even expectations. For individualized teachings, this included variation in teaching topics, time, frequency, fun, pacing, and enthusiasm. Since it is not clear how these one-on-one tutoring sessions were specifically successful, it is quite important to consider implementing the tutor/tutee practices and strategies identified from this analysis. Such strategies include:

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

As with the experiment in Andhra Pradesh, teachers are paid their prevailing wage to review the outgoing as well as the incoming questions. One potential concern with translating the pedagogical method is that an ill-listening student might simply ignore or delete phone messages. Possible directions to mitigate this are (a) to channel the messages through a more public medium, such as making it an interactive radio program, or (b) to incentivize student behavior by allowing them to bet on their own learning outcomes.

Recent advances in personalized instruction are a potential solution to this problem. A natural next step is to extend past papers by incorporating a wider range of pedagogical methods. Tutors can address additional channels that are shown to be important in learning outcomes. Individualized, context-relevant feedback seems to be a particularly promising method of addressing social and emotional skills, including self-control and motivation. In future work, we plan to further explore this possibility by conducting a field experiment targeting math and language in a rural Indian context. The tutorial will be delivered by phone messages.

Personalized tutoring has the potential to greatly increase student outcomes, but is often viewed as prohibitively expensive. The impact of tutoring will depend on many factors. However, one common element across the literature is that personalized tutoring, if targeted correctly, can narrow the achievement gap, especially for low-income or minority students. The effect of any policy will depend on the nature and implementation of the policy in practice.