ABSTRACT
One of the hallmarks of one-to-one tutoring across all disciplines is the opportunity to move away from the directiveness of instruction strategies to more collaborative strategies that typically are difficult to practice in one-to-many classroom teaching. Cognitive scaffolding strategies can push and probe students’ thinking by getting them to reflect on their own reasoning and by guiding them to answer questions or perform tasks they could not otherwise perform. These strategies lend student writers the support they need to advance in their composing abilities. The experienced tutors in our study took advantage of the one-to-one pedagogical situation-the individualized attention and feedback it affords-to use cognitive scaffolds that got student writers to think and make decisions about their writing, to analyze their aims for their papers, and to generate content for their own purposes.
