ABSTRACT
One-to-one tutoring is the teaching equivalent of a home run. It delivers far superior results than conventional teaching, however it’s a costly enterprise and so it’s rare that the average student gets to be tutored individually. This chapter focuses on a study done by doctoral students in which they compared student learning under three conditions: conventional, mastery learning, and tutoring. The average student in the mastery learning group was about one standard deviation above the average of the control class. Mastery learning is an instructional approach where students are tested on material learned and if they get less than 90% in a test then they are given additional instruction on that material until they get over 90% or until they have “mastered” the content. Benjamin Bloom suggests a method called cue-participation-reinforcement; an approach which seeks to provide better guidance to teachers on more effective cues and to generate greater student engagement.
