Tutoring: Guided Learning by Doing. RAND Reprints.

Individualized instruction significantly improves students' pedagogical and motivational outcomes. The study described here sought to characterize tutorial behaviors that could lead to these benefits and to consider why these behaviors should be pedagogically useful. The experiment studied 16 undergraduate and graduate university students learning LISP programming with the assistance of a tutor. Tutoring sessions were audiotaped, allowing analysis of every verbal utterance during the sessions and identification of the conversational events that led to pedagogical success. This discourse analysis suggested that tutors were successful because they took a very active role in leading the problem solving by offering confirmatory feedback and additional guidance while students were on profitable paths and error feedback after mistakes. However, tutors carefully structured their feedback to allow students to perform as much of the work as possible while ensuring that problem solving stayed on track. These results suggested the types of strategies tutors employ to facilitate guided learning by doing. Instructions for coders and reliability coders and a table showing transitions between events are appended. (Contains 72 references.) (Author/ND)