Tutoring and Coaching Parallel Session

There were five parallel papers I this session. Caroline Brandt presented first on integrating peer tutoring and interdependent learning to enhance academic learning support provision. Caroline is from an engineering university and most of the students are from the United Emirates. The University works closely with the national oil company. Caroline works with communication courses which are student centred and contain literature reviews as one of the assessments. There is a writing centre set up to support students and peer tutors run this experience. Caroline collected data from 11 conversations between peers and these were audio-recorded. In addition data was collected from observing 15 peer tutoring consultations and 4 semi-structured interviews. These were then analysed using linguistics looking at how many words were spoken by each participant. The findings demonstrate that whilst students do consult on a one to one basis the peer spoke more than the student seeking support. Many of the students entered straight from school and so are not use to engaging in group type activity and so Caroline is exploring how students would be better to work in pairs or threes so they develop some independence.

I presented the paper on the personal tutor evaluation undertaken here at City University London and outlined changes to the policy and the staff development support we were providing.

The next paper was about the development and implementation of an educational training programme for teaching assistants in engineering education. The speakers (I Van Hemelrjick, E Londers, M Burman, C Suttels and Y Berbers) introduced a training programme they had developed. The project started by interviewing TA’s about their experiences. They then developed objectives from this and three modules. Each module had an assessment, a face to face session, another assessment and a final face to face session. Specific materials were developed for the sessions. There were 3 major objectives but one was let TA’s experience activities they would practice with their students. This was the constructive approach and some of the types of things they did were guiding a masters’ thesis one to one sessions, coaching for PBL using the 9 coaching roles. The TA’s were very positive about this approach and liked the interaction.

The next paper was was given by Miri Shacham on a Personal academic coaching programme for enhancing student learning. This was focused on engineering students with an average age of 23 years. The drop-out rate is 35% in year one which is an international issue. It is known that personal coaching can improve resilience and student self- esteem. Academic coaching included motivation, time management, study skills etc so successful in studies. This was to promote the students learning skills and reduce attrition. The process was that students got 10 -12 coaching sessions using the Keden (2006) model which focused at the end of establishing capabilities. The findings were that using this model students did gain more self-management skills, took responsibility for their learning, has a sense of self-efficacy, provided support and positive communication to peers, exposed difficulties and had difficulties in making the change. There were both intrinsic and extrinsic factors but family had a big impact. This improved academic achievement in 25 of 37 (67.5%) students involved in the study.

The last paper in this session was about virtual or face to face tutorials: which do university students prefer? Given by Maria J Hernandez-Amoros on behalf of a team of three (M Iglesias-Martinez and I Lozano-Cabezas). The European HE area is changing and innovation is being used. There is a shift from teacher focus to students and away from being the leader and expert to the guide, supporter, creator and tutor. There was a discussion about the difficulty in defining tutor and tutorial and that there were no real limitations in terms of time and space and that some misconceptions arise through poor strategies. The actual process does not matter but the quality does. The team wanted to find out what approaches students used and so undertook a survey with 273 students. They had 8 items on the survey that used a likert scale of 1-5. Students preferred face to face tutorials for questions and used these 1-3 times a term. Virtual tutorials were however used more often. Students tended to seek tutorial support when they needed professional guidance or had academic doubts.

There was a good mix of papers with some issues being raised across the studies.