Evaluate

An evaluation judges information, processes, relationships or people.

The power of evaluations

Skillful tutors use evaluations sparingly and carefully. They can be very tricky and are broken down into positive and negative evaluations.

Positive evaluations

Positive evaluations are most effective when they are tied to specific aspects of a student’s work and are used sparingly for real accomplishments.

By tying positive evaluations into specific that the tutee did, you are promoting two things:

1) It clearly identifies your evaluation as being related to the student’s work, as opposed to being related to the students WORTH.

2) Tying the evaluation to some specific aspect of the student’s work helps him learn how to recognize specifically what he is doing right.

Thus the tutee becomes more independent, which is one of your fundamental goals in tutoring.

Negative evaluations

It is easy to evaluate when a tutee does something correctly. What do you do when a tutee is incorrect? Aren’t you obligated to tell the tutee when they are wrong?

Let’s look at this example:

The Megan (the tutor) and Bob (the tutee) are working on a physics problem which asks for the acceleration of a vehicle.

Bob: Ok, if the speed is constant, then the acceleration must be 20.
Megan : No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!

Eight times Megan said “no.” How do you think Bob felt? We can see here that this is going to be counterproductive. I am sure you are asking yourself “So, what SHOULD I do?”

Here are some techniques to try.

Smaller Steps

By breaking the current task into smaller steps and asking a question about the first step is what more skillful tutors do. In our case, Megan could have asked Bob to first state how you get acceleration. This breaks up the larger problem and would lead Bob to the answer.

Focus on progress

Another technique is to identify what is right. Let’s see how Megan might use this technique.

Megan: “Bob, why don’t you tell me how you came up with that answer.”

This gives Bob an opportunity to explain and perhaps initiate discussion about what he doesn’t understand.

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