How students learn

In order to design a successful tutorial you must have some idea about how students learn and what promotes this.  Even if it is not consciously articulated, behind all teaching is an implicit theory of learning.  Making explicit the theory that informs tutorial practice will not only help you to feel confident in designing and facilitating tutorial but it will allow you to identify how to address weaknesses (See King (1993) for further discussion of this point). 

There is a long history of research about how students learn.  The main idea is that, while students might learn something from listening to a tutor tell them something, they will learn far more, and more deeply, by doing something themselves: for example by trying to put concepts in their own words, by discussing and debating the merits of ideas with other students, or by explaining their thinking as they try to solve a mathematical problem.  The basic idea is that students construct new knowledge by interacting with and by transforming received information in order to own it and make it personally meaningful. This is sometimes called ‘active learning’, ‘constructive learning’ ‘deep learning’ and even ‘experiential learning’. The term we use is self-regulated learning.

The overall idea is that tutorials must develop students’ capacity to monitor, evaluate and regulate their own learning independently of the tutor. This means that everything a tutor does in a tutorial should, as far as possible, over time, be placed in the hands of the student.  Instead of the tutor asking questions, the tutor should organise the tutorial to elicit student questions. Instead of the tutor answering questions he or she should first see if other students, either alone or in groups, can construct answers. Instead of tutors presenting models from the literature he or she might ask students in groups to present the model or even to construct their own model before comparing it with the one in the literature.