Towards research-based organizational structures in mathematics tutoring centres

Abstract

Undergraduate mathematics tutoring centres are prevalent in many countries; however, there is limited research-based evidence on effective organizational structures for these centres. In this study, we consider two research questions. First, how can the quantitative and qualitative data from 10 mathematics tutoring centres be organized for research purposes? Second, what hypotheses do expert mathematics tutoring centre leaders generate about characteristics of effective centres given data from a sample of ten centres? We collected quantitative data from over 26,000 students taking mathematics courses at ten institutions. Data collected included college entrance exam scores, high school grade point average, number of student visits to the centre per eligible student and course letter grade. We used exploratory data analysis to look for relationships between visits to the tutoring centre, student grades and other variables. Qualitative centre characteristics that were considered include: specialist–generalist tutoring system, tutoring capacity, physical layout, relationships between tutors and mathematics instructors and extent of tutor training. We used the Delphi process to generate testable hypotheses from the data, such as the following: (1) The more courses a tutor is responsible for tutoring the more likely it is that the tutor will struggle to answer student questions, when the difficulty level of the courses is roughly the same. (2) Centres with more specialized tutor models have more visits per student than centres with generalized tutor models. The preceding two hypotheses, along with the other generated hypotheses, have been identified by the experts participating in this study as plausible based on professional experience, exploratory data analysis and inferences based on prior research on tutoring. This study has not rigorously shown the validity of these hypotheses; rather it lays the groundwork for future investigations to determine what combination of features characterize an effective tutoring centre.