If a student is not struggling, a math tutor can be beneficial. By offering advanced study materials and techniques, mathematics tutors can further improve the student's understanding of concepts and even introduce more difficult formulas and curricula, preparing them for future classes. Does the tutor help the student practice how to deal with confusion and mistakes? Students learn more when they make a mistake and recognize that they have made it. A good tutor will not intervene to avoid the error, but will allow the error to occur and then help the student identify and fix it.
This approach teaches skills that the student can use when the tutor is no longer there. If your child is struggling with math, look for ways to do math with your child in pleasant ways, such as games or apps. For example, the tutor's experience in a subject may increase student achievement, but it may also make no difference that you can easily see. These options are offered both by tutoring companies that hire many tutors and by individuals, such as university students and professors.
While tutoring is more likely to benefit the student than not, research on tutoring is contradictory because there are so many factors at play. One of the reasons research is everywhere when it comes to tutoring is because student characteristics vary. Children learn when they are asked to reflect on their own work, even when a guardian (or parent) doesn't give a lot of comments or explanations. A tutor who says “OK, this is a quadratic equation, so you need to factor”, or “This question is about similes, so look up the words “like” or “like”, has done most of the thinking for the student and doesn't help him in the long run.
Free options include after-school help from classroom teachers, in-school peer tutoring programs, professional tutoring from outside companies that the school pays to come after school or on weekends, and tutoring programs at city libraries and community centers. Candidate in mathematics education and veteran private tutor in mathematics, sciences and humanities for students from primary to university level. For tutoring to be effective, students must be actively involved in the process, not just sit quietly while the tutor speaks. Interestingly, working on mathematics with your child benefits him even more if you are anxious about mathematics.
Before parents move directly to paid tutoring services, it would be beneficial to explore free options.
