So, What's the Best Method of Teaching?

This is not a trick question! We do know the answer! It has implications not only for what we do in the classroom, but particularly has implications for how we serve students at ISU under the various offices of student support housed in the CeTL.

Benjamin S. Bloom, the researcher most famous for his creation of “Blooms Taxonomy” (a topic in an upcoming Nutshell Note), wrote another paper which is less well known: “The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring” (Educational Researcher, June/July 1984, pp. 4-16). As you may have deduced from the title, the best known method of teaching is tutoring. In fact, Bloom looked at many variables related to student achievement, and his findings have held up in subsequent research. Nothing trumps tutoring; the outcomes of tutoring are astounding.

If one looks at a “conventional classroom” that uses the traditional lecture approach (Bloom chose classes of about 30 students for his study), the outcomes of both learning and cognitive development of higher mental processes produced by such classes can be expressed as scaled in at the 50th percentile equivalent. By contrast, the outcomes of tutoring scale at close to 100% or about two standard deviations (2s) beyond the level of achievement in conventional classrooms! This achievement has further striking implications: students who learn through tutoring don't flunk out, stress out, or drop out. This means that many students who have been consigned to the categories of “low achiever,” “not bright enough,” or even “unteachable” are students who can, in fact, succeed.

Education is a partnership between teacher and student, and learning takes hard work. To succeed, there must be good-faith effort made by students; students have to show up for the tutoring and make honest efforts to learn. But if enough will is present in a student to assume adult responsibility for her/his learning, the odds are very good that a student who makes use of tutoring is going to succeed at a very high level. Tutoring is so effective because it is a form of active learning in which teacher and student are engaged in a dialogue. There is full access to nonverbal cues, opportunity for discussion, questioning, and constant ability to provide feedback, support, and correction.

Bloom's research also had interesting findings in the value of tutoring as an early intervention. Bloom found that only about 3 to 4 hours of tutoring used at the start of a course to enhance or refresh students' understanding of initial entry prerequisites allowed tutored students who took the examination on the first two weeks' course material to outperform, at about 0.7s level, the students who experienced more general informal review.

Tutoring works, and for this reason ISU faculty should refer their students to the tutoring services available in mathematics, writing, English as a second language and in the various disciplines in content area tutoring available at ISU's CTL. A directory to help facilitate access is provided on the back of this newsletter.

Of course, a pragmatic problem with tutoring is that one cannot operate public universities with a student-to-faculty ratio of one-to-one. But there are ways in which we can obtain greater gains in the group instructional environment of a classroom. One way is to adopt some cooperative learning strategies that allow students to tutor one another for short periods. These can boost achievement 0.5s to 0.8s beyond what a class would gain without such enhancements.

Can we ever hope to obtain, in the classroom, achievement that approaches the 2s gains of tutoring? Research, in fact, shows that this can be done, but not simply through alternative teaching techniques alone. A systematic strategy called instructional alignment can produce such gains. This involves developing comprehensive sophistication in formulating instructional goals, matching instructional methods to both content and student audience, addressing levels of thinking with sophistication and providing both corrective action and opportunity for student self-assessment. Instructional alignment will be covered in a forthcoming issue of Nutshell Notes.

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Find a CTL Tutor through the Following Contacts

(For general access/information at the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) call Cindy Haddon at 3197 haddcynt@isu.edu. Some tutors may also be found at a few other areas of the ISU campus such as through the TRIO Student Services)

Bookmark your access to ISU's institutional online subscription to National Teaching and Learning Forum and its archives at <http://www.ntlf.com/restricted/>.