The role of tutoring and university entrance

Tutoring is extremely effective in helping students to achieve to their academic ability. The highest form of tuition is that which helps students to become independent learners. Thus, at its best, the aim of tutoring is to make the tutor redundant. When it comes to the HSC then students need to learn a wide range of skills and content. From the middle range performers through to the highest achieving students, those undertaking post compulsory studies may acquire the skills necessary to become effective at university studies. Tutoring practices will best help students to cope with the rigours of university studies when the sessions are characterised by the following: 

• An emphasis on deep thinking skills and different types of cognition
• The focus on the capacity to generalise from rules
• A development of research skills
• An encouragement and focus on assisting students to appropriately build an argument or make a case
• An emphasis on the ability to paraphrase with referencing
• An emphasis on the capacity for self-check and refective thinking
• A strong focus on deep knowledge and subject-specific understanding

All students, regardless of schooling, can be taught the types of thinking that makes for the successful undertaking of academic studies. Tuition can therefore foster a self belief in students which engages their highest academic abilities. This is not to say that all tuition will do this. Indeed there are tutoring practices that will actively undermine a student and make them far less likely to achieve at university. Thus tuition that is rote learning based, repetitious and which focuses merely on memory (and not on thinking) will not help a student to approach problem-solving with the necessary skills to be successful at university. Tutors should never compromise on the vision of creating lifelong learners.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/bright-students-betrayed-by-hsc-20090911-fkq1.html