The project presents a web-based component for a tutor training program at College of the Desert, Palm Desert, California. The application is designed to be responsive and adaptable to the tutor's needs. It also addresses the logistic and pedagogical problems that plague many community college tutor trainers and helps to mitigate this through an online instructional system that facilitates communication among the tutors so that learning can occur in a situated context.

published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 113-114). Also available in print.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

The purpose of this qualitative dissertation was to seek characteristics common to writing tutorials because current discussions and assessments of tutorials rely strongly on specific pedagogical approaches that may or may not be present in all tutorials. This dissertation seeks characteristics common to all tutorials. A second purpose of this dissertation was to explore differences in those characteristics based on levels of flow, a measure of how much a person is likely to repeat an experience, felt by both students and tutors. The dissertation begins with a review of literature to establish where current understandings of tutorials developed. It then progresses to an examination of six total cases. The cases are made up of individual tutorials; the data points included observation notes from the tutorials, survey results from student and tutor participants, interview data from students and tutors, and video and transcript data from the tutorials themselves. Grounded theory was used to analyze the data, meaning data was reviewed many times and coded through open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Data analysis revealed eight characteristics in verbal and nonverbal categories. The verbal categories are questions, praise, mentions of time, negotiating an agenda, and postponing. The nonverbal categories are writing on the text, gaze, and smiling/laughing. These characteristics, with the exception of postponing, are common to all of the tutorials examined. The fine details of how each characteristics is displayed in each tutorial differ depending on the flow score of the session. The dissertation is able to present general characteristics of all writing tutorials that differ in fine detail based on high and low flow scores. / Department of English

The general purpose of this study was to investigate the concept that the learning disabled group (LDG) students who are given extra attention will show improvement in their regular classes. Three methods selected: Group counseling, individual counseling, and individual tutoring.

This auto-ethnographic study (i.e. an autobiographical genre of writing and research, written in the first-person voice, where the workings of self are expressed both cognitively and emotionally) qualitatively explores the changing assumptions of a training therapist. It shows how various therapies were negotiated during the training period, and explores how meaning was constructed according to basic, underlying epistemological assumptions. Significant experiences and therapies are presented, showing how the therapist's most basic, linear assumptions, were directly challenged by eco-systemic training. The study produces an in-depth, thick description of both the emotional and the cognitive journey of a training therapist, and traces the therapist's movement away from the stability and certainty of a linear epistemological 'way of knowing' to the instability and uncertainty characteristic of an eco-systemic 'way of knowing'. Conclusions are idiosyncratic and are not intended for generalization. / Psychology / M.A. (Clinical Psychology)

Tutors are key supporters within semi-distance education and as such comprehensive support of tutoring is necessary to provide the best possible support to learners. This case study investigates how tutoring can be better supported within a semi-distance part-time professional development course in environmental education. The course, aimed at adults working in environmental education fields, is seen as an important strategy for helping participants become critical, reflexive and active environmental education practitioners who can start working on solutions to environmental issues. This study found that most challenges to successful tutoring lay in the availability and competence of human resources within Namibia. Additionally improvement in the management of tutor and learner support systems, information, guidance and enrolment and finally of learning resources is seen as essential to better support a successful tutoring process. An alternative model of tutoring is offered as a way of overcoming the major tutoring challenges outlined in this study. / Educational Studies / M.Ed.

Responding to Student Writing: Strategies for a Distance-Teaching Context identifies viable response techniques for a unique discourse community. An overview of paradigmatic shifts in writing and reading theory, 'frameworks of response' developed to classify response statements for research purposes, and an overview of research in the field provide the theoretical basis for the evaluation of the empirical study. The research comprises a three-fold exploration of the response strategies adopted by Unisa lecturers to the writing of Practical English (PENl00-3) students. In the first phase the focus falls on the effect of intervention on the students' revised drafts of four divergent marking strategies - coded correction, minimal marking, taped response and self assessment. All the experimental strategies tested result in statistically-significant improvement levels in the revised draft. The benefits of self assessment and rewriting, even without tutorial intervention, were demonstrated. The study is unique by virtue of its distance-teaching context, its sample size of 1750 and in the high significance levels achieved. The second phase of the research consisted of a questionnaire that determined 2640 students' expectations with respect to marking, the value of commentary, their perceptions of markers' roles and their opinions of the experimental strategies tested. Their responses were also correlated with their final Practical English examination results. The third phase examined tutorial response. The framework of response, developed for the purpose, revealed that present response strategies represent a regression to the traditional product-orientated approach to writing that contradicts the cognitive and rhetorical axiological basis of the course. There is thus a disjunction between the teaching and theoretical practices. The final chapter bridges this gap by examining issues of audience, transparency, ownership, timing of intervention and training. The researcher believes that she has successfully identified practical and innovative strategies that assist lecturers in a distance-teaching context to break away from old response blueprints. / English Studies / D.Litt. et Phil. (English)