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Examples of Assessment by Institution |
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Williams College, for 20 years, had offered a small number of courses in a tutorial format, in which a faculty member meets weekly with pairs of students, one of which presents a paper or problem set, the other critiques it, and the professor then moderates a discussion between the two.
The College analyzed data from its course evaluation questionnaire, which showed that students' evaluations of the "quality of instruction" and "educational value" in tutorials were significantly higher (p<.05) than those of non-tutorials. Students also indicated that tutorials on average required more work than other courses.
Even after controlling for enrollment size and professor experience, tutorials still outperformed other types of classes -- the format itself appeared integral to students' more favorable evaluations of their educational experience.
Further analysis distilled the effects of the tutorial format even further by identifying matched pairs of courses taught by the same faculty member with roughly the same enrollment, in which one was a tutorial and the other a seminar or lecture. The instructor's tutorial course outscored his or her non-tutorial course in 91% of the matched cases on the key questions of "quality of instruction" and "overall educational value."
Based on this analysis, the College decided to invest significantly more resources in providing tutorial courses and to make more of them open to first-years and sophomores so that they could apply the skills learned in tutorials to the remainder of their undergraduate experience. As a result, the number of tutorial offerings nearly tripled since 2001. By 2008, 57% of graduates had taken at least one tutorial - an increase of 22 percentage points.
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Williams College |
