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Abstract
Tutors often have difficulty with accurately assessing a tutee's understanding. However, little is known about whether the professional expertise of tutors influences their assessment accuracy. In this study, the authors examined the accuracy with which 21 teacher tutors and 25 student tutors assessed a tutee's understanding of the human circulatory system in the course of tutoring. The authors found that the teacher tutors were more accurate than were the student tutors in assessing whether a tutee had a low or high level of knowledge about concepts relevant to the human circulatory system. In addition, in comparison with the student teachers, the teacher tutors more accurately assessed the number of concepts that a tutee would know. However, the teacher tutors and the student tutors did poorly in assessing a tutee's mental model of the human circulatory system even though the teacher tutors were more aware of their assessment difficulties than were the student tutors.
Acknowledgments
Parts of this article are based on a paper presented at the 2011 conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. This research was supported by grants from the German Science Foundation (DFG, WI 3348/2–1). The authors thank Julian Etzel, Imme Husmeier, Tatjana Scharping, Anika Schoneville, and Raoul Zimmermann for their help with many practical aspects of the project.
Notes
Note that the relatively low intraclass correlation obtained for the codings of the tutors’ mental models at the end of tutoring is not produced by a low interrater agreement per se but by restricted variance between the codings. The restricted variance is due to the fact that the coders mainly assigned the highest codes because all tutors assumed the tutees to have a correct mental model at the end of tutoring.