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JoshuaZ comments on [Link] Why the kids don’t know no algebra - Less Wrong Discussion
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Varied, most were in the range of a semester to 2 years.
Yeah, this is obviously a problem. I suspect that in many cases I wasn't better than the previous teachers in any substantial fashion, but a 1-1 setting will work better than almost any other setting, so even if the teacher is better at teaching, having a tutor will still likely work well.
This is definitely a problem. A lot of the students I tutored were students who were failing classes because they hadn't mastered basic material from 2 or 3 years ago.
On the other hand, as long as were using anecdotal evidence (which frankly using to this extent makes me uncomfortable) I had one student who was very smart, possibly smarter than I am, and I started tutoring him when he was a junior in highschool and couldn't do almost any math beyond about 7th grade (had trouble solving any equations more complicated than something like x+8=10). In his case it was very clearly an incredibly poor learning environment (although based on other data, it does seem like the the students were so disruptive that the teachers were spending most of their time just trying to control the students). I tutored him for about 1.5 years and he is he's now a computer science major at a respected university, and doing quite well. He got an A in linear algebra two semesters ago and is now taking algorithms and some other similar classes. I obviously had some impact but the fact that his general intelligence was very high obviously helped in terms of success and long-term retention.
I can see a lot of mechanisms that would allow tutoring to move faster or go further, but the original post claims that the students do quickly learn the material in the ordinary class, only to quickly forget it. I don't see any mechanisms for tutoring to lead to better recall. Do you?
There might be. A 1-1 setting makes it easier to see if a student has a superficial understanding that is more likely to be forgotten. But the essential point you raise is definitely a valid one. I'm not aware of any studies that look at retention rates for tutoring.