Tutoring in K--12: Parent Satisfaction and Interpersonal Process

Date of Completion

January 2011

Keywords

Psychology, Social|Education, Educational Psychology|Psychology, Counseling

Degree

Ph.D.

Abstract

Tutoring has long been thought of as an ideal educational strategy because of the individual attention and relational context that it allows. However, due to the cost of personalizing education, the availability of tutoring has been limited. Recently under the No Child Left Behind Act, failing schools have been required to offer contracted tutoring in the form of supplemental educational services (SES). This archival study made use of parent satisfaction survey data that had already been collected by a private nonprofit educational agency providing such services. This data was unique because it had corresponding scores for both tutor and tutee allowing for dyadic analysis. Findings from the parent survey indicate that parents were highly satisfied with the tutoring services and indicate that higher satisfaction with convenience variables, preference of home based services, or having a child with a disability predicted higher rates of reenrollment. Dyadic analysis and variance partitioning using the SRM one with many design found that tutors are distinguishable from each other in terms of perceived student improvement. Tutors and parents have moderate agreement on how students are improving relative to other students. Finally, the unique relationship between tutor and tutee contain quite a bit of the variance in perception of improvement, supporting the idea that interpersonal process is an important variable in tutoring. ^

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