Tutorials: Getting the most from them

By the end of this study skills guide, I hope you will be better-able to:

(1)       Balance for yourself the relative importance of tutorials alongside the other components in your course.

(2)       Prepare for tutorials so as to derive the maximum benefit from them.

(3)       Use the time in tutorials to make best use of the less-formal contact with lecturers.

(4)       Organise your record-keeping about work covered in tutorials.

Perhaps the question should be “what should a tutorial be?” Tutorials should certainly be rather different to lectures.

A tutorial group is normally much smaller than a lecture class. Tutorials may involve half a dozen or so students, or may even be one-to-one face-to-face sessions with a lecturer. Sometimes, tutorials will be conducted by the lecturer who takes you for the relevant part of your course. Alternatively, another member of the teaching staff may take your tutorials, where the class is too big for the lecturer to “go round”. Sadly, it’s “expensive” to have high staff:student ratios, so tutorials are sometimes conducted with a dozen or more students there - when the danger is that they become too much like lectures.

In another study skills guide in this series, I say a lot about things you can do in lectures. If you haven’t studied the study skills guide on lectures, I suggest you read it soon - I’m assuming you’ll be applying all the principles I discuss about lectures to your tutorials as well.

Let's look at some purposes served by tutorials,which lectures can't achieve - the differences between tutorials and lectures. Try: and think of three purposes which tutorials can serve: (a) for lecturers, and b) for you.

a)

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b) 

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When reading my response, did you notice how tutorials can serve more purposes for you than for lecturers? Looking at these purposes, you can see that a tutorial is intended to be a much more active and flexible component of your course than lectures. However, how active and flexible is very much up to you.

Lecturer:        “Hello. How’s it all going?”

Group:        “O.K.” (or silence)

Lecturer:        “Good. Well, you know where to find me”

“See you next week then. Cheers” (the end!)

Students often seem to regard tutorials as not as important as lectures, and other formal parts of a university course. Sometimes this feeling can be traced back to the attitudes of some lecturers. I’ve often seen notices on classroom doors saying “Sorry, tutorial cancelled due to illness”. Much less often does a similar notice appear on lecture theatre doors - some alternative will usually be arranged.

There is a tendency for lecturers and students to regard tutorials as a bit of an optional extra. Both kinds of participant sometimes are guilty of preparing little before a tutorial, but rather going there hoping “it will be all right on the day”.

Despite this seeming disregard for tutorials, if lecturers are asked: “which is more directly relevant to answering exam questions: things you do in lectures, or things covered in tutorials?” Their reply is usually the latter. Very often, lecturers use tutorials to go step-by-step through the sort of answer that you should become able to give in an exam.

In fact, from your point of view, tutorials are as important as you make them. There’s a lot you can do to ensure that you get a great deal out of them. It does, however, mean that you need to do a little preparation before each tutorial, and also a little processing of the proceedings afterwards.

Let’s add one more dimension to the importance of tutorials -what can you do if you’ve missed one? It’s not too bad if you miss a lecture, you can always get someone else’s notes, and copy it up. Or you can look at several people’s notes, and catch up rather better. But when you miss a tutorial, it may be impossible to really catch up on what went on. People may not have taken notes in the same way as they would during a lecture. We’re going to explore shortly things that you could usefully be doing during a tutorial, including note-taking, but there’s no guarantee other people have been doing the things we’ll be exploring in any tutorials you miss.

If you glance back at the list of purposes of tutorials, and the things that can happen during tutorials, these give you an idea of the sort of preparation you can make. Here are a few things you can do.

•       Write down any questions you would like to get dealt with by your lecturer.

•       Make a note of any things that are not clear to you, or where you would like a bit of further explanation. (If your tutorial is being run by someone other than your lecturer, it is often very useful to have a second person’s explanation even of things you understand quite well).

•       Do any preparation, practice, reading and so on, which may have been suggested by your lecturer.

•       If you haven’t been asked to do any definite preparation, try to find out exactly what the tutorial will be about, and do a bit of background reading and preparation.

•       If you know in advance that quite a bit of student participation will be happening, prepare for this. If you’re branded as a “passive” member of the group, it may be hard to shake off the label - and it could influence marks you’re awarded.

Obviously, this will depend a lot on what the tutor has in mind. However, you can almost always manage to ask questions, explain what puzzles you, and ask what the most important thing about so-and-so is. Above all you can gently persist in finding out more and more about that basic question: “What am I expected to become able to do?”

Should you make notes?

Again, this will depend what sort of tutorial it is. However, it’s all too easy to sit back and not take notes, especially when discussions are taking place, and other students’ questions are being dealt with. It is very useful to write down in question form as much as you need to, to remember exactly what was covered in each tutorial. Such questions can be useful learning tools for later revision. Other students’ questions can be a useful reminder of the things that you may be expected to know.

Don’t forget that things that are dealt with in tutorials are just as likely to come up in exam questions as material from your lectures. Indeed, where tutorials cover detailed worked examples, case-studies, problem-solving and so on, the tutorials may give you the best possible guidance to the level and standard of forthcoming exam questions.

Of course, preparing for exam questions is only one aspect of the time you spend in tutorials. discussions of all sorts of things can happen. discussions can range far beyond your syllabus. It’s a valuable part of your college experience to have this chance to really probe what makes your lecturers’ tick.

To sum up, the real benefits associated with tutorials are to do with all those things that can’t happen very easily in the lecture situation. You have the chance of real two-way communication in tutorials. Usually things are relatively informal, so you can relax, and get to know how the lecturer’s mind works. You may get to know this so well that you can anticipate and prepare for likely exam questions.

The danger is that you do nothing. However useful a tutorial was at the time, you need something to remind you of what you learned, what sorts of things were discussed in depth, and so on. It may only take you five or ten minutes to write short notes about what was covered in a tutorial. Again, it’s particularly useful to think back to “what were the questions which the tutorial dealt with?” Armed with the questions, you can rehearse the answers. If you didn’t make notes of the questions, you’d soon forget them, and be unable to remember what you might be expected to be able to do.

Often, tutorials are used for going through worked-examples of problems, or case studies. You will then have notes of the problem, and its answer. However, if you look again at the question, you immediately see the answer - robbing you of the opportunity to have another go at the question, on your own, before checking that your answer is correct. The remedy is simply, separate-out the questions. In the study skills guide on “Making Learning Tools” I’ve suggested making a question-bank. This is where you can store the questions that were dealt with in tutorials.

Don’t just store the big questions that were central to each tutorial. It’s worth storing all the smaller questions which may have been answered during tutorials. This includes questions you asked, and also questions other members of the group asked. You could be expected to be able to answer all of them in due course .

To sum up, in the same way as I suggested that you process your lecture notes, it’s worth getting into he habit of spending a few minutes processing what happened during each tutorial. Obviously, it’s best to do this within a day or two of each tutorial, so that you can remember exactly what happened in the tutorials.

Tutorials should be occasions where the advantages of less-formal interaction with your teachers prevail. They should allow things to happen which can’t happen in lectures. But if you just sit back in tutorials, they’ll probably not be as useful to you as they could be.
Some lecturers are good at making tutorials interactive and interesting - others aren’t! However, it’s very much in your hands. You can do a lot to make sure tutorials are a valuable part of your studies.

Above all, tutorials provide a valuable way for you to find out more about that important question:

“What am I expected to become able to do?”

You can actually ask that question during tutorials. You can probe into the criteria that will be used to measure your progress. You can ask “do we really have to remember all this detail?” You can ask “would a possible exam question take the following sort of form . . . . . . . . . ?”

What are the purposes of tutorials?

At best, tutorials can have a range of purposes that aren’t covered by lectures. Here are some possibilities I thought of – you may have listed others too.

(a)       Purposes serving lecturers

•       to allow them to go into greater depth with selected parts of the subject matter.

•       to give them the chance to find out exactly how your learning is going.

•       to give them extra time to catch up, if they get behind schedule with their lectures!


(b)       Purposes serving you

•       to give you the chance to ask all the questions which the lecture situation didn’t allow you to ask.

•       to allow you to practise and apply things dealt with in the lecture courses.

•       to give you the chance to see how you are getting on going over marked work, and so on.

•       to encourage you to work as part of a small team.

•       to allow you to find out more about exactly what is ex pected of you.

•       to help you find out which things you need to give a bit more attention to.

•       to give you practice at giving presentations yourself, in the comfort and “safety” of a small group (for more help with this, please refer to the study skills guide on “Giving a Seminar”)