What do reading tutors do? A naturalistic study of more and less experienced tutors in reading

Virtually every study of tutoring in reading has found it to be highly effective, but the reasons for its effectiveness are relatively unexplored. We built on a small body of research on the tutoring process in reading and a large body of research from other well-defined domains by collecting and analyzing verbal protocols from 3 more experienced and 3 less experienced volunteer tutors from preexisting dyads as they taught adults with decoding problems. It was found that more experienced tutors used significantly more cognitive scaffolding and significantly less motivational scaffolding than did less experienced tutors. Tutors were similar in their rates of question asking, content errors, and responses to student errors. We suggest some hypotheses for modeling in the design of a computer-based reading decoding tutor and for training human tutors who teach decoding.