The Role of the Lecturer as Tutor: Doing What Effective Tutors Do in a Large Lecture Class

Most instructors at one point or another in their careers— during office hours, in the laboratory setting, or as a tutor— have had the luxury of sitting down one-on-one with a student to help him or her learn. For many, the reward of watching the proverbial lightbulb go on over a student’s head was a first, addictive step into a career that involved teaching. Now imagine—or for many of us, remember—standing in front of 30, 60, 100, 150, 200, 300, 700, or even 1000 students in a traditional college or university lecture setting. Did you sometimes wish you could just sit down and talk with students from your large lecture individually, and then they would finally get it? What is similar and different about your instructional choices in a large lecture versus a one-onone situation? To what extent can we translate what is known about effective tutoring to a large lecture setting? One-on-one human tutoring has been extensively studied. Insights into what makes it effective is of great interest in a variety of fields, including computer-based tutoring program development, general education research, and training of future teachers. It is well accepted that one-on-one tutoring promotes both greater student learning and increased student motivation to learn compared with traditional, formal classroom teaching and learning settings (Slavin, 1987). However, examination of the research literature on effective tutoring would suggest that this mode of instruction and our approaches to fostering student understanding in large biology lecture classrooms need not be as dramatically different as one might assume. In fact, the differences in what instructors choose to say and do, as well as what they choose not