The article, Can Tutors Be Supported in Giving Effective Explanations? By Jörg Wittwer, Matthias Nückles, Nina Landmann, and Alexander Renkl from the University of Freiburg, questions whether tutors are ineffective in giving explanations without previous background knowledge on the tutees individual knowledge level. The study examined 30 sets of tutors and tutees, the researchers gave half of the tutors information on the tutee’s individual knowledge level, while giving the other half of the tutors no information on their tutee’s. After a few weeks the researchers realized that the tutor’s who had information on their tutee’s were able to customize instruction for them, bettering their understanding of the tutor’s explanations, while the other tutee’s were not fully comprehending their tutor’s explanations. The study very clearly showed, that only the tutors that were given background information on their tutee’s individual knowledge could successfully explain concepts to them. Overall, the findings suggest that a diagnosis-based approach to support tutors in developing a model in how to properly teach the tutee effectively contributes to the individualization of instruction in tutoring. All in all, the article is answering the research question of how can tutors give effective explanations to tutees? Therefore, the type of data needed in order to answer this question is acts, behavior, or events, since the researchers conducted their research by listening and watching in on tutoring sessions. The data-gathering method would then be detached observation, since the researcher is simply watching and listening to who they are trying to collect data from. The method of data analysis would be ordinal, since the researchers are only ranking the tutees based off of how well they appear to be absorbing the information. Overall, I found this to be a very interesting way to conduct research. It seemed to be a lot more laid back than most research strategies. However, I still found it to be effective in answering their research question, something that I think would interest the rest of the class as well.

Wittwer, Jörge, Nückles, Matthias, Landmann, Nina, and Renkl, Alexander. (2010). Can Tutors Be Supported in Giving Effective Explanations? Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 102, No. 1, pp. 1-256.