> The average, middle class person thinks about education as an expenditure, not an investment. The way I remember it, middle class folks in Kansas City suburbs really, really care about the quality of their schools and levy property and sales taxes to fund it. Rural Ohio townships where dual earners are making 17k less than the national median for such households may not have a lot of middle class to speak of. Cost…
"1:1 tutoring is the gold standard for educational outcomes." Is it? I'd be interested to see some data to support or refute this. I'd always assumed that students benefit somewhat from other students being around (due to observing how others learn, being pushed to be better etc.), so perhaps the ideal ratio would be in the 1:2 to 1:4 range. If people have really figured out that 1:1 is better than 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4,…
In a 1:1 interaction, it is possible to efficiently figure out where the two interlocutors’ common premises are, and then explain concepts in whatever amount of detail is necessary for understanding, skipping over any parts that are known, with frequent checks that the other party is following along (not just pretending, and not suffering some misconception).
In a 5-way interaction, it is typical for each participant to be coming from slightly different background / preparation, and have difficulty with different parts of the new material, which makes it necessary to take time for (sometimes extended) digressions to fill in whatever details are missing for anyone. It’s easy to accidentally not notice that 1 or more participants is missing crucial background, because it is time consuming to verify that each separate participant has a solid understanding of every idea. A problem that is too hard for one student will be too easy for another.
Things might be better if you had the same 4 students to 1 tutor for, say, 3–4 years at a stretch. Then you could assume a lot of shared history, and amortize digressions to fill knowledge gaps for particular students. Better hope the students learn at a similar pace.
When actively trying to solve a set of problems, with the students working independently with minimal guidance/help from an instructor, and if the only goal is problem-solving efficiency, then having more people is helpful, because different students will have trouble with one problem or another, and they can then confer and fill in the other answers at the end. Often the weaker students don’t fully understand everything to the extent they could solve a similar problem independently, but that’s often an acceptable standard. [Same story if you are trying to build some work project with many parts, etc.]
But if the goal is to get everyone to understand every answer deeply and accurately, then in a 1:1 tutorial setting the expert tutor can ask leading questions, give appropriate hints, or just outright explain the answer if the problem gets to be too big a time suck. And the student can get more direct personal experience with trying to solve all of the problems with a fast feedback loop and without getting bogged down, and hopefully feel like they personally figured out most of the main breakthroughs.
One issue is that often tutors (probably more than other types of teachers) are amateurs rather than experts in the subject or in teaching. For instance the tutor might be a slightly older student, a family member, a retired person volunteering, or the like. In that case 1:1 tutorial is still helpful vs. the student working alone, but obviously pales in comparison to highly skilled tutoring.