How Quickly Can a Tutor Help You Improve

Looking for ways to bring up your grades? Don't waste time studying at home. Learn how quickly a tutor can help you improve.

Looking for fast results? Maybe you need to bring your grades up, and fast. Maybe you have a big assignment, paper, or test approaching which determines if you pass or fail.

So, what’s the fastest way to achieve results? How quickly can a tutor help you improve?

Let’s take a closer look and find out.

One-on-one tutoring is the best alternative to sitting at home, pouring over books on your own or trying to join a study group where your individual needs are glossed over. If you want to quickly improve grades, tutoring is the way to go.

Why?

Let’s look at your options:

Option 1: Studying on your own

This seems great, you can do it at any time, but if you don’t understand the concepts at their core, or you are unsure about something, being on your own won’t better explain them or offer reassurances that you are, in fact, doing it correctly.

Option 2: Studying with a group of peers

Group study might get you some of those answers, explanations, or reassurances you can’t get on your own, but when you are stuck and need something explained differently yet everyone else in your group understands it, chances are, they will move on without you, just like a teacher does in class. Groups have to move at the speed of the pack, the majority. This means the fastest and slowest are on their own.

Option 3: Getting help from your teacher

Teachers sometimes offer office hours or will agree to meet with you to go over something you were unsure about. But they only have so much time, and they have a lot of students. You won’t get more than 30 minutes or so of one-to-one time each week, and chances are, if a few students didn’t understand something or are looking for ways to bring their grades up, you will find yourself in a teacher-led option 2 scenario… with the same pitfalls.

If you are trying to improve your grades, tutoring is the best way. You don't know if you are doing something wrong when you study on your own, studying with a group means you get left behind, and a teacher doesn't have time to dedicate to you one-on-one.

Option 4: One-on-one tutoring

This brings us to your best option, tutoring. One-on-one tutoring goes at your pace. It covers topics you are struggling with and blows through the things you already understand. One-on-one tutoring gives you the reassurance that you are doing something correctly, lets you repeat a critical skill until such time as you truly understand it, and helps you set concrete goals for bringing up your grades quickly.

How is all this achieved?

Practice for critical skills

When new concepts are introduced in school, repeating those concepts with guidance is one of the best ways to commit them to memory. Studies have found the best way to achieve this is with one-on-one tutoring.

Teachers might give a handful of examples in class, but then they have to move on. Given how most examples build off one another, missing just one or being unsure about one can have detrimental effects on grades for the rest of the year. You might know exactly where it was you got lost, which critical skill or concept you didn’t practice enough. With an experienced tutor, you can go back to where the issues began and practice.

This opportunity to practice until you are confident will increase your intrinsic motivation too.

One-on-one tutoring is the best chance for you to practice your newly-introduced critical skills, obtain feedback, and make sure you commit everything to memory without any mistakes.

More time

This goes hand in hand with the concept of practice makes perfect. Tutoring can improve your grades quickly by giving you the time you need to develop a solid foundation and process the topics covered in class. Studies indicate this leads to big results, quickly.

Personalized learning

We all learn differently. Everyone has their own style. And a lot of times, certain concepts just need to be introduced in a style you understand… but that’s not what happens in class.

The more you work with a private tutor, the better they get to know you, your learning style, your likes and dislikes, your personal life, and more. It is much easier to relate to a tutor in some cases than to your teacher, and being able to cultivate a relationship with a tutor who understands how you need information presented, when you need a break, and so on has been shown to improve grades quickly.

The longer you work with the same tutor, the better this gets.

Boost confidence

Working with a tutor will boost your confidence, and this can contribute to better grades, quickly, because it removes the fear of making a mistake, the fear of being wrong, or the shame of not understanding a concept the teacher taught a few weeks back.

Continual development

Working with a tutor provides a chance to set personalized goals for achieving better grades, and with each achievement, new goals are set. This type of continual development improves grades short and long term. Private tutors are best equipped to introduce new and related topics during study sessions that both work toward bringing up your grades.

The more often you work with a private tutor, the faster your improvements will be. Studies indicate the more time spent tutoring, the better student achievement will be.

Even short, regular sessions will make fast improvements for most students. The frequency matters much more than the duration. So don’t try and cram everything into one study session every 2 weeks, working for 180 minutes. Break it up.

Tutoring helps students achieve their goal of improving grades during the academic year by not only exposing them to the repetition and critical thinking they need, but by improving their intrinsic motivation.

In it for the long haul…

Why Extrinsic Exchanges Fail

Ever tried to give yourself or your child a boost right before an essay or a test, in exchange for focusing and doing well?

Maybe you offered a dessert, increased allowance, or payment on a new bike.

And maybe it worked. But it only worked temporarily. Relying on the exchange of “if you just focus now, and do well on X, then you can have Y” it becomes a crutch, something a student begins to rely on. The next time a due date is pending, the question will arise of “what’s in it for me?” or “what do I get if I do well?”

Extrinsic exchanges, trying to bribe yourself or your child into performing well don't work long-term, but tutoring gives you intrinsic exchanges that do.

If no exchange is offered, students won’t do as well. 

Why Intrinsic Tutoring Succeeds

But this is where tutoring steps in and saves the day. Tutoring programs don’t use extrinsic rewards. Tutors don’t offer a student something in exchange for reaching their goals, save for developing attainable goals.

Tutors get to know students personally, figure out their interests, where they derive joy, what brings personal satisfaction. Tutors know how to guide students to achieve their academic goals based on:

• passion for the subjects
• curiosity
• a love of personal challenges
• and more

Students will learn for the sake of learning, set goals to better themselves and their grades “just because”, without the need for any exchange.

This becomes a long term, internal concept that students take with them long after their tutoring is complete, something corroborated by studies.

Intrinsic motivation associated with one-on-one tutoring has been repeatedly correlated to:

• improved academic results,
• an increased interest in school,
• a greater ratio of success where academic goals are concerned
• better autonomy and independence

Tutoring, in effect, cultivates intrinsic motivation early on.

A tutor can help you improve your grades by giving you personalized learning, more opportunities to practice, more time to better understand the critical skills you are learning, continual development, and the intrinsic motivation you need to meet your goals long-term and bring your grades up for good. Overall, if you want to know how quickly can a tutor help you improve, the answer is very quickly, and we'll prove it to you. Sign up for a free trial session with StayAhead's expert tutors in Dubai here.