Parents know they need to be intimately involved with evaluating their child’s academic progress.
However, through my conversations with our parents, it is hard to know what are the right questions in evaluating academic progress.

Here are several questions a parent should be asking their child’s tutor, both before and during the tutoring process.

1. What is your tutoring history?
A very simple question on the surface, however, a parent needs to have an understanding of their child’s own demographic before they find the right tutor. For instance, in questioning a prospective tutor, make sure you let the tutor know your child’s age, subject difficulty, learning history, type of learning environment at school, relationship with their current teacher, competing interests (e.g. soccer practice). Only then can you, with your tutor, effectively evaluate a tutor’s track record and a good fit with your child.

2. How will you evaluate my child’s progress?
Your tutor needs to have a diagnostic tool in order to determine exactly what the need is and what the tutor is going to do in addressing this need. This is not a long and drawn out report card of your child’s strengths and weaknesses. It is an initial evaluation of your child’s needs, based on question 1 above. Your tutor needs to be able to tell you how they plan on reporting any progress based on your child’s initial needs. For instance, based on the initial conversation about your child, a tutor could tell you they believe your child needs help on long division, fractions, multiplication and addition. Your tutor would then need to come to the table with an initial plan for reporting any new progress against how your child did week 1 – 4 on long division.

3. How will I receive these reports on my child’s progress?
After setting a reporting schedule with the tutor, a parent should then focus on how they will receive this information. Will it be a periodic phone call with the parent and tutor? Will it be through email? Tracking progress is necessary so that a parent knows they are spending their money with the right tutor. Fortunately, TutorSource provides an online tracking system for both parent and tutor. In fact, each TutorSource tutor is required to input notes from each session. As the parent, you should be evaluating these comments and making sure they are detailing exactly what progress is being made and in what academic areas.

4. How will you deliver feedback to my child?
The parent knows their child best and should pay particular attention to how a tutor answers this question. Sending the wrong message could derail your child’s efforts. A discussion with the tutor is needed to make sure that agreement is reached before tutoring is started. A tutor needs to provide a forthright assessment of how a student is proceeding, both to the parent and child. However, tone can make all the difference and it is important to make sure that your child develops their own positive self-image. Continuous communication and continuous improvement in your child’s performance are positively correlated.

I welcome your thoughts as parents and learners. Please post comments or questions below.