What Can I Expect?
Learning Commons tutors help fellow students grow academically by building confidence and habits that lead to independence. Tutors focus their efforts on modeling and suggesting problem solving skills that benefit students for the long-term.
Upon arrival, Welcome Desk Assistants help students sign in with their UNK IDs and introduce them to available tutors. As a walk-in service, a peer tutor may assist several students simultaneously, but will always integrate new students into their rotation as quickly as possible. Generally, daytime tutoring is not as busy as evening tutoring, but we cannot guarantee one-on-one assistance without scheduling an appointment outside of regular tutoring hours.
Students should expect peer assistance to be collaborative. This means tutors will ask students questions about problems and topics, access textbooks and other course material to help investigate solutions, and spend time thinking with a student during the problem-solving process. We believe professors to be the most fundamental academic resource on campus; tutors enact this principle in the form of faculty referrals when expert assistance is needed.
Tutoring sessions are more effective when students come prepared with a course syllabus, a textbook and/or related material, and attempted homework. Students do not need to bring completed assignments in order to get help, but the more students have worked with the material on their own, the more focused tutoring sessions can be in terms of content and suggested learning strategies.
To get the most out of tutoring, please review and follow the following guidelines:
- Get help as soon as you know you need it!
Coming in at the last minute (i.e. the night before an exam, the morning homework is due, the day of your lab) is not effective! While you may leave with a better grasp of the specific problems you asked about, you probably won’t strengthen the general learning skills that give you the power to do well in any class.
- Attend tutoring with others from your class.
As a walk-in service, tutors may need to float from person or person or group to group. If you attend with a classmate or two, you will still be able to have a conversation about the material while a tutor is working with someone else. Don’t worry if you don’t know anyone to “bring” with you, though! Tutoring is also a great place to meet people from your class.
- Continue getting help as you need it throughout the semester.
Sometimes students start off their semester right—by getting help early and often as they need to. But, then they might stop coming mid-term or even earlier. Don’t make this mistake! Statistics from previous semesters show that students are more successful in their classes if they come over the entire semester.
- Study on your own, without assistance, as well.
It’s easy to get comfortable with someone right next to you every time you study! But that won’t help you on an exam or quiz, and it certainly won’t help you feel confident in your class! Be sure you study before and after tutoring, so that you develop a strong personal connection to the course content.