What is Tutoring?

1. Etymological origin and basic definition: What does tutoring mean?

The word tutoring derives from the Latin verb "tueri", meaning "to protect, to guard, to guard and to defend". It entered Anglo-French and Old English as the word tutor, which describes the responsibility of a guardian or guide, and since the 16th century, it has gained the identity of "private instructor who guides the student one-on-one" in the university and academic world.

Tutoring in today's Turkish; Private lessons are welcomed as one-on-one guidance, private tutoring or individual mentoring.

At the heart of the concept is "individualization". Unlike mass teaching (one-to-many lecturing), which teaches everyone in a crowded lecture hall at the same tempo and with the same method, tutoring; It is an interactive pedagogical approach that instantly answers the student's questions, detects the step in which he made a mistake, and adjusts the tempo completely according to the student.

2. Tutoring in daily life and the EdTech ecosystem

In daily life and in the digital world, the concept of tutoring appears in three common forms:

• Peer Tutoring: An upper-class student or colleague who has successfully passed a course explains the subject. Sociological research shows that the highest learning retention occurs in the process of "learning by teaching" (Feynman technique) and benefits both the guide and the recipient.
• Online Tutoring Platforms: These are video sessions held with native speakers for foreign language practice or YKS, SAT, IELTS preparation through platforms such as Preply, Cambly, Superprof.
• One-on-one Software Mentoring (Pair Programming & Code Tutoring): These are one-on-one code review, architectural guidance and live debugging sessions held by software developers with senior developers.

3. Tutoring in computer engineering and artificial intelligence architecture (AI Tutoring)

The concept of tutoring in computer science came to life with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that have been developed since the 1970s. Today, these systems, combined with generative artificial intelligence (LLM), work with complex engineering principles:

• Socratic Method Algorithms (Socratic Prompting): A classic chat bot gives a direct answer to the question asked. But an “AI Tutor” never tells the answer directly; By asking guiding questions, the student makes the student realize the mistake and establishes the correct logic sequence.
• Student Knowledge Tracking (Bayesian & Deep Knowledge Tracing): In the background, artificial intelligence tracks which learning outcomes the student understands and which concepts he is lacking in with probabilistic models (BKT or LSTM-based DKT). The student does not move on to advanced questions before fully understanding a topic.
• Pedagogical Alignment and RLHF (Pedagogical Alignment): While language models are trained with training data, they not only give technically correct answers; is passed through special reinforcement learning (RLHF) filters that focus on being patient, motivating, and resolving student confusion.

4. Education science and philosophical dimension: Bloom's 2 Sigma problem

A famous study conducted by educational scientist Benjamin Bloom in 1984 (Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem) has scientifically proven the importance of the concept of tutoring in the world:

Bloom and his team; measured that the average student who received one-on-one tutoring and mastery learning outperformed 98% of students in a traditional classroom of 30 students (two standard deviations / 2 sigma above).

The most fundamental socio-economic crisis in the education world for the last 40 years has been how we can offer this tremendous efficiency not only to the children of rich families, but to all humanity. Artificial intelligence supported tutoring engines; It aims to radically democratize equality of opportunity in education by delivering a personalized Socratic tutor with unlimited patience to a student anywhere in the world via the device in their pocket, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Commonly confused with

• Tutoring vs Teaching: Teaching generally aims to convey a curriculum to a large class; Tutoring, on the other hand, is micro-guidance that focuses on eliminating the gaps in understanding of a single individual.
• Tutoring vs AI Chatbot: A regular chatbot solves the assignment for you; An AI Tutor helps your brain establish neuronal connections by helping you find the solution step by step.

Questions and answers

Related terms

Related tools