INFERRING WHAT THE STUDENT KNOWS IN ONE-TO-ONE TUTORING - THE ROLE OFSTUDENT QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

We analyzed 44 one-to-one tutoring sessions in which undergraduates we re tutored by graduate students on troublesome topics in research meth ods. The primary goal of this research was to determine the relationsh ip between measures of student achievement and measures of student que stions and answers. First, our results indicated that the quality of s tudents' answers were the most reliable source for inferring student u nderstanding. Second, the quality of the students' questions was only a marginal indicator of student understanding. And third, students' an swers to tutors' comprehension-gauging questions (e.g., Do you underst and?) proved to be very misleading in regard to student understanding.