Tutoring Behaviours Taxonomy: Towards Just-In-Time Tutors’ Support

Tutoring is a vital tool complementary to traditional classroom teaching. It fulfils the need for personalized and on-demand support that cannot be satisfied by traditional classroom teaching in the crowded classrooms of the twenty-first century. Tutoring is especially effective in supporting the development of computational thinking and problem-solving skills, which makes it an important component of STEM education. To date, little research has been conducted to analyse the instructional behaviours involved in the tutoring process. This work first defines the different types of tutoring and the context in which they occur, then presents an overview of various taxonomies and models of teaching behaviours and finally classifies behaviours that are found in the tutoring context in a Tutoring Behaviours Taxonomy (TBT). Since the role of a tutor must be to guide the learner through the process at hand, as opposed to providing them with solutions, the TBT is focused on defining guiding and telling behaviours and identifying examples of the same. Ultimately, the TBT can inform tutor-training software that can be used to assess tutoring activities and provide tutors with feedback about their choice of actions.