“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” — John Dewey

A Comprehensive Evaluation

At Tutor Visions, we begin every new tutoring journey with a personalized student assessment. This process delves into your unique learning habits, strengths, and areas for growth.

Understanding these aspects is vital to fostering a productive learning environment. We then use this knowledge to craft a tailored action plan to help you achieve your academic goals.

Person performing a student assessment.

How Does It Work?

Ultimately, we aim to develop a comprehensive learning profile to guide our tutoring approach.

Our process is straightforward – here’s how it works.

The Process

Scheduling

Once we decide to work together, we set up a two-hour meeting with you and your parent(s) at your home to perform the assessment.

No prior preparation is necessary on your part.

Interview

During our meeting, we conduct a conversational interview using a questionnaire as guidance. We probe for anecdotes and examples to unearth different dimensions of your learning experience. That helps us get to know each other and build rapport.

Evaluation

Using our rubrics, we evaluate your writing samples for diction, argumentative structure, use of evidence, reasoning, narrative, and expressive language. We also review your academic transcript for strengths and patterns of performance.

Assessment

Combining what we learned from the interview and evaluation, we prepare a written report presenting a holistic portrait of you as a student. We discuss study habits, class-by-class analysis, extracurriculars, passions, and college and professional plans (if any). Then, we propose a tutoring plan with goals, strategies, and milestones.

Delivery

Finally, we email the written student assessment to you and your family. This process takes about five business days from interview to delivery. Once we agree on the plan, we schedule your first tutoring session.  

How Do We Use This Assessment in Tutoring Sessions?

Conducting the student assessment helps us develop a mutual connection. We begin by asking why you seek tutoring and about your experience of school–your favorite and most challenging classes, study habits, classroom experiences, homework routines, organization, and time management skills. 

Then, we listen as you describe your objectives, how you study and learn, your struggles in class, and the challenges you encounter when working at home on your own. You also rate yourself on the eleven executive function skills and seventeen behaviors for student success. Do you employ metacognition? Do you write a daily homework plan?

Finally, we repeat what we heard to confirm that we truly understand your thoughts, concerns, desires, and frustrations. 

Being seen and listened to in this way is rare but invaluable for building the trusting relationship we need to help you achieve your goals. It puts you in the driver’s seat, empowers you to guide our work together, and encourages you to develop a growth mindset.

The assessment is also a crucial tool that guides our tutoring sessions, ensuring we focus on your unique needs and making our progress reports more meaningful. For instance, our questionnaire includes a special section for those with ADHD and other learning challenges.  So, in these cases, we also engage with parents, and sometimes, school administrators and teachers, to gain a comprehensive understanding of the student’s learning experience. In short, each assessment is unique, resulting in a customized plan that directs our work.

About the Assessors

We tutor students in multiple subject areas and pair them with an assessor with subject-matter expertise. The assessor tailors the experience to your needs, bringing in other perspectives when necessary. In most cases, your assessor will also become your principal tutor.

Our lead writing tutor and owner of Tutor Visions, David Wolf, Ph.D., brings over twenty years of university and high school teaching experience and degrees from Brown University and the City University of New York (CUNY) to his work. All student assessments in the writing tutoring realm draw from his experience.

Our math tutors have degrees in Mathematics and related STEM fields, and many are graduates of local and state universities. Therefore, if you are primarily interested in math tutoring, we will design your assessment accordingly.

Let's talk

Contact us to learn more.