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In education, a tutorial is a method of transferring knowledge and may be used as a part of a learning process. More interactivity and specific than a book or a lecture, a tutorial seeks to teach by example and supply the information to complete a certain task.
A tutorial can be taken in many forms, ranging from a set of instructions to complete a task to an interactive problem solving session (usually in academia).
The tutorial system at Oxford and Cambridge is fundamental to methods of teaching at those universities, but it is by no means particular to them; Heythrop College (University of London), for instance, offers a tutorial system but with one-on-one teaching. Another example is Imperial College London, where tutorials in groups of 3 take place. It is rare for newer universities in the UK to have the resources to offer individual tuition; a class of six to eight students is a far more common tutorial size. At Cambridge, a tutorial is known as a supervision.
In Australian, New Zealand, and South African universities, a tutorial (colloquially called a tute or tut) is a class of 10–30 students. Such tutorials are very similar to the Canadian system, although, tutorials are usually led by Honours degree or postgraduate students, known as 'tutors'.
At the two campuses of St. John's College, U.S. and a few other American colleges with a similar version of the Great Books program, a "tutorial" is a class of 12–16 students who meet regularly with the guidance of a tutor. The tutorial focuses on a certain subject area (e.g., mathematics tutorial, language tutorial) and generally proceeds with careful reading of selected primary texts and working through associated exercises (e.g., demonstrating a Euclid proof or translating ancient Greek poetry). Since formal lectures do not play a large part in the St. John's College curriculum, the tutorial is the primary method by which certain subjects are studied. However, at St. John's the tutorial is considered ancillary to the seminar, in which a slightly larger group of students meets with two tutors for broader discussion of the particular texts on the seminar list.
Some US colleges, such as Williams College, offer tutorials almost identical in structure to that of an Oxbridge tutorial. At Williams, students in tutorials typically work in pairs alongside a professor and meet weekly, while alternately presenting position papers or critiques of their partner's paper.
Tutorials usually have the following characteristics:
While many writers refer to a mere list of instructions or tips as a tutorial, this usage can be misleading.
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