Tutoring Strategies to facilitate positive emotional states during home tutoring

There has been little focus on providing personalised support for parents in their role as home tutors. This is surprising given the high correlation between parental involvement in learning activities in the home and the child’s academic success. P.A.C.T. is a system that provides personalised coaching for parents in their role as home tutors. P.A.C.T. endeavors to coach parents in a set of tutoring strategies that provide a mechanism to positively affect the emotional state of the child therefore enhancing the learning process. The core component of P.A.C.T. is a set of tutoring rules, which define what tutoring tactics the parent needs to master and under which conditions they need to be used. These conditions comprise the emotional state of the child and the current phase in the tutoring process. This paper illustrates the development, implementation and validation of this set of tutoring rules. In particular this paper presents an empirical research study, which results in feedback on 74% of tutoring rules, of which experts deemed 81% to be valid. In addition, preliminary results indicate that P.A.C.T. may be of significant educational benefit to parents during their role as home tutor.