Perhaps the most important aspect of the Academic Tutor role is advising your tutees on how to improve their academic performance and academic skills. You may also be called upon to offer guidance or advice on University processes; for example, disciplinary procedures or mitigating circumstances.
Learning how to learn is a complex and unfolding process and any student may need some academic support at some point. This may result from their course of study requiring them to think and work in different ways, or from unfamiliar challenges within the degree subject. The issues presented by tutees cover a wide spectrum but almost all present with anxieties about studying. At one end are students who are worried about their capacity to study but who are performing well in their academic work; at the other extreme are students who are anxious because they are experiencing severe difficulties and are not performing well. In general, anxiety is triggered by many external factors including competition, tests, challenge, change, adverse past experiences and by internal factors such as low self-esteem and self-confidence. Self-efficacy, one’s belief in one’s ability to accomplish a task or succeed in specific situations, is an important factor in student success. Some students may have generally low self-efficacy, but self-efficacy is often task-related, and it is not unusual for a normally high achieving student to demonstrate low self-efficacy in relation to a specific course, task, or assignment.
The anxiety that affects tutees may not be immediately obvious, or even recognised by the student. The skill of the tutor is in identifying study-related anxiety and helping the student take steps to overcome it. Listening non-judgementally, acknowledging the anxiety and discussing it with your tutee all help greatly in reducing the anxiety, as do empathy, support, and gentle confrontation.
Both success and failure are complex, highly subjective personal responses and the anxieties of many students arise from a fear of failure. Submitting assessed work for grading and judgement of its worth by an academic also raises anxieties for some students, and the grading process does not consider the student’s personal response to failure. Some students with very high expectations placed upon them (by themselves, parents, or sponsors) may feel that they have failed if the passing grade they achieve does not live up to their expectations, whereas other students who scrape a bare pass may consider the result a success. As a tutor you will encounter students dealing with failure, and it is important to discriminate between actual and perceived failures. Students with actual failures may be experiencing academic difficulties, and these often don’t become known until the student fails an assessment. Academic failure of this nature can be a result of anxiety but is more likely to occur when a student has underlying mental health or psychological issues, or undiagnosed specific learning differences (SpLD). When advising a student experiencing actual failure you should consider if there may be any underlying issues like this contributing to the failure.