When 9-year-old Miles — a fourth-grader at Southwest Baltimore Charter School — visits his after-school tutor at Johns Hopkins University, he always asks what kind of math his tutor does in college.
“He thinks I do some higher level math. He’s attracted to the math that I’m doing,” explained Miles’ tutor, Soumy Haidara, a sophomore and public health major at Hopkins.
“So how I get him motivated is I tell him the math that he’s doing is going to build him up to the math that I’m at.”
Similar interactions are a regular occurrence at the Johns Hopkins Tutorial Project, a longstanding after-school tutoring program in which elementary school students get one-on-one help in reading and math from Hopkins students who volunteer.
While there is no formal evaluation of the tutorial program, which currently serves about 63 first- through fifth-graders from three nearby elementary schools by pairing them with Hopkins students who volunteer, anecdotes — coupled with some of the more favorable research on the impacts of tutoring — suggest that the program is well positioned to have a positive effect on the students it serves each year.
Program officials say they tutor the schoolchildren because it’s the right thing to do, not to necessarily help the students score a certain amount of extra points on standardized tests.
“We don’t look at tutorial like a research thing,” said Young Song, director of the Tutorial Project.
