Facilitative tutoring: how can it be understood and improved?

Empirical evidence, gained from group discussions with both staff and students, points to the need for effective analyses of the facilitative tutoring situation required in problem-based learning. The research problem centres on the need for models which are sufficiently detailed, general, and usable to provide the necessary help in understanding facilitative tutoring and assisting its development. This paper describes the evidence and discusses a relevant model. The model enables interactions between the tutor, student, and public knowledge to be described in terms consistent with the cooperative, questing, critical, reflective, self-evaluative, and knowledge-rich nature of effective problem-based learning.