About Us
Our Motivation
The COVID-19 outbreak has disrupted learning and made every-day life more challenging – especially for students. This includes University of Toronto students, but also younger students in elementary and secondary schools, many of whom are also no longer attending physical classrooms and being close with friends.
Staying connected and helping each other are some of the most important actions we can take to improve the well-being of ourselves and others. With that in mind, UTutors is an effort led by members of the University of Toronto Economics Department to provide greater opportunity for UofT students to share their talent and help others while receiving experience and feeling good about their efforts in return.
A convincing body of research suggests that tutoring can be an effective means to help, not just for improving academic outcomes but also mental health. UTutors aims to make it easy and rewarding for UofT students to connect with high school students and volunteer a little of their time each week.
What We Do
UTutors is a tutoring program that matches qualified and trained University of Toronto students (tutors) with Grade 6 or 9 students from the Toronto District School Board, in conjunction with the Khoaching with Khan Academy (KWiK) program. All UTutors tutors are high-achieving University of Toronto Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) students. Tutors provide students with one-on-one virtual assistance with their Khan Academy mathematics assignments given to them at school.
If selected for the program, parents and students will receive an email to schedule 1-2 weekly one-hour tutoring sessions. A tutor from the program who can meet during the suggested times and with the same gender as the student will be assigned.
Sessions will be conducted using Zoom. Parents and students will receive an internet link to access the meeting room. At the scheduled time, students should click on the link with video and audio on. Students will be asked to share their screen while accessing their Khan Academy assignment.
Collection of Confidential Information
For safety and quality assurance, all sessions will be recorded. Tutors will not have access to these recordings. Only UTutors administrators and the researchers of the UTutors program will have access to the recordings. Recordings will only be used for quality assurance and anonymous research purposes. Recordings will be deleted within 365 days. They are stored on a password protected secure OneDrive folder.
UTutors is being evaluated for its effectiveness by researchers at the University of Toronto through anonymized qualitative and quantitative analysis. The researchers will compare assignment performances before and after beginning the program, examine attendance patterns, and interview tutors and teachers to assess overall experiences and impressions. All data collected will be used anonymously and aggregated. No individual would be identified.