Nowadays, finding the right tuition can feel like a battle in itself. Parents have to weigh qualifications, availability, teaching style and countless other factors before a student even sits down for their first session. Once the right tutor has been found, it is tempting to think that the hardest part is over.
But what happens after the lesson ends?
It’s a question that is easy to overlook. After all, isn’t the point of tuition to produce an improvement in the student's performance in a subject? Tutors can fall into the same trap. Few things are worse than hearing the dreaded line: “What did we do last time?”. Or worse, seeing a student struggle on a test covering material they had comfortably understood across multiple sessions.
In these scenarios, a student can win every proverbial battle, but still lose the war.
The Cause
Why does this happen? The problem is a mismatch between the scope of a lesson, and the scope of learning itself. Learning is a process, and not easily carved up into discrete chunks. Subjects feed into each other, rely on each other, and often, even with regular sessions, a tutor can overlook a knowledge gap or exam technique that could be the difference between reaching their first choice university, or missing out. Yet parents are rarely looking for improvement in just one isolated area. They understandably expect tuition to translate into broader, lasting academic progress - especially when they are investing significant time, money, and energy into it.
Ultimately, this problem stems from two key issues - engagement and motivation. No matter how good the tutor, you can only teach so much at once, and even then, a single lesson is rarely enough for that knowledge to stick around in the long term.
At the same time, the student only has so much focus and energy. Extending a learning period beyond their limit results often leads to diminishing returns, and a building of frustration that can make future learning more difficult.
Of course, there is another approach: make tuition more like school. By booking repeated lessons and assigning homework, a tutor can make a student engage with material between sessions as well as gain extra time to teach their subject more comprehensively. The trade-off is that increasing the workload can place greater demands on a student's motivation, as I’m sure any student will agree!
So what's the solution? Students are stuck between these two challenges, with no easy way out. If they pick a learning strategy to solve one, they expose themselves to the other.
The answer, then, is to go beyond tactics. What a student needs is a better tool.
More than Memory
That tool is hardly a new one - in fact, it has existed for over half a century! In 1973, two psychologists performed a study to test how humans interact with two types of learning: ‘Incidental’ learning with no specific reason to remember a fact, and ‘intentional’ learning with the aim of using knowledge for a specific goal.[1]
They gave participants a list of words. One group was told to rate these words by ‘pleasantness’, whilst the others were asked to note if specific letters such as ‘g’ appeared in them. Within those groups, some were also told there would be a test later and others were not.
Later on, the test came, and the results were astonishing: there was little to no difference between the ‘incidental’ and ‘intentional’ groups. Even knowing of the test ahead of time, the intentional learners could not significantly outdo their fellows.
The disparity, instead, was found between the methods of classification; those who ranked by pleasantness scored almost double that of those who ranked by letter. The conclusion was obvious: it wasn’t why you study, but how you study and what you associate with your topics that most affects your performance.
Meaning makes it memorable.
- Check lettersShallow processing
- Rate pleasantnessDeep processing
How people engaged with the words mattered more than expecting a test.
Hyde & Jenkins (1973)Nowadays, these are called “deep” and “shallow” processing- and the key to deep processing isn’t the threat of an exam or extra time with the material- it’s the context and associated facts. I’m sure you don’t study to remember a friend’s birthday!
To maximise deep processing, what we need is a way to hone in on the core topics of a subject, and a way to give them the context for long-term memory that works for students in their own unique way.[2][3]
It’s a simple enough method in theory, but has always been hard to put into practice, especially with the high demands students put up with day to day.
LiteLearn’s goal is to change that.
Built for Purpose
Litelearn promotes deep learning in two ways- we ask for specific questions rather than general topics in order to reduce our session time to 20 minutes. In that time, our students can easily maintain their focus without worrying about being overwhelmed. At the same time, our tutors focus on building context, helping a student find their own personal method and avoid a loss of motivation.
At the same time, our AI analyses the session transcript, and key to this process is that it uses the student's own words, reinforcing the associations developed through a session and allowing them to internalise a subject their way.
By ensuring that the student doesn’t have to spend time memorising a rote response, we give them the freedom to answer every question from first principles, avoiding knowledge gaps and reducing time pressure.
We don’t just teach what to think- our goal is to reveal to students how they think, and how their specific ways of thinking are best suited to the problems that they face.
The strongest memories are rarely singular- they are complicated webs of interconnected experience. Litelearn’s goal is to bring this idea from a ‘common sense’ intuition to an active learning strategy.
