Professor Nick Rawlins

Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology, and a professorial fellow at Wolfson College

I am a statutory professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology, and a professorial fellow at Wolfson College. This followed 22 years as a university lecturer holding a tutorial fellowship at an undergraduate college.

Tutorials require the ability to integrate information, and set it out and communicate it clearly. Second, they build undergraduates' ability to try out new ideas of their own (perhaps at first more by sharpening their critical skills but subsequently by developing their creative thinking). Third, tutorial dialogue is the very stuff of constructive engagement with ideas – the basis of a rational polity.

The tutorial is totally distinct from other teaching methods. First, it is completely personalized, and it is an essentially active process. The tutorial is a unique opportunity to discover what an individual undergraduate doesn't yet know – to determine how far their understanding extends, or where they might be making a crucial mistake – and to respond accordingly. It is often, and not unfairly, said that tutorials give undergraduates nowhere to hide. This isn't a threatening situation though. The tutor and their pupils have to learn to form a partnership of trust in which the aim for the pupil is not to disguise how little they know, but to clarify exactly how much they do or don't know, so as to build their understanding.

The tutorial gives undergraduates a regular opportunity to try out their own ideas with an expert; to link different lines of thought or information; and to extend their interests into new areas. There is no limit to what they can explore. The nearest experience to this is small group seminars, but these run the joint risks of domination by one or two participants, of free-loading by the idle, and of disengagement by the anxious or reclusive.