CURRENT PROJECT: “Skin-in-game mcat Prep”
To low-income underrepresented premeds, EEF provides free (after reimbursement at the end of each month, hence "SkinInGame") subscriptions to top-of-the-market online MCAT Prep courses. Based on an assessment (after 1-2 initial Zoom sessions with EEF’s professional MCAT Prep tutor), each premed is guided to the marketplace MCAT Prep course that best fits his/her needs. Moreover, as needed, EEF’s tutor provides supplemental tutoring in GenChem, Physics, and Math. (Before college, many of these premeds attended poor schools in underserved communities, hence the frequent need for Math tutoring.) EEF’s tutor also shows the premeds how to integrate ChatGPT into their studying, making their studying more effective.
Each premed's MCAT Prep is thus
1. Professional Quality
2. Targeted To The Premed's Needs
3. AI Augmented
Just as importantly, this program can be easily scaled up to help many low-income underrepresented premeds.
FUTURE Project
Free Hybrid (online/inperson) Tutoring of College Students
free 1-to-1 online sessions taught by EEF
free 1-to-1 in-person follow-up sessions taught by peer-tutors
Free Peer-Tutor Training at Colleges - this training coordinates inperson sessions with online sessions
(eg, appointment as tutor-trainer by Hunter College's Skirball Science Learning Center)
Peer-Tutors of course already know the content of the courses they tutor. After all, in order to qualify to become a peer-tutor, they must have aced the courses.
What they don’t necessarily know, is how to teach the content to others. This is where my 2-session peer-tutor trainings come in.
Training Session1: Tutoring Generalities
This session is usually online, 1-to-1 or 1-to-many, through a video-conferencing program that enables me to share documents I’ve composed that elaborate the following general principle of tutoring:
interactively assessing the student’s needs, then tailoring tutoring to these needs
Training Session2: Tutoring Specifics for the Peer-Tutor’s Specific Course
This session must be in-person, during which:
I observe – and take notes throughout – an actual tutoring session that the peer-tutor has with a student. (I of course get both the peer-tutor’s and student’s permissions to do this observation. I also emphasize that I’m only an adviser, wielding no administrative power over the peer-tutor.)
After the tutoring session, alone with the peer-tutor:
We discuss the notes. Though I address the weaknesses I observed, I make sure to also point out the strengths I observed.
We role-play (I play tutor while peer-tutor plays student) on how to tutor – and integrate textbook study – for a specific practice problem that was asked about during the tutoring session.
FUTURE Project:
Supporting College-Bound HS Grads’ Prep For Upcoming College STEM Courses.
This projects’ method: free weekly in-person tutoring follow-ups of free online courses (MOOCs) that these financially-strapped gritty students are taking in STEM
For more about this, please see https://www.educationequityfoundation.org/inperson-tutoring-supplement-for-online-courses/
Future Project
Free Tutoring (from peer-tutors trained by EEF) in STEM to College-Hopeful Students from NYC Public High Schools
