How to Find the Best ACT® Tutor for Your Child

You’re looking for a tutor to increase your son or daughter’s ACT® Test score. There are several considerations that determine the best value for your family. You want a tutor who is experienced, knowledgeable, and organized.

This article contains tips on what to consider when searching for the best private tutor to help your son or daughter on the ACT® Test. Here are the factors to keep in mind when determining who the best tutor is for your specific circumstance:

Structure for Students

A tutor should provide structure your son or daughter. That can look like a number of different things. Some questions to ask include: Is there a plan for during and between tutoring sessions? Is the plan too little, just right, or too much to strike a balance between my child’s goals and free time? How do tutoring sessions fit into the study schedule laid out?

While tutoring is incredibly valuable, your son or daughter can make a lot of progress on his or her own. See if you can find a tutoring program that emphasizes self-study. A good tutor can direct your son or daughter on what to study and where to find the appropriate resources. That way tutoring sessions can focus on the things your son and daughter needs help with that they can’t learn on their own.

I’ve designed a free program that allows students to figure out exactly what their knowledge gaps are, so they can study exactly those things they’re missing. The program gives students a benchmark and automatically tells them what they should study.

The study plan includes relevant links to each topic. The content has detailed explanations and practice problems tailored to studying for the ACT® Test. So your son or daughter save time studying only the things they need to know but don’t already – and it’s all available for free online.

Individualized Attention

Each student is unique. Tutoring should be too! As much as there are content gaps almost all students miss, each student has something particular to him or her that can prevent them from reaching their potential. It’s impossible to discern what the issue is from self-study or an online form.

A tutor should have a way to address the content gaps that are not unique to your son or daughter first. The more content a student sees on his or her own, the more time a tutor can spend working on figuring out the issues a student may have that go beyond just learning the material.

This is one of the most valuable things a tutor can do. One of the main benefits of tutoring is helping a student identify and overcome the obstacles specific to him or her. Sometimes, hearing the content explained in a different way can be helpful. There are other cases when a student doesn’t realize how to implement a reading strategy, for example. Or maybe a student isn’t making as much progress as he or she wants because they’re making the same mistake over and over again.

Standardized tests demand that a student conduct themselves in a way the shows he or she is well-prepared for the rigors of college. A good tutor will ensure your son or daughter is well prepared, both in terms of content and strategic, organizational, and logical thinking.

My tutoring program is designed to help students self-study based on their specific needs. This way, I can spend our time in tutoring sessions helping them with what they don’t know or with what they don’t realize they don’t know.

Building Lasting Skills

When a student has trouble in a certain area on the ACT® Test, he or she tends to have problems in related areas. If your son or daughter struggles with test anxiety, it’s probably not just on the ACT® Test that he or she struggles. Similarly, learning to study efficiently for the ACT® helps a student learn to study efficiently for college and anything he or she may do after. A good tutor will provide more than just content delivery. Sometimes a student needs to hear an idea delivered in a certain way before he or she understands it. That’s a good use of a tutoring session.

There are other related topics that a tutoring session helps solve. See how a tutor can speak to these things when deciding who the best tutor is for your family.

Studying: Your child may study too much or too little. This is often owing to a difficulty in articulating the specific learning outcomes and how each assignment relates to the child’s goal.

Motivation: If a student knows exactly the scope of what he or she needs to study, the organization can be motivating. Rather than feeling like a certain task is interminable, providing measurable goals and self-contained, small units that can be shown to attain a higher score can be really motivating.

Organization: It can also help students understand how to organize his or her studying for college. The ability to define the scope of a project before beginning can also pay dividends in a student’s lifetime.

Higher Level Skills

Students spend all day in school learning. Some kids seem better at this than others. Learning is a skill like any other: your son or daughter can learn to learn. A good tutor will have spent time studying how to learn, so the lessons stick with the student.

Students can make the same mistake over and over again. The solution to this problem is to learn how to do directed practice. Instead of looking at a mistake and saying “I get it now,” which is what a lot of people do, a good tutor will help a student do directed practice.

This can include spending more time to unpack a mistake, practice only on the mistakes a student is making, and doing test corrections slowly. A combination of these techniques help student recall the information on Test Day. These skills are also life-long skills.

Organized Thought

The ACT® Test has a specific way of combining knowledge across domains that encourages critical thought. The Test tends to ask questions that are more than just simple geometry, for example. Instead of just geometry, a math question might involve geometry and algebra. This forces a student to make connections between classes he or she may have never considered.

Despite being a standardized test, there are many ways the ACT® Test forces your students to think differently than the way a student learns to think in school. A good tutor will have experience helping students feel comfortable developing and refining these skills.

Specific Skills

The ACT® Tests wants a student to be familiar with all the following content areas. While the below is all high-school level knowledge, you’ll want to find someone who is good at all of these concepts and also adept at explaining them to high school students. Unfortunately, these concepts aren’t taught at every high school.

Grammar

This is one thing students have to learn for the ACT® Test that will stick with them for sure. Schools just don’t teach the grammar that is on the ACT® Test. This is true whether a student goes to a public or private school, domestic or abroad. The Test focuses on comma usage, punctuation, antecedents, and subject verb agreement. Most students are familiar with these terms. Over 50% of any English test is rote grammar.

Rhetoric

Few students have had enough experience writing to already know the sort rhetoric the ACT® Test wants them to know. Learning this helps improve their writing skills, which will help for all of the papers they write in college.

It also carries over when students eventually join the work force and have to communicate daily in writing. The Test focuses on concise expression, logical organization of sentences and paragraphs, and whether or not including a certain phrase affects an outcome.

Math

The math on the ACT® Test tends not to be too complex. Questions include algebra, functions, geometry, probability, and properties of numbers. A lot of students miss two things on the ACT® Math: 1) Keeping positive and negative signs straight, and 2) reading the question. The reason students miss the first is because the ACT® Test creates questions that force students to be careful with the signs.

One misplaced negative sign is all it takes for students to get the whole question wrong. The reason students struggle with reading the question is because they’re not used to reading on a math test. Most ACT® Math questions involve a question with at least 2 sentences. There are also more advanced topics in math that students may need a refresher on.

The challenge to think about math across different domains can help all students in life. The benefits apply to doing percents while shopping to find the best value to using basic geometry and algebra for construction or sewing.

Reading

A lot of students struggle with reading. The best solution is to have a student read more. While the ACT® Test doesn’t use overly complicated words that much, some students struggle to either read all of the passages in time or know all of the words on the page. It’s impractical to expect all students to simply read more since most don’t have the luxury of time before a test date.

Tutoring in reading can go a long way to help for the test and in life. The key concept for most students is strategy in deciding which passage to do first Difference between skimming and scanning The types of questions the ACT® Reading Test asks Strategy for order of answering questions.

A lot of these strategies are things an adult does any way when browsing the internet, reading all of their emails, or researching something for work.

Science

Science is easy. Students freak out because the section is called science. It’s not high school biology, chemistry or physics. The ACT® Test wants students to read graphs and charts. That’s the majority of the Science Test. This can be really helpful when watching the news, seeing a graph on social media, or learning more about a certain product or service.

The Science section is very repetitive in asking students to identify labels, axes, and values. Once students are trained in thinking about data in this way, spotting misleading charts becomes second nature.

Writing

The writing is optional. Most elite colleges recommend the essay. After learning to think about grammar and rhetoric from the English Test and reading comprehension for the Reading, most students are well-equipped for the Writing Test.

You’ll still want to find someone who can express him or herself clearly. This person is more likely to be able to help your student on the ACT® Test.

Resources for Students

There’s more to tutoring than meeting with a tutor. A good tutor can help find you resources that fit your situation. Sometimes, it’s the 90% of content on my website. I designed a grader that takes students through the content so they can focus on the lessons that matter.

If a student needs more help, direct them to Khan Academy. This is for more fundamental issues, like algebra or understanding a subject and a verb. Link: Free Resources There are a ton of books. I’ve even helped write some of them. A good tutor knows what books are good and which aren’t.

For advanced students, it’s very hard because the marginal cost of each point goes up by a lot. Meaning, the difference between a 35 and 36 on the math is hard – they’re both often in the 99th percentile (the scale for the Math Test changes from test to test). There are good advanced resources more than just planning your academic classes. A good tutor will also be to provide them based on the student’s situation.

Expert Tutoring Advice

There are a lot of really good tutoring companies in existence. My tutoring business started with a question I didn’t think any of them were answering. Parents rightly want to receive the best value for the money they’re paying. How do you provide the best value for parents and students at every single step?

Free, individualized, self-study resources for students. Data-driven, precise, proven tutoring plans to deliver the requisite number of sessions, but no more. As much information available to parents as possible: on my website, live over the phone, and detailed notes for each session.

Dedicated to Tutoring

Look for somebody who is dedicated to tutoring. There are a lot of tutoring companies. Most of them are really good. Sometimes, other companies employ less experienced tutors. The less-experienced tutors will rely more on the content the company has prepared, which in most cases is very strong. The downside to this is that the content may not be specific to your son or daughter’s needs.

Tutoring is all I do. I’ve been tutoring professionally since 2016. I have a teaching certificate, a CELTA from Cambridge University. I also have my bachelors from New York University.

Highly Reviewed

Look for reviews, not only on the company’s website. Yelp, Google, BBB, Forums, friends. When a tutor is really helpful for your student, you’re likely to sign their praises. That’s true of other parents too – and it’s part of the reason those parents leave reviews. Link: Reviews

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