Academia
In British academic parlance, a tutorial is a small class of one, or only a few, students, in which the tutor (a lecturer or other academic staff member) gives individual attention to the students. The tutorial system at Oxford and Cambridge is fundamental to methods of teaching at those universities, but it is by no means peculiar to them; Heythrop College (University of London), for instance, also offers a tutorial system with one on one teaching. It is rare for newer universities in the UK to have the resources to offer individual tuition; six to eight (or even more) students is a far more common tutorial size. At Cambridge, a tutorial is known as a supervision. The Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, founded in 1972, is the only degree-granting institution in the United States where students take weekly tutorials throughout their education.
In some Canadian universities, such as the University of Waterloo or the University of Toronto, a tutorial refers to something more like a recitation in an American university, that is, a class of between 12-18 students that is supplemental to a large lecture course, which gives students the opportunity to discuss the lectures and/or additional readings in smaller groups. These tutorials are often led by graduate students, normally known as "Teaching Assistants" (TAs), though it is not unknown for the primary instructor of a course, even if a full professor, to take a tutorial. At Princeton University, these tutorials are known as preceptorials and are led by preceptors. Woodrow Wilson developed the preceptorial system, intending it to be the main form of teaching.
In Australian and New Zealand universities, a tutorial (colloquially called a tute) is a class of 10–30 students. Such tutorials are very similar to the Canadian system, although tutorials are usually led by honours or postgraduate students, known as 'tutors'.
At the two campuses of St. John's College, U.S. and a few other American colleges with a similar version of the Great Books program, a "tutorial" is a class of 12 - 16 students who meet regularly with the guidance of a tutor. The tutorial focuses on a certain subject area (e.g. mathematics tutorial, language tutorial) and generally proceeds with careful reading of selected primary texts and working through associated exercises (e.g., demonstrating an Euclid proof or translating ancient Greek poetry). Since formal lectures do not play a large part in the St. John's College curriculum, the tutorial is the primary method by which certain subjects are studied. However, at St. John's the tutorial is considered ancillary to the seminar, in which a slightly larger group of students meets with two tutors for broader discussion of the particular texts on the seminar list.
Some US colleges, such as Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, offer tutorials almost identical in structure to that of an Oxbridge tutorial. At Williams, students in tutorials typically work in pairs alongside a professor and meet weekly, alternately presenting position papers or critiques of their partner's paper.
Read more about this topic: Tutorial