Specific tutoring: a strategy for promoting educational success in three middle-schools

In the context of the creation of conditions that favour the learning success and the students’ development, the “specific mentoring” or “self-regulatory” mentoring, are structured as a programme proposed by the Portuguese Ministry of Education to be applied to students between the fifth and ninth grades with two or more retentions (DN 4-A/2016). In this alignment, the study we now present consists of an analysis of the reality boosted and developed in three middle-schools in the Oporto region (Portugal), in order to better understand the effects of this programme in/for the educational success of the tutored students. With this purpose, we proceeded to the conceptual and theoretical clarification, using the theoretical, normative and conceptual referential associated with the learning self-regulation. At the methodological level, we carried out an investigation strategy of qualitative nature, in the form of a “case study” and, therefore, inscribed in the logic of studying the particular, specific and unique (Yin, 1989), trying to understand the pedagogical advantages of the programme and its practical effects in the learning success of the tutored students. The data gathered and analysed using the techniques of collection, production and interpretation of results (e.g. document analysis, questionnaire, interview, focus group and free observation), allowed us to deduct the alignment and pedagogical validity of the programme to promote school success. In fact, the studies in general and ours in particular, concerning the tutoring programme in a school environment relate the high quality and prolonged relationship with improvements on a personal, academic and behavioural level (Alarcão & Simões, 2009; DuBois, Holloway, Valentine & Cooper, 2002; Fletcher, 2005; Raposa, et al., 2019), being the learning gains more evident in students at risk.