Guide for parents · September 2026
Tutor For Learning Gaps Support Built Around Your Child
A learning gap is a specific thing, not a general weakness. What the four kinds are, how they are found, and how to hand one over so it gets closed.
The word "gap" is doing too much work
It gets used for anything a child cannot do, which makes it useless for deciding what to do about it. Four quite different things hide inside it, and they close in different ways and on different timescales.
Never taught. The content did not reach this child. Absence, a chaotic stretch in the classroom, a move between districts with different sequencing, a year where a topic fell off the end of the calendar. There is nothing wrong and nothing to repair — there is something to teach, once, and it usually goes in fast.
Taught but not secured. It was covered, it made sense at the time, and it never became automatic. The child can reconstruct it slowly with effort and cannot produce it on demand, which means it fails whenever it appears as a step inside something larger. This is the most common one and the one most often mistaken for not understanding.
A misconception. A rule was formed that is wrong, and it is being applied consistently and with confidence. Adding the denominators when adding fractions. Simplifying by a factor that is common but not the highest one. Choosing a common denominator that is not common to both. Dropping a sign whenever a negative appears mid-calculation. These are not absences; they are a wrong structure occupying the space where the right one goes, and they have to be dislodged rather than filled.
A conceptual jump not made. The procedure is fine and the idea underneath it never arrived. Percent handled as a separate topic rather than as another way of writing a fraction. Proportion treated as addition. The child performs correctly on familiar formats and fails on anything that requires the idea rather than the steps.
Why gaps do not announce themselves
A gap of the second or fourth kind is almost invisible in ordinary schoolwork, because school keeps supplying the context that hides it. The unit heading tells the child which method to use. The examples on the board are still visible. The worksheet contains twelve versions of the same thing, so the first one is worked out and the remaining eleven are imitated.
Remove those supports — a cumulative test, a mixed review, a question written differently, September after a summer — and the gap appears, seemingly out of nowhere. It was there the whole time. What changed is the scaffolding, and that is why a child can be fine in class and lost on an assessment without anyone being dishonest.
Gaps are found backward
There is only one reliable procedure and it runs against the intuition. You do not look at what the child cannot do now. You look at what that thing is built out of, and then at what those things are built out of, until you reach something solid.
| The failure | Check these before anything else |
|---|---|
| Adding fractions with different denominators | Common multiples, equivalent fractions, adding with the same denominator |
| Subtracting fractions | Adding with unlike denominators, equivalence |
| Multiplying fractions | Multiplication and division facts, equivalence |
| Dividing fractions | Multiplying fractions, equivalence |
| Solving an equation | Simplifying expressions, substituting a value |
| Converting between fractions, decimals and percentages | Fraction to decimal, percentage of an amount |
Each row separates causes that look identical from the outside. A child failing at the top of a row might be missing any one of the things on the right, and those are three different weeks of work. Guessing wrong means practicing something that was never the problem, which is how families end up convinced that nothing helps.
The economics of handing it to someone
An hour of tutoring costs the same whether it is spent finding the gap or closing it. That is the entire argument for doing the finding first, and it holds regardless of who does the closing — a tutor, a teacher during office hours, a school intervention block, or you.
A good handoff has four parts and fits on an index card. The specific skill, named as an operation rather than a topic. An example of the actual mistake, in the child's handwriting if possible. What has already been tried and what happened. What the child can do reliably, so the helper knows where the floor is.
Hand that over and the first session starts at the work. Hand over "she's behind in math" and the first session, and often the second, is an assessment you have just paid retail for.
Knowing a gap is closed
Three tests, in increasing order of what they prove.
Can they do it unassisted, with nobody in the room and no example in front of them. Can they do it in a question that does not announce which method to use — mixed in with other kinds, or embedded as one step inside something bigger. Can they still do it after two or three weeks of not touching it.
The third is the one people skip and the only one that distinguishes a closed gap from a rehearsed one. Something practiced to success on Friday and gone by the end of the month was never closed; it was borrowed.
What Pobbi does about gaps specifically
The finding part, which is the part that is expensive to buy and cheap to automate. The math check is twenty questions drawn from eighteen skills, takes about twelve minutes, is free and asks for no card. Six of those skills carry explicit prerequisite lists, so a wrong answer redirects the check downward into what the skill was built from instead of continuing forward.
The result scores each skill it touched and sorts it into three bands — 80 and above is mastered, 50 to 79 is practicing, under 50 is still learning — then names the lowest-scoring skill that other skills depend on. It also records what was asked, answered, correct and skipped, and skipped is worth reading on its own, since a cluster of skips in one area is usually avoidance rather than failure.
Practice afterward starts at the named skill rather than at this week's unit, and responds to a wrong answer with a hint, a smaller question or a comparison instead of the answer.
Its limits are real. It covers the number and algebra chain, not geometry, probability or statistics. It is not aligned to your state's standards or your district's sequence, it is not a tutor, and it is not test preparation. It cannot tell you why a gap exists, only that it does — and if the pattern suggests something structural, that belongs to the school's evaluation process and to qualified professionals, not to software.
Questions about gaps and tutoring
Should the tutor be a teacher?
It helps for explanation and for knowing how schools sequence things. It matters less than whether they will work on the named gap instead of on the current homework, which is the more common failure mode.
The tutor says everything is fine but the grades are not moving.
Ask what they are working on each week. If the answer is the assignments, you are paying for supervised homework, which is a legitimate service and is not gap closure.
How far back is too far back?
There is no such thing as too far back if that is where the solid ground is. Working on grade 5 content with an 8th grader feels wrong and is frequently the fastest route to the 8th grade content.
Can a gap be closed without a tutor at all?
Often, for the second and fourth kinds, if the gap is correctly named and the practice is short and regular. Misconceptions are harder alone, because someone has to notice the wrong rule rather than the wrong answer.