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The School of Medicine of The University Walter Sisulu trains competent doctors to serve South Africa's rural communities with a view to improving the health conditions in historically impoverished areas. The admissions policy caters for students from schools where teaching materials are scarce, which is a challenge for both, students and tutors. In this paper we share experiences tutoring basic sciences medical students as well as explore the skills that these students value more in their tutors. Small tutorial groups are cooperative learning units where an educational environment encouraging students to learn may be developed. The problem challenges individual knowledge because it generates the need to improve it; this cognitive dimension of the process occurs in and as a result of students' interactions, which add a powerful social dimension to this learning approach. The tutor, with her/his actions, should ensure that the enthusiasm engendered by the problem is channeled into the search for its solution, the quality of which, depends on each individual's effort and responsibility to achieve this collective goal. The students rated important the skills that they regularly assess in their tutors, their favorites being those that facilitate the development of cognitive strategies favoring the quality of learning (horizontal and vertical integration). Tutor's skills regarding the collaborative component of the tutorial process were given less importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of this century, University has been experiencing a profound transformation. In this framework, the guidance and tutoring are a major issue in Higher Education. The modern Life designing conception highlights two fundamental factors: the commitment of the person in the construction of the life-project through systematic reflection and the need for professional support in different forms and contexts: a challenge for reflection and creative response of guidance and mentoring at universities. This is why innovations in tutoring are so numerous, promoted at universities either by teachers or by governance in order to achieve the implementation of guidance and tutoring systems, based on new technologies and scientific developments that respond to identified needs. This is generating an innovative dynamics and a structural renovation at universities, achieving a better Higher Education quality. Thus, the studies included in this paper constitute a mosaic of intervention practices in University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]