The concept and name of "lecture tutorials" are not original but come from Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Geoscience (2012) by Kortz and Smay. These authors define a lecture tutorial as "a short worksheet that students complete in class, making the lecture more interactive."

Tutorials were added to a specific course to incorporate interactivity, hold student attention throughout a class session, improve student understanding, and increase attendance. The results are presented in more detail in the Instructors Notes, but adding tutorials to lectures has generally accomplished the goals listed above. The number of lectures with tutorials has increased since the first term of use.

This activity contains 26 tutorials, one for each lecture in the course. However, not every tutorial is used in every semester; they are rotated from year to year. Some tutorials are used but not collected for grading.

The accompanying PowerPoint slides may be incorporated into the lectures. These slides are written for the clicker option but can also be used with physical handouts after some modification.

Tutorial content is not graded because the answers are discussed in class. However, each tutorial is assigned 1 or 0 points for completion or omission of the work. Tutorials typically account for 3-7% of the total course grade, depending on the number of tutorials and the other elements of the course.