Online chemistry tutors for middle school students

Be honest about what you can actually assess here. Unless you did chemistry yourself and recently, you are not in a position to judge whether an explanation of moles or bonding was any good, and sitting in on a call will not change that. Parents usually end up judging the wrong things instead: whether the tutor seems nice, whether the child came out cheerful, whether an hour felt busy. None of those track the mark. There is one thing you can check from the outside, and it happens to be the thing that matters at this age. What costs marks is a small set of recurring written mistakes, the same three or four turning up test after test. Ask the tutor to keep that list and to send it to you every few weeks. You do not need to understand a single item on it. You only need to see that items leave the list and that new ones are not quietly replacing them at the same rate. That is also the reason this arrangement suits a screen rather than being a compromise on one. The list lives in a shared document instead of in somebody's memory, the child's working is already a photograph or a file rather than a page in a bag, and a fortnight of tests is visible side by side. If a tutor cannot produce anything like that after a month, the lessons may still be pleasant, but you have no way of knowing whether they are working, and neither do they.