A substantial research base indicates the value of one on one tutoring. Usually those studies involved a trained specialist or instructor providing intensive instruction to the tutees. Peer tutoring hasn't shown as strong of effects but the effects can be quite positive. In traditional school settings, we see age-mates and cross-age tutors used in instructional tasks. Again, the results can be quite beneficial for both participants.
How is peer tutoring used in your instructional practices? In which academic content or skills instruction do you have a peer tutoring activity?
As fluid as enrollment is within many programs, maintaining a peer tutoring relationship might be quite challenging. Perhaps you have found some procedures that support the continued interactions or maybe you expect switching among the tutor and tutees. What works best in your setting?
Lots of opportunity for creating more intense instructional activities and peer tutoring could be one alternative. I hope you'll share your experiences, positive and negative!
Comments
Daryl and all: In 1983-1986 colleagues and I developed a 45 hour reading program for the U. S. Navy which integrated teachers, books, computers, and peer instruction. This was an early model of what today would be called a blended classroom because of the integration of computer based instruction into the classroom.
However, in addition to an area in the classroom where students worked on computers, we blended in a special area with a large table that could hold up to four students, one on each side. At this table peers worked together to complete complex tasks such as flow-charting the four life-saving skills used in emergency medical care. This component of instruction helped the students learn oracy skills of questioning each other providing spoken directions to one another and understanding how others of their classmates think. This is important in a work-related situation when teams need to work together. The peers also developed and used written language skills to read and comprehension written information about the life saving procedures and writing to fill in the circles, diamonds, arrows, etc used in constructing flow charts or in some cases constructing tables from written paragraphs with various types of equipment descriptions and uses.
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In addition to the computer and peer instruction areas, the classroom blended in an area with smaller tables for independent self-study of texts in specially constructed books which were all contextualized in the work knowledge the students needed in their work.
And finally, one area of the classroom was used by the teacher to blend in small group instruction for students.
While we were not able to evaluate the separate contributions of each of the classroom components to learning in the course, we did evaluate the performance of our students against an existing general basic skills course provided by the local community college. We found that our students made higher scores on work-related reading tests than did the community college students who used general reading materials. Our lowest scoring students also made as much gain as the lowest performing community college remedial students on the Gates-MacGinitie general reading test, though the community college higher scoring students scored higher on the post-tests than our work-related students did.
For the U. S. Navy, the work-related gains in reading skills were more highly desired because it helped their personnel score better on correspondence courses which they needed to pass to get promoted to higher paying manager positions.
Tom Sticht