Instructional Principle: Students tutoring other students can lead to improved academic performance both for the tutor and for the tutee.
Students who experience difficulty with instructional objectives often need more individual assistance than the teacher alone can provide. Peer tutoring can help solve this staffing problem. Not only does the student being tutored benefit from this process, but the tutor usually benefits as well. Teachers are not surprised at this discovery. Indeed, they have often noticed that they themselves understand a topic thoroughly only after they have been required to explain it to someone else.
Peer tutoring works best when the tutors receive structured guidelines and materials from the teacher or from a guidebook (including instructions on how to give feedback), when the instruction focuses on an important basic skill, and when the tutoring covers a relatively short duration of instruction (a few weeks or months). An excellent source of information on peer tutoring is Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik (1982).
One obvious way to use the computer with peer tutoring is simply to let the knowledgeable peer sit next to the student who is running the computer program and provide supplementary tutoring and feedback as necessary. Moreover, older students can monitor computer laboratories in which younger students are working. When properly instructed, these lab assistants can both troubleshoot hardware and software problems and answer questions raised by the younger students. Any sort of group work at the computer can be turned into effective peer tutoring, provided the students interact productively with one another. Many teachers have discovered that the enforced necessity to share computer resources actually leads to an opportunity for tutoring and for cooperative learning, which is described next.
Simply pairing students up and letting the slower learners watch the brighter ones solve problems at the terminal is not a useful form of tutoring. It is necessary to instruct the students in effective modes of interacting at the terminals so that everyone thinks about what they're doing and benefits from the input and feedback that occurs at the computer.
Peer Tutoring
Peer Tutoring
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/atrisk/at6lk20.htm
Summary of research from NCREL.
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