Peer Tutoring

Description of the Strategy

Children routinely exchange information with slightly older or more knowledgeable peers, transmitting information and modeling practical skills. Peer tutoring refers to a student instructing a classmate under teacher supervision. Most applications of peer tutoring stretch the concept of “peer” to include tutoring between students of approximately the same age or grade level and cross-age or reverse-role tutoring, in which tutoring pairs may differ considerably in age or academic status.

While the general conception of peer tutoring suggests that the tutor be more competent than the tutee, in many peer tutoring models, tutors and tutees consist of randomly assigned same-age classmates or sameage low achievers. Likewise, while most peer-tutoring models utilize dyads, other models utilize teams of three or more ...