Peer Tutoring

Peer tutoring is an instructional strategy that uses pairs of students to teach one another academic skills. Peer tutoring has been used successfully across a wide range of students, subject areas, educational settings, and grade levels. It is a promising strategy for diverse students including low income, ethnic minority, and language minority students. This strategy has been implemented to enhance student learning in the areas of mathematics, reading, spelling, social studies, science, and history. Peer tutoring has been used in regular and special education settings with students of all abilities and grade levels. As opposed to more traditional teacher-led models of instruction, peer tutoring has the advantage of engaging students in active rather than passive learning. It enables the classroom teacher to serve as a facilitator, moving around the classroom as students are engaged in learning with their peers.

The documented effects of peer tutoring include increases in academic skills, on-task behavior, social skills, self-concept, and academic motivation. The components of peer tutoring include providing structure so that students have well-defined roles, interdependent reward contingencies in which both students' contributions enable them to earn team rewards, evaluation on the basis of individual student progress, and opportunities for self-management.

Two well-researched models of peer tutoring applied to whole classrooms include Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (RPT) and Classwide Peer Tutoring (CWPT). RPT was originally developed by Fantuzzo and colleagues for pairs of low-achieving urban elementary school students. RPT uses a structured format and a student-managed group reward contingency, and provides opportunities for students to alternate between tutor and tutee roles. RPT has been effectively used in the context of elementary school mathematics education with students in grades three through five, although it may be modified for other purposes. CWPT was developed by Greenwood and other researchers from the Juniper Gardens Children's Project at the University of Kansas, and can be [Page 379]applied to classrooms of students within the same grade level. The core features of CWPT include reciprocal teaching, curriculum, tutor training, and motivational strategies that include team competition (Greenwood & colleagues, 2002). CWPT has been used in both elementary and secondary school settings and has been applied to reading, spelling, and mathematics education with positive results.

Two additional evidence-based models of peer tutoring developed on the basis of CWPT are Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) (Fuchs & colleagues, 1996) and Classwide Student Tutoring Teams (CSTT) (Maheady & colleagues, 1991). PALS includes some additional peer teaching strategies and can be linked to computerized curriculum-based measurement evaluation programs. PALS has been used quite successfully to enhance elementary school reading and mathematics instruction. CSTT was developed to support secondary level instruction in mathematics, social studies, science, and history. CSTT combines the peer teaching procedures of CWPT with aspects of the Teams-Games-Tournaments model (TGT) (Devries & Slavin, 1978), which uses mixed ability teams of four to five students in team competition.

Overall, peer tutoring is a promising evidence-based strategy for enhancing student learning in diverse classrooms.