As an accomodation does peer tutoring really work?

Peer tutoring has been on my son’s IEP for two years. Last year it worked great! This year he just ended up with alot of bosses.

From my observations by watching these classes in progress, we have an open door policy, it worked best when the students naturally chose each other. Then end up working as a team using each other strenghts. The friendship and respect each other receive makes a great team.

This year on the other hand the teacher use of peer tutoring end up being a way for the teacher not to have to deal with him. His peer tutor was the child who happen to be next to him at the time. Their was not a bond or respect between each other and neither learned anything from each other. The teacher had a way out of helping him by useing his IEP against him. No one benefitted. Sorry if it seem I am being hard on the teacher but it was not a good match as far as teacher and student match either.

If they naturally chosed each other the LD in our case my son never felt least than or less knowledgable. He enjoyed the support.

It was this year when he did not work with a compatable student, it did makes him feel less than because it was not teamwork he felt ordered and pushed.

I have all these images running through my head of all the ways it works but it is hard to put in words. I can only come up with natural. Peer tutoring works when they find eachother otherwise I would not recommend it.

I have taken peer tutoring off my son’s IEP for next year. It was not use properly this last year but I would not discourage it if he finds someone that enjoys being around him and does not mind sharing their knowledge.

Any child that is not comfortable with teaching reguardless of their knowledge should never be asked to be a peer tutor. They will cause self esteem damage to an LD student without realizing it.

It needs to be a mutual agreement that happens naturally. Not pre-arranged.

My observation of my son at 6 and at 7 yrs.

I would just add my support for what Anne has outlined.

Peer tutoring is very popular with teachers and school administrations because:
(a) it is absolutely free
(b) it gets *two* students (or more if there are more pairs) off their workload
(c) it requires no extra work or time or preparation

In particular as a math and remedial reading and handwriting teacher, I am *absoliutely against* peer tutoring in 99 cases out of 100.
Why? Because peer tutoring most often results in sharing misconceptions, cheap tricks, bad habits, and often out-and-out errors, as well as time wasted in non-academics.
As a teacher I spend ages and ages teaching kids to work out their algebra step by step; then the peer tells the kid he can do it so much faster by just shoving this number here and that one there and flipping the sign. Heck, it works this once — of course he than fails every test from then on by sliding around the wrong numbers and flipping the wrong signs, but that’s his problem. I spend ages and ages teaching the kid a systematic way of sounding out words; then the peer teaches him to “read” faster by skipping over all the little words, what the heck, it looks good for a month or two, and who cares that he has to re-learn reading all over next year. I spend ages and ages teaching a consistent, rhythmic, ordered handwritng; then the peer teaches him a “cute” or “fast” way to form a couple of letters and what the heck, the stuff can still more or less be read, who cares that he starts reversing things and messing up his spelling again?
Tonight I just once again was reviewing my thirteen-year-old student for his final tonight; I just for the fifth time this year told him that it is NOT a rule, it is WRONG that “two negatives make a positive” (only true in two limited cases out of five or six possible, and a “rule” that is WRONG more than half the time is a lousy excuse for a rule — but then he goes back to the peer tuutor who tells him that is a much quicker way to do it, and the peer doesn’t suffer when my student fails his tests and has to take summer school, does he?
One time I was talking with a parent about this issue. Her boy was very gifted, in a very good private school, and was chosen to be on the school’s quiz team for a TV show when he was only in Grade 4 and the rest of the team in Grades 5 and 6. Well, some of the questions included fraction arithmetic, which the older kids had done but this boy had not yet met in his program. So the other boys “helped” him to learn how to do it. Of course they showed him all the “quick tricks” — this was for a quiz show after all. She said it took two years of tutoring to get his math straightened out again.

The one exception I’ve seen, where so-called “peer tutoring” actually did some good, was in three well-organized junior college tutoring centers where the tutors were hired on the basis of excellent grades in the subject and treated the tutoring as a job, outside of class. The students learned from peers who actually knew the material, and the tutors learned the subjects in more depth as they explained them. I worked as a “peer tutor” in high school and much later as an adult returning to university, both again outside of class time, and this helped both me and the other students.
In one of those same colleges there was a separate developmental math tutoring room where the tutors had done the same developmental math classes, ie they were also four years behind in math, and unfortunately they mostly shared ignorance; barely scraping through basic algebra is not a good background for making the concepts clear to anyone else.

I often ask, if any random six- or ten-year-old in the next seat can teach the subject, why do we have professional teacher education and certification and why are teachers paid wages? Heck, we could just put all the ten-year-olds in one room and let them get on with it, right?

(Actually, some of the radical unschoolers suggested exactly this. If you have a caring educated parent and a kid who wants to learn, unstructured education is not necessarily bad. But the totally open schools generally degenerated academically very fast. Amazingly enough, teachers do teach and are needed.)

I mostly think it is a cheap thing to do where they can say “see we are doing something”. One application I see is for “peers” work with fairly well behaved but severely disabled kids. They get to know an individual child helping to alter stereotypes, while the disabled kid gets a normally behaved, language peer to imitate.

I don’t think that’s usually the situation.

—des

I wonder…

Do peers count as “highly qualifierd” istructors under NCLB?

wow I even use the word and never really thought of it that way. Teaching! That is probably why it went wrong this year. The class teacher was not doing the teaching but was leaving it to the student next to him. She change all seats every month.

I think the wording should be changed maybe to peer support. The reason I think I worked better the year before is because it was not about teaching him the lesson. He had a very good supporting teacher who did not mind repeating lessons to him.

His helper only repeated or reread the instructions as each section was completed when the teacher was busy with another student. Otherwise she/the teacher repeated the directions. There was only three students out of 21 that where to do this for him and it was not advertised. They the students did it on their own. The teacher realized their support and rotation them having one of them next to him at sometime during the year. These where his friends and did not mind their help.

In the spirit of “accommodations” peer support can be a good thing. Tutor is probably a bad word to use - if the student really needs a tutor, especially because of an LD, then that sounds like he needs more than an accommodation; he needs different instruction.

If he’s really close to being successful on his own and the “peer tutor” is merely a formalilzation of what a lot of students do anyway — fill in gaps in each others’ memories for those steps along the way — then fine.

If it’s yet another “hey, if we do this he’ll get more answers right on the homework - who gives a flip whether he learns it or not - and that might boost his grade enough to compensate for failing the tests, so we can pass him along” — he’d be better taking Librarian Assistantship for that period and working on Math independently at home.

I am a resource teacher currently in an elementary setting but also with experience in middle and high school. I am a big proponent of peer assisted learning or “tutoring.” I have used this method in all of my classes with excellent results.

Actually, there has been quite a bit of research on the benefits of peer tutoring, if done correctly. In one study a classroom of students helping other students was found to be an efficient and effective method of enhancing achievement. Twenty teachers participated in a study of classwide peer tutoring with 40 classrooms in elementary and middle schools. Half of the schools implemented classwide peer tutroing programs and half did not. Both urban and suburban school participated in the study. Students cam fro diverse backgrounds, both culturalluy and linguistically. There were three different categroes of students: average achievers, low achievers without learning disabilitites, and low achievers with learning disabilitites. The peer tutoring programs were conducted three days a week. 35 minutes a day, for 15 weeks. Stronger students were paired with weaker students. Teachers reveiwed each pair to ensure they were socially compatible. In all pairs, students took turns serving in the roles of tutor and student. Student pairs worked together for four weeks; then teachers arranged new pairings. Teachers recevied training on how to train their student to be tutors. Tutor training included teachng students how to correct each other’s tutoring program. Regardless of whether students were average achievers or low achievers, with or without learning disabilitits, students in the peer tutoring classrooms achieved higher levels than those in the classrooms without classwide peer tutoring.

Of course there are caveats - not every student will be a good tutor, they must be properly trained. Lastly, there may be classes into which a tutoring system simply doesn’t fit. Classes with discipline problems or classes with homogeneous learners may not provide the best setting to begin a tutoring program.

Further research was completed by:

Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L., Mathes, P.G., & Simmons, D. (1977). Peer-assisted learning strategies: making classrooms more responsive to diversity. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 174-206.

The trouble with the study, imo, is there is no control which might be something like some other type of nonspecific attention. And there is no comparison with something known to be highly effective, ie OG. It might be just getting some kind of attention is better than nothing. For example, I have read that reading to dogs helps kids read. Well I am just crazy about dogs (and cats as well) but do I think that it is an effective strategy in the same league as OG? I don’t.

I think if you do something it is generally better than nothing, but this doesn’t really convince me that it is a good (or the best) intervention.

—des

I think we are comparing apples and oranges here.
The program Chuck describes is more a cooperative learning program, and while I have my questions about use of limited time, such approaches can be useful **with kids who can already read and do math** at least somewhere within the range of their class.
On the other hand, for the student who is having serious difficulty with basic skills, we are talking a whole different situation. Peers can;t help and may do a lot of harm on these cases.

Des,

I’m sorry for not including a number of other studies. The issue of peer tutoring actually has quite a bit of research based data to support it. You may want to look at “Askeric” for further studies. The problem I encounter is that the correct methodology for effective intervention is not used in many classrooms which questions its efficacy. Another well researched study is:

King, A., Staffeiri, A., & Adelgais, A. (1998). Mutual peer tutoring: Effects of structuring tutorial interaction to scaffold peer learning. Journal of Educational Pyschology, 90(1) 134-152.

Chuck

My experience has been that, like many other methods & innovations (inclusion especially), peer tutoring **when done right** can be a useful & wonderful thing, **for many but not all students.** While statistically speaking, students with or without disabilities do better with peer tutoring than without (tho’ I won’t begin to go into the Hawthorn Effect possibilities or myriad other potential flaws), if it’s my kiddo that has a learning style issue or, more likely, has the social skills to turn the peer tutoring into work avoidance, then peer tutoring isn’t good for him, and I’m going to ask that he not be included. (I do recognize that anxiety issues are usually *better* with peer tutoring, though.)
A huge question is whether the peers get training, supervision, and/or feedback & accountability.
Peer tutoring is huge in college; an awful lot of research indicates that training those tutors makes or breaks it (especially in math where there can be several approaches to what’s the same mathematical problem, in different contexts).