Peer tutoring

Now here is an idea you would think might appeal to cash-strapped school districts: peer tutoring. This involves students tutoring slightly younger students (often with a 1 or 2 year age gap). I'll provide some excerpts from an article in the "School Improvement Research Series" which took a look at the current literature:

Both tutors and tutees have been shown to benefit academically from peer and cross-age tutoring in elementary mathematics (Britz, Dixon, and McLaughlin 1989; Damon and Phelps 1989a; Pigott, Fantuzzo, and Clement 1986). Math skills addressed in this research included ratio, proportion, and perspective taking, among others....

Researchers have also noted significant beneficial effects on the language arts achievement of tutors (Rekrut 1992) and especially tutees (Palincsar and Brown 1986; Wheldall and Mettem 1985; Wheldall and Colmar 1990; Giesecke, et al. 1993; and Barbetta, et al. 1991). Language arts areas examined include story grammar, comprehension, identification of sight words, acqusition of vocabulary, and general reading skills. Most of this research involved elementary students (some were middle-schoolers), and positive results were found for both short- and long-term tutoring....

Research studies in the areas of peer and cross-age tutoring in science, social studies, health, and art are too few to permit firm conclusions about the achievement effects of these practices.... However, some positive achievement outcomes were noted (Rosenthal 1994; Bland and Harris 1989; Maheady, Sacca, and Harper 1988; Thurston 1994; and Anliker, et al. 1993).

Studies whose main focus was the affective outcomes produced by peer and cross-age tutoring have generally revealed positive results. These include improved attitudes of younger students toward older ones, increased "internality" of locus of control, and improved school attendance (Raschke, et al. 1988; Dohrn 1994; Imich 1990; and Miller, et al. 1993).

In short, having students teach other students is beneficial, and I can't see how it could cost much (if anything). So why don't schools use peer tutoring?

The cynic in me, steeped in John Gatto's essays, says that they don't want to use peer tutoring because it suggests that, quite possibly, a child can learn from another child (even when the tutor is of elementary school age) better than they can learn in a large group classroom setting, taught by a trained teacher. If the purpose of every institution is to survive and grow, then schools will not promote the concept of peer teaching, because it competes with the notion of certified teachers.

Another reason, of course, is one of practicality. With strict age segregation, you don't have kids mixed together with slightly older kids; they're in different rooms. You would have to go out of your way to mix the rooms together, which would involve coordination between teachers. And the very system of age segregation can only make students wary of students of another age or grade, which might impair the tutoring process (it certainly couldn't help).

Then, there is a belief that older children are dangerous to younger children in some way. When I was in high school, our school district consolidated. The "old building" at the high school became a junior high, while the "new building" became the entire high school. There was parental outrage that the junior high kids would be in proximity to the older kids. I am not sure if it was violence or peer pressure they feared, but it was assumed by all that a strict division between the buildings was of utmost importance, to protect the youngsters. (Frankly, if you set up a system of age segregation in which older students have more antipathy than empathy toward the younger ones, there might be some real cause for concern. But such segregation is an unnatural system.)

Lastly, I suspect parents would not feel they were getting their money's worth and would protest at having their child taught by another student. Regardless of what the literature might suggest about peer tutoring, the certification of teachers implies that educating a child is extremely tricky, a task to be undertaken only by professionals.

It is the schools that have structured themselves using strict age segregation, and the schools which have promoted the idea that an education is a difficult and complex thing to bestow (too complex to make peer tutoring marketable to the community). Thus they may have cut themselves off from a technique which would be (it seems) free, and academically beneficial.