Overview | chem-peer-tutoring2

At the beginning of each academic year, we discuss potential strategies which might enhance overall student achievement and, more specifically, sharpen their ability to solve complex chemistry problems. Collectively, it is our experience that proper modeling and actual practice are key components to content retention and success in any chemistry course. While we all incorporate these critical components into our daily direct instruction, it is always a challenge to encourage students to replicate our efforts at home on their own.

This year, we decided to provide extra modeling and practice in the form of regularly scheduled, student-led, peer tutor sessions. In traditional brick-and-mortar environments, peer tutoring has been shown to provide several academic and social benefits including, but not limited to the following (1):

OurProposal

While such diversity can be found at any brick-and-mortar school district, this profile is remarkably descriptive of our community at Agora Cyber Charter School.

We explored various models for peer tutoring (3):

Classwide Peer Tutoring

This method involves dividing the entire class into groups of two to five students with differing ability levels. Students then act as tutors, tutees, or both tutors and tutees.The entire class participates several times each week.

Cross-Age Peer Tutoring

Older students are paired with younger students to teach or review a skill. The positions of tutor (older student) and tutee (younger student) do not change.

Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies

Here, a teacher pairs students who need additional instruction or help with a peer who can assist. Groups are flexible and change often across a variety of subject areas or skills. All students have the opportunity to function as a tutor or tutee at differing times.

Recipricol Peer Tutoring

Two or more students alternate between acting as the tutor and tutee during each session, with equitable time in each role.

Same-Age Peer Tutoring

In this type of tutoring, peers who are within one or two years of age are paired to review key concepts.

Since the students enrolled in our chemistry courses range from high school freshman to high school seniors, the content is specific, and the resource would be available outside of class time, we began designing our program by considering variations on the same-age peer tutoring model.

Finally, prior to devising a detailed program, we consulted with the students enrolled in the accelerated, honors level of the same chemistry course to determine if we could provide confident tutors who showed mastery of the content. Once that was verified, it became clear that training our tutors would be necessary. According to established research, the selection and training of tutors is critical to the ultimate success of the program; studies have shown that trained tutors had significantly higher success than a control group of tutors who were not trained (4). Proper training would include an emphasis on confidentiality, providing positive reinforcement, allowing adequate response time when asking questions, watching for and correcting mistakes, and providing positive feedback and encouragement (1).

Using all of the aforementioned research as a guide, we created a strategy we believed would be most effective in and supportive of our virtual classrooms.

Most documented research describes peer tutor programs which serve to advance math and reading skills among students. In these studies, academic gains are reported for the following populations of students (2):