Forms and benefits of applying peer tutoring

Abstract

In order to discover the many types of peer tutoring trends, reviewing summaries about the directions (Topping, 2005) and the grouping of types of peer learning (Zeneli et al., 2018), also studies concerning specific development programs have great relevance. The purpose of the present research is to explore some forms of applying peer tutoring and to examine which fields of education investigate these types of learning. Peer tutoring is a student driven and teacher facilitated learning process (Schilling et al., 2019), and one of its main features is that one student teaches the other (Alwi et al., 2019). Peer tutoring can be characterized as same-age or cross-age tutoring, when student pairs’ relationships are concerned (Batz et al., 2015). Based on the number of participants peer tutoring can be: class-wide or paired-assisted learning (Zeneli et al., 2018). Regarding peers’ roles there are two types of peer tutoring: fixed (Alwi et al., 2019) and reciprocal (Youde, 2020) tutoring. Another form is based on the way of choosing students for tutor’s and student’s role: achievement based (Alwi et al., 2019) or random (Tsuei et al., 2020) selection of pairs. When the impact of development is considered two types of tutoring can be found: supported by control group (Ding & Harskamp, 2011) or without control group (Alegre et al., 2020). Peer tutoring develops students’ skills in the areas of science (Batz et al., 2015), mathematics (Alegre et al., 2020), and reading comprehension (Tsuei et al., 2020). It can contribute to the improvement of affective conditions of learning, such as self-concept (Hanze et al., 2018) and learning motivation (Srivastava & and Rashid, 2018), as well as to the development of social behavior (Bowman-Perrot, 2014).