Abstract
Peer tutoring may promote not only deeper comprehension of subjects, but also everyday use of more effective learning strategies. The purpose of the present study was to develop a peer-tutoring program and evaluate its effects on the quality of peer-tutoring interactions and students’ learning strategy use. A preliminary program was implemented in 1 high school during the 2010 academic year. Although it was emphasized that the goal of peer tutoring is to deepen the understanding of both the tutor and the tutee, and instructions were provided on skills needed for peer tutoring, the student participants’ questions and explanations tended to be superficial, and the tutors rarely checked their tutees’ understanding of the tutors’ explanations. It is possible that these problems were caused by the students’ “instruction-learning schema”, which could have portrayed the view that “tutors teach fragments of knowledge or procedural solutions through one-way instruction”. On the basis of that hypothesis, a new program was developed that aimed to change students’ schema into “tutors teach the relations between knowledge components interactively with their tutees”. During the 2012 academic year, 8 classes of public high school students (n=320) participated in the new program, which consisted of 6 one-hour sessions of lectures and peer tutoring. Analysis of the students’ interactions revealed that the students asked and explained the relationships between knowledge components, and their comprehension test scores improved. In addition, the students’ daily use of effective learning strategies, such as an explanation strategy, increased after they experienced the program.
