Reading Gains for Underachieving Tutors and Tutees in a Cross‐age Tutoring Programme

Abstract

A cross-age peer tutoring programme in reading is described in which three underachieving 10- to 11-year-old students tutored three underachieving 6- to 8-year-old students. The programme, a modification of the 'paired-reading' technique of Morgan and Lyon, involved both concurrent modelling of correct reading and praise for reading independently by peer tutors. When given general instructions to help, tutors did provide some assistance, but specific training was necessary before appropriate tutoring behaviours were used. Both tutees showed marked improvements in oral reading and comprehension on classroom exercises and standardised reading tests.

Preliminary empirical model of crucial determinants of best practice for peer tutoring on academic achievement.

“…This procedure reduced the undue impact of these outliers on the subsequent effect size analyses, but their large sizes were still accounted for (Durlak & Lipsey, 1991;Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001). In the present investigation, there were only two positive outliers with extreme effect sizes of 3.68 (Limbrick, McNaughton, & Glynn, 1985) and 5.47 (Mackiewicz, Wood, Cooke, & Mazzotti, 2010). After these two extreme effect sizes were winsorized, the unweighted mean effect size for the 72 independent samples as the unit of analysis was 0.59 (SD = 0.58).…”

Paired reading: a review of the literature

“…Lee concluded that there was evidence that changes in reading style accruing from a brief cross-age peer-tutor project showed no signs of wash-out at long-term follow-up, even though no tutoring had occurred in the interim. Limbrick et al (1985) deployed three tutors aged 10-11 years with three tutees aged 6-8 years, all of whom were retarded in reading. The tutors and tutees read graded passages taken from classroom reading materials and answered comprehension questions based upon them.…”

“…Turning to process studies of peer-tutored paired reading, Limbrick et al (1985) collected very detailed process data on three pairs in which tutors were aged 10-11 years and tutees 6-8 years, using a minor modification of the paired reading technique. Pre-training baseline measures and post-training measures were made of: amount of discussion, praise for correct responses, praise for independent reading, attention to errors, supplying of unknown words, eliciting positive responses, and avoiding negative comments.…”

Peer Group Tutoring to Improve Reading

“…Relaxed reading (Lindsay et al, 1985), paired reading (Morgan, 1976;Morgan & Lyon, 1979;Topping, 1987) and pause, prompt and praise (McNaughton et al, 1987) are systems which have been developed to provide support and enhance the progress of low-progress readers. Most of these schemes started by using adults (mostly parents) as tutors in the first place but all have now been used successfully using peers or cross-age peers as tutors (see for example Limbrick et al, 1985;Wheldall & Mettem, 1985;Greening & Spenceley, 1987;Merrett et al, 1987;Atherley, 1989;Houghton & Glynn, 1993).…”