Effects of peer tutoring and consequences on the math performance of elementary classroom students.
Pair students as math tutors, add small prizes for correct answers, and watch accuracy and speed rise.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Fourth- and fifth-grade kids tutored each other on math worksheets. Some days they worked alone. Other days they worked in pairs and could earn small prizes for correct answers.
The teacher switched the two setups day by day so the team could see which one worked better.
What they found
Kids solved more problems and got more answers right when they tutored peers and could earn prizes. The gains carried over to similar problems the next week.
Even the lowest-skilled students improved when they were the tutor.
How this fits with other research
Hursh et al. (1974) took the idea further. They trained the peer tutors to hand out points and praise, then paid the tutors for doing it well. Math scores stayed high only when the tutors earned points for good supervising, not when the whole group earned points together.
Buskist et al. (1988) kept the prize piece but let every child switch roles daily. One day you monitor, the next day you earn points. Disruptions stayed low and work stayed fast, showing you do not need fixed tutor-learner pairs.
Haas et al. (2019) updated the plan for kids with autism. ClassWide Peer Tutoring and PALS give ready scripts for inclusive rooms. The 1973 study did not include kids with autism, but the flow is the same: pair up, practice, earn small rewards.
Why it matters
You can run peer tutoring in any fourth- or fifth-grade room tomorrow. Pair students, give them answer keys, and add tiny reinforcers for accurate work. Rotate pairs daily and reward both the tutor’s accuracy and the learner’s gains. This keeps math scores up without extra staff.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The effects of unstructured peer-tutoring procedures on the math performance of fourth- and fifth-grade students were investigated. Students' performances in two daily math sessions, during which they worked problems of the same type and difficulty, were compared. When students tutored each other over the same math problems as they subsequently worked, higher accuracies and rates of performance were associated with the tutored math sessions. The use of consequences for accurate performance seemed to enhance the effects of tutoring on accuracy. The results from an independent-study control condition, which was the same peer-tutoring except that students did not interact with each other, suggested that interactions between students during the tutoring procedure were, in part, responsible for improved accuracy and rate of performance. When students tutored each other over different but related problems to those that they were subsequently asked to solve, accuracies and rates during tutored math sessions were also higher, suggesting the development of generalized skills in solving particular types of math problems.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1973 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1973.6-587