Peer-assisted Learning

Keith Topping, Stewart Ehly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781135686857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) involves children in school consciously assisting others to learn, and in so doing learning more effectively themselves. It encompasses peer tutoring, peer modeling, peer education, peer counseling, peer monitoring, and peer assessment, which are differentiated from other more general "co-operative learning" methods. PAL is not diluted or surrogate "teaching"; it complements and supplements (but never replaces) professional teaching--capitalizing on the unique qualities and richness of peer interaction and helping students become empowered democratically to take more responsibility for their own learning. In this book, PAL is presented as a set of dynamic, robust, effective, and flexible approaches to teaching and learning, which can be used in a range of different settings. The chapters provide descriptions of good practice blended with research findings on effectiveness. They describe procedures that can be applied to all areas of the school curriculum, and can be used with learners of all levels of ability, including gifted students, students with disabilities, and second-language learners. Among the distinguished contributors, many are from North America, while others are from Europe and Australia. The applicability of the methods they present is worldwide. Peer-Assisted Learning is designed to be accessible and useful to teachers and to those who employ, train, support, consult with, and evaluate them. Many chapters will be helpful to teachers aiming to replicate in their own school environments the cost-effective procedures described. A practical resources guide is included. This volume will also be of interest to faculty and researchers in the fields of education and psychology, to community educators who want to learn about the implications of Peer Assisted Learning beyond school contexts, and to employers and others involved in post-school training.

1

Introduction to Peer-Assisted Learning

Keith Topping

University of Dundee

Stewart Ehly

University of Iowa

Building on the foundation of the preface, this introduction seeks to map the territory of peer-assisted learning (PAL) and give the reader a framework within which to relate and understand the component parts of the field. Definitions and a typology are offered, distinguishing one approach from another and from related methods not covered in the book. Linkage with current educational, political, and financial issues is made. Some of the major theoretical and research underpinnings of PAL are discussed and summarized. A brief review of the contributed chapters then leads into the main part of the book.

WHAT IS PAL?

Learning is to acquire knowledge and/or skill by study, experience, or teaching. To assist is to aid, help, promote, support, or succor. A peer is an equal in standing or rank, a matched companion (Onions, 1978).

It follows that PAL is the acquisition of knowledge and skill through active helping and supporting among status equals or matched companions. PAL is people from similar social groupings, who are not professional teachers, helping each other to learn and by so doing, learning themselves.

As becomes evident here, this simple definition has many and powerful ramifications. Some PAL methods are more suited to the acquisition of knowledge, whereas others are more suited to the development of skills. In some PAL methods, peer helpers are more intensively and consciously active in the helping role than in other methods. In some applications of PAL, the definition of peer might seem somewhat stretched, as when university students tutor young school children. However, a peer always remains very different from a salaried, and ultimately controlling, professional teacher.

Archaic perceptions of PAL considered the peer helper as a surrogate teacher, in a linear model of the transmission of knowledge, from teacher to peer helper to tutee. Traditionally, there was an assumption that peer helpers should be among the best students (i.e., those who were most like the professional teachers). However, the differential in levels of ability and interest in such a situation could prove understimulating for the helper, who was unlikely to gain cognitively from the interactions. Later, it was realized that the peer helping interaction was qualitatively different from that between a professional teacher and a child or young person, and involved different advantages and disadvantages.

Recently, there has been more interest in deploying helpers whose capabilities are nearer to those of the helped, so that both members of the pair find some cognitive challenge in their joint activities. The helper is intended to be learning by teaching and is also a more proximate and credible model under these circumstances. Thus, PAL projects now almost always target gains for both helpers and helped; double added value.

WHY IS PAL IMPORTANT?

Raising Standards

The education system is frequently criticized for failing to raise standards in literacy, numeracy, and science and is often blamed for apparent declines. Additionally, there is criticism for failing to promote the development of vocationally relevant transferable skills in high schools. The quality and cost-effectiveness of teaching and learning methods and resources has never before been so closely scrutinized.

The occasional clarion calls of “back to basics” are paradoxical. Didactic curriculum delivery, coupled with crude and brief summative assessment methods, are known to promote a surface approach to learning—the kind of learning of which machines are now capable—rather than a deep or intelligent approach.

Government attempts to be seen to be doing something about it too frequently result only in increased administration and bureaucracy, reducing the time, energy, motivation, and other resources available for teaching. Such initiatives are frequently set in the context of reductions in levels of resourcing at the grass roots.

Cost-Effectiveness

The dual requirement to improve teaching quality while doing more with less has recently increased interest in PAL. Just as it is unwise to assume that more teaching resources automatically yield better results, it also would be unwise to seize upon PAL as a universal, undifferentiated, and instant panacea.

Undoubtedly however, PAL is important because it is effective and cost-effective. In the case of peer tutoring, a recent review identified 28 previous reviews and meta-analyses of evaluation research (Topping, 1992). Sharpley and Sharpley (1981) and Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik (1982) found strong evidence of cognitive gains for tutees and tutors and some evidence for improved attitudes and self-image (which are, of course, more difficult to measure). They also found that training improved outcomes, structured procedures improved outcomes, and that same-age tutoring was as effective as cross-age tutoring.

Bloom (1984) reported a series of studies comparing the outcomes of different educational methods. The average student exposed to one-on-one tutoring scored about two standard deviations above the average student receiving conventional classroom instruction. Bloom’s description of the search for other methods as effective as tutoring as the “two-sigma problem” subsequently became famous. He also pointed out that his results demonstrated that most children have the potential to achieve to high levels.

The Information Age

For the new millennium, competence in information technology will be crucial, yet, computers alone are not a panacea. Levin, Glass, and Meister (1987) conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis of four different interventions to improve reading and mathematics: computer-assisted learning, reduction of class size, lengthening the school day, and cross-age peer tutoring. The best method—peer tutoring—was four times more cost-effective than the least.

However, consider the benefits of PAL in an information technology environment. The most computer literate person in a classroom is only rarely the teacher. Transmission of information technology skills through the peer group is already happening. Teachers can channel and organize this powerful force.

Social Benefits

For the future, in a competitive world, children need to be able to compete. To survive, they also need to be able to cooperate, because in a world full of individualists, all time would be unproductively spent in futile competition. Johnson and Johnson (1983) compared the effects of competitive, cooperative, and individualistic learning experiences on schoolchildren. Cooperation resulted in greater positive feelings between children and higher self-esteem and empathy.

Many of us live in divided, fragmented, frightened societies, in which caring is no longer seen as fashionable. The breakdown of the traditional family has left many young people increasingly socially isolated and relying ever more on the peer group. Arguably, humans are social animals, deriving a good deal of their identity, satisfaction, and well-being from positive social relationships. PAL is a vehicle for engineering positive contact between groups who would otherwise remain alienated—contact across the divides of age, gender, ethnic origin, social class, and so on.

Politically, peer tutoring delegates the management of learning to the learners in a democratic way, seeks to empower students rather than de-skill them by dependency on imitation of a master culture, and might reduce student dissatisfaction and unrest.

Affective Benefits

Of course, education is not just about knowledge (what I need to know) and skill (what I need to be able to do). It is also about motivation (how much I want to be able to know and do) and confidence (my belief that I am able to know and do). Even if the assistance and support given by a peer helper is of a lesser quality than that from a professional teacher, what it lacks in quality it might compensate for in quantity and immediacy. But perhaps more importantly, if PAL can help develop motivation and confidence, its impact could be profound.

PAL, like other forms of service learning, has been described as “humanly rewarding” (Goodlad, 1979). Tutors can learn to be nurturing toward their tutees, and in so doing, develop a sense of pride and responsibility. Partners can learn to feel good about each other, and about themselves as well. PAL has been and will become even more important for all of these reasons: educational, economic, political, social, and affective. These are large claims. To evaluate them, first we need to consider just what is meant by PAL and move toward some definitions.

DEFINITIONS BY INCLUSION

Teachers might not, of course, agree about whether their efforts target gains in knowledge or skill—or what proportion of which. A definition of training is that it is to drill and instruct in, or for, some particular art, profession, occupation or practice. The targeted outcomes are very particular; training is clearly skill oriented. (Note, however, the secondary definition from horticulture—“to manage so as to cause to grow in some desired direction”!)

Education, by contrast, is seen as a “process of nourishing, rearing, bringing up … culture or development of powers, formation of character.” These are clearly attitudinal and behavioral correlates of a very generalized nature, reflecting the origin of the word education from “educe”: to bring out, to elicit, to develop. In fact, you do not always get just or only what you targeted, so philosophical debate is almost certainly pointless until you have actually tried out some of the PAL methods defined next.

Peer Tutoring

Peer tutoring, the most widely known PAL method, often targets skill gains. However, much wider (educational) gains often accrue as serendipitous side effects.

Peer tutoring is characterized by specific role-taking: at any point someone has the job of tutor, whereas the other (or the others) is in role as tutee(s). It has high focus on curriculum content. Projects usually also outline quite specific procedures for interaction, in which the participants are likely to have training that is specific or generic, or both. In addition, their interaction may be further scaffolded by the provision of structured materials, among which a greater or lesser degree of student choice may be available.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction to Peer-Assisted Learning
• Part I The Basis and Benefits of Peer-Assisted Learning
• Part II Peer Tutoring
• Part III Peer Facilitation and Education
• Part IV Peer Feedback
• Part V Embedding and Extending Peer-Assisted Learning
• Afterword
• Resources and Contacts
• About the Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index