This review of the literature on peer and cross-age tutoring emphasizes programs in mathematics and suggests that such programs have positive academic outcomes for African American and otherminority students as well as for White students who participate as tutors, as tutees, or both. Such programs also appear to have a positive impact on a variety of attitudinal and socioemotional outcomes, such as students' attitudes towards school, their self-concepts, and their sense of academic efficacy. This review also explores whether specific features of the tutoring programs (e.g., tutor training and amount of tutoring) or characteristics of the students (e.g., academic level prior to tutoring and gender composition of tutor-tutee pairs) affect various outcomes. Role theory is used as a theoretical framework to explain some intriguing and surprising findings (e.g., why tutors show academic gains even when they do not receive additional subject matter instruction, whylonger and/or more substantial tutoring programs may not foster greater immediate academic gains than shorter programs, and why mixed-sex pairs do not consistently reap benefits equal to those of same-sex pairs). Finally, implications of the review for the development of peer and cross-age tutoring programs are discussed.

Peer and Cross-Age Tutoring in Math: Outcomes and Their Design Implications

We proposed that help-seeking perceptions and behaviors will be more adaptive under salient task goals relative to ego achievement goals. A total of 159 2nd- and 6th-grade Israeli children could request help as they worked on difficult puzzles in either a task or an ego goal condition. As predicted, children were more likely to request help and to explain help avoidance as guided by strivings for independent mastery in the task-focus condition. In contrast, more children in the ego-focus condition explained help avoidance in terms of masking incapacity. Skill level moderated help seeking only in the ego-focus condition, wherein requests for help were more frequent at intermediate than at both high and low skill levels. The results clarify the role of motivational factors in promoting or undermining academic help seeking and can help resolve theoretical controversy and inconsistent empirical findings concerning the relation between competence and help seeking

Effects of Task and Ego Achievement Goals on Help-Seeking Behaviors and Attitudes.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of two key team‐based pay characteristics – namely reward allocation procedures (i.e. reward based on norms of equity, equality or some combination of the two) and incentive intensity – on both the amount and type of help given to one another among members of outcome‐interdependent teams.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 180 undergraduate students participate in a laboratory simulation with a 2 × 3 experimental design. Servicing virtual “clients,” participants receive pre‐scripted requests for assistance from anonymous teammates. ANOVA and hierarchical regression analyses are used to test the hypotheses.Findings – Relative to equity‐oriented group‐based pay structures, equality‐oriented pay structures are found to be associated with both significantly more help giving in general and more of the type of help likely to enhance group‐level competencies (i.e. autonomous help). Incentive intensity strengthens the effects of reward allocation ...

Team‐based reward allocation structures and the helping behaviors of outcome‐interdependent team members

The authors examined whether motivational goals influenced the participation and performance of low-achieving students during collaborative problem solving with a high-achieving partner. Thirty-five pairs of 4th- and 5th-grade students were randomly assigned a set of instructions designed to induce students to adopt a learning goal or a performance goal. The following day, the students were individually given a posttest on problems similar to those worked on collaboratively. The low-achieving students given learning-goal instructions performed better on the posttest problems and perceived their partner's competence as more similar to their own than did the low-achieving students given performance-goal instructions. No differences in overall amount or level of low achievers' participation during collaborative problem solving were observed. Implications of the findings for the use of peer learning in heterogeneous classrooms are discussed.

Collaborating with a Skilled Peer: The Influence of Achievement Goals and Perceptions of Partners' Competence on the Participation and Learning of Low-Achieving Students.

The Benefits of Peer Collaboration on Strategy Use, Metacognitive Causal Attribution, and Recall

DEPAULO, BELLA M.; TANG, JOHN; WEBB, WILLIAM; HOOVER, CLAUDIA; MARSH, KERRY; and LITowlTZ, CAROL. Age Differences in Reactions to Help in a Peer Tutoring Context. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1989, 60, 423-439. Second and fourth graders (8and 10-year-olds) were tutored by children in the same grade as themselves or 2 grades older. It was predicted that help would be selfthreatening in dyads in which the children were similar to each other in both age and achievement. In those dyads, the high achieving tutees (and their tutors) should respond to the threat by performing well; in the same-age dyads with low achievers, however, only the tutors should perform well. This pattern should be more evident in the dyads involving fourth-grade tutees, who are more sensitive than are second graders to the self-relevant implications of social comparison information. These predictions were supported. We also hypothesized that help would be supportive in dyads in which the tutors were older and smarter than their tutees, especially if cooperative contingencies were in effect. As predicted, those dyads were characterized by positive socioemotional outcomes, but poor performance by the tutees relative to their tutors.

Carol Litowitz

Papers

Age Differences in Reactions to Help in a Peer Tutoring Context.