Q2. What is the role of peer interaction in reading?
Peer interaction and talk can promote self-regulation during reading where students have to take an active role in recognizing and overcoming their difficulties in understanding texts (Almasi, 1995; Duke & Pearson, 2002).
Q3. What is the effect of peer tutoring on learning?
Peer tutoring might facilitate a greater volume of engaged and successful practice, leading to consolidation, fluency and automaticity of core skills.
Q4. What is the way to increase reading engagement?
Fixed role cross-age peer tutoring, with older more capable students tutoring younger and less capable students is reported to be an effective method of raising reading engagement and attainment.
Q5. How many students were missing from the post-test data?
Retention rate pre to post test was 100% at the class level and >99.99% at the student level (only 5students were missing from post-test data).
Q6. What was the effect of paired reading on reading achievement in a randomized study?
Oral reading with scaffolding from teachers and parents was demonstrated to be effective at raising oral and silent reading ability in a randomized study of 400 students in Grades 3-5 (Kim & White, 2008).
Q7. What is the effect of tutoring on learning?
One finding associated with cross-age tutoring reported by researchers is that, in the process of tutoring, tutors reinforce their own knowledge base and skills.
Q8. What was the appropriate constellation for dyads?
The emphasis was on error correction and for this reason fixed role peer tutoring (in which tutors remain in that position within the pair) method was the most appropriate constellation for dyads.
Q9. How many years of reading development did these students have?
These students were less than twoyears from leaving formal education by the end of this intervention, and had effectively made only one year, four months of reading development during the nine years that they had spent in school.
Q10. What is the effect size of the paired reading technique?
As control classes were matched with intervention classes within the same school, and had non-significant differences in pre-test literacy scores, this would have fallen into a category where a lower effect size would have been expected (Zeneli, Thurston, A. & Roseth, 2016).
Q11. Why is there a requirement for a control group in randomized trials?
This emphasizes the requirement for a control group in randomized trials to allow policy makers to make informed decisions about ‘what works’.
Q12. What is the average ES for tutors?
Cohen et al. (1982) reported in a meta-analysis of 52 cross-age tutoring studies that tutors generally exhibited a small, but significant improvement in academic performance; they found the average ES for the tutors to be 0.33.
Q13. What is the effect of paired reading on the attainment of students?
For optimal performance of paired reading where the emphasis is on error correction there needs to be an attainment differential between tutors and tutees (Duran & Monereo, 2005).
Q14. What were the effects of tutoring on students?
In 33 of the 38 studiesinvestigating effects in this area, students who served as tutors performed better in examinations than control students in the subject being taught.
Q15. What would be the way to implement the technique?
Schools planning to implement the technique would have to decide whether; benefits would still accrue if this were a targeted intervention for Grade 8/Year 9 students in the bottom decile of reading attainment; or whether the benefits to this technique to a vulnerable sub-group and the lack of negative effects on other students make it worth implementing the technique as a whole school program.