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THE EFFECT OF OLDER-PEER PARTICIPANT MODELS
ON DEFICIENT ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE’
JOHN J. HORAN MARY ANN DE QIROLOMO
AND
RONALD
L.
HILL ROBERT
E.
SHUTE
The Pennsylvania State University
Considerable print has been devoted to extolling the academic, economic, and
humanistic benefits of peer tutoring
(e.g.,
Criscuolo,
1971, 1972;
Goodman,
1971
;
Marsden,
1971).
Elliot’s
(1973)
review suggests that tutoring benefits the tutor
as well as the child tutored, at least insofar as the imparting of elementary reading
skills is concerned. With the exception
of
several behaviorally oriented studies
done with young children
(e.g.,
Hamblin
&
Harnblin,
1972;
Myers, Travers,
&
Sanford,
1965;
VonHarrison,
1971;
White,
1971),
however, hard data rarely are
presented. Furthermore, precise specification of the critical independent variable,
namely tutoring, is conspicuously absent from the tutoring literature. Hence, even
if
the null hypothesis with regard to peer tutoring were
to
be disproved adequately,
replication would be difficult indeed. For example, Horan, Hill, and De Girolomo
(1973)
found that after
9
weeks of treatment students exposed to untrained high-
school-aged tutors were performing according to teacher-assigned grades at an
insignificantly lower level than the control group. “HOW to tutor” is apparently
not intuitive! The crucial research question that emerges is, “What kinds of tutor
behavior,
if
any, can produce reliable changes in student performance?”
Token reinforcement via teachers
or
tutors has proved successful to strengthen
the academic skills of disadvantaged young children (Hamblin
&
Hamblin,
1972;
‘This
project was sponsored in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Governor’s Council on
Drug Abuse.