The effects of reciprocal peer tutoring with a group contingency on quiz performance in vocabulary with seventh-and eighth-grade students
✍ Scribed by Retta A. Malone; T. F. McLaughlin
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 154 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1072-0847
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The purpose of this study was to compare reciprocal peer tutoring with a group contingency to a traditional vocabulary program in a regular middle-school classroom. The participants were 20 seventh and 12 eighth-grade students enrolled in a private parochial school. A counter-balanced time-series design was employed to evaluate the effects of reciprocal peer tutoring across the two groups of students. The overall results indicated that when students participated in reciprocal peer tutoring, scores on weekly quizzes in vocabulary were signifcantly higher. Reciprocal peer tutoring with a group contingency was beneficial to middle school students, easy to implement, and a cost-and time-efficient system for teachers and students.
A major problem teachers encounter is finding adequate time for all students to respond orally to questions over newly learned material and to be able to monitor which students are responding correctly. Permitting increased active interaction between students and teachers to work with the materials or on tasks to learn the required skills increases the students' opportunity to respond'' which in turn greatly enhances the students' learning and retention rate (Greenwood, Hart, & Walker, 1994;Maheady & Harper, 1987). Students' opportunity to respond'' is an ecobehavioral measure of the `interaction between: (a) teacher-formulated instructional antecedent stimuli (the materials presented, prompts, questions asked, signals to respond, etc.); and (b) their success in establishing the academic responding desired or implied by the materials (Greenwood et al., 1994). It has been shown repeatedly, that students' ability to acquire and master academic subject matter varies according to how effectively teachers are able to structure classroom environments to provide CCC 1072±0847/97/010027±14