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 other minority 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, why longer 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.

When people receive feedback about how they and others have performed on a task-feedback that should be interpreted as implying equivalent performance-they only seem to exhibit a self-enhancement bias (erroneously believing they have outperformed others) when feedback about others' performance is unambiguous and feedback about their own performance is ambiguous (Klein, 2001). They do so by distorting estimates of their own performance upward. In 2 studies, we show how 2 types of standards moderate this effect. In Experiment 1, we show that people distort ambiguous self-performance feedback in a self-enhancing direction only when they receive information about their own and others' performance at the same time. In Experiment 2, we found that when people hold neutral prior beliefs about their ability (an internal standard), they exhibit self-enhancement in their performance assessments whenever at least one source of information (self or other) is ambiguous. Despite the wealth of literature that has demonstrated self-enhancement biases, it appears that the emergence of this bias is bounded in theoretically interesting ways when people are faced with performance feedback.Imagine that a supervisor conducts performance appraisals for each of her four subordinates. One subordinate learns he has received scores of 41, 66, and 91 on the three components of the appraisal. He also happens to hear that his three coworkers received average scores of 78, 54, and 66 on the same three components. One week later, this employee is asked by a friend how well he performed on the overall appraisal relative to his coworkers. Despite the fact that his average score across the components was 66-identical to the mean performance of his peers-will his motivation to think he is better than average make him come to believe that his performance was superior? If so, might we still observe this bias if he did not receive the information about his coworkers' performance or received it much later? Moreover, would beliefs about his prior performance influence the likelihood of a self-enhancement bias? These questions concern the effects of two types of standards-the performance of others on the same task and beliefs about one's own task-related ability. The purpose of our investigation was to address the effect of each of these standards on the extent to which people distort ambiguous performance feedback in a self-favoring direction.

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