Improving attainment across a whole district: school reform through peer tutoring in a randomized controlled trial

Abstract

2011) 'Improving attainment across a whole district : school reform through peer tutoring in a randomized controlled trial.', School eectiveness and school improvement., 22 (3). pp. 265-289. Further information on publisher's website: This is an electronic version of an article published in Tymms, P. and Merrell, C. and Thurston, A. and Andor, J. and Topping, K. and Miller, D. (2011) 'Improving attainment across a whole district : school reform through peer tutoring in a randomized controlled trial.', School eectiveness and school improvement., 22 (3). pp. 265-289. School eectiveness and school improvement is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/openurl?genre=articleissn=0924-3453volume=22issue=3spage=265Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Despite limitations the study demonstrates that it is possible to carry out a clustered RCT on a large scale working with districts and suggests that peer tutoring has promise when scaled up.

Cross-age tutoring in kindergarten and elementary school settings: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…It should be noted that meta-regressions have very weak statistical power a low number of studies. Regarding this apparent lack of doseresponse relationship in tutoring, the findings of this review are in line with results of recent large-scale randomized trial of peer tutoring study in Scotland, The Fife Peer Learning Trial (Tymms, Merrell, Thurston, Andor, Topping & Miller, 2011). A no-intervention control group was absent, and the different groups served as controls to each other (e.g.…”

“…Ritter and Maynard also concluded that highly structured tutoring programs are more likely to lead to improved reading. Similar phenomenon was observed in the Fife Peer Learning study, which reported Effect Sizes of 0.2-0.25 for highly structured peer tutoring in mathematics (Tymms et al, 2011). The impact of structure shows the important role that an educator has in designing tutoring programs to ensure that interactions maximize the behaviours seen as providing effective learning.…”

The influence of experimental design on the magnitude of the effect size -peer tutoring for elementary, middle and high school settings: A meta-analysis

“…Supporting this view recent RCT studies of peer tutoring have reported lower ESs than a study using the same tutoring techniques in studies when randomisation was not used to assign to condition. For example, the Fife Peer Learning project where tutoring in reading and maths was implemented over two years in a RCT reported a mean ES of 0.20-0.25 Tymms, Merrell, Thurston, Andor, Topping & Miller, 2011).…”

Successful Transition to Secondary School in Tanzania: What Are the Barriers?

“…Positive results have been reported in the USA and UK (Parsons et al ., ). Cross‐age peer mentoring has had a positive effect in reading and mathematics on the learning of both the mentee and the mentor, provided the age gap between the two is at least 2 years (Topping et al ., ; Tymms et al ., ). Subject‐specific mentoring has been shown to function as a useful buffer to the more general challenges faced by those in transition to secondary school (Thurston et al ., ).…”