Improving peers' helping behavior to students with learning disabilities during mathematics peer tutoring

This study investigated the effects of providing training and practice in helping behaviors to students during peer tutoring in mathematics. Participants were 20 general educators from grades two through four, whose entire classes participated in peer tutoring for 29 weeks. From each class, teachers identified one average-achieving student and one student with a learning disability to participate as a dyad in this videotape study. The 20 classrooms were assigned randomly to two treatments: peer-tutoring experience with additional training in how to help and peer-tutoring experience without training in how to help. Following training in how to help in 10 of the 20 classrooms, each dyad, one from each classroom, was videotaped completing a mathematics peer-tutoring task. Microlevel quantifications and more global descriptions of transcripts of representative pairs in each condition indicated that students who received the helping training engaged in an increased number of directly trained helping behaviors than the untrained students. The nature of students' explanations is also described.