Abstract

MONTEIRO, Vera. Programa tutorial em crianças do 4.º ano de escolaridade: Benefícios cognitivos . Aná. Psicológica [online]. 1998, vol.16, n.2, pp.277-283. ISSN 0870-8231.

The present work was designed with the purpose of studying the peer-tutoring system. This system, in its most general form, can be defined as a pedagogical method in which a «competent» student act as a tutor of a less «competent» classmate. With this research we aimed emphasizing the existence of a tutoring effect, that is to say, we wanted to examine the presence of personal cognitive gains in 9-year-old children who were tutoring younger children. We worked with 14 third grade students (8 years old) and 22 fourth graders (9 years old). The control group included eight of the fourth graders who were assigned individual work, whereas the experimental group consisted of 14 dyads, each of them included a tutor (fourth grader) and a tutee (third grader) who was helped during the session. The task presented to all subjects consisted on looking some words that were given by the present researcher in a dictionary of their own language. In the dyadic situation each tutor helped his (or her) classmate in solving the task, which was unknown to him (or her). The results that we obtained led us to the following conclusions: Children that act as tutors present more individual cognitive gains than their classmates who perform individual work.

Keywords : Social interactions; peer tutoring; cognitive gains.

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