Effectiveness of peer counseling on high school students who failed two or more classes in a nine week quarter

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of peer counseling on high school students who have previously failed two or more classes in a nine week quarter.^ This study was constructed by comparing students who previously failed and were subsequently given peer counseling with a matched group of students who failed and did not receive peer counseling.^ To test the proposed research question, 324 students from a large urban school system were randomly chosen from a computer generated list of students who failed courses, matched on variables of number of classes failed, grade level and gender. One student from each matched pair was randomly placed in either the experimental or control group. 162 students from Group 1 (experimental) were assigned a peer counselor with their pair assigned to Group 2 (control). Group 1 received peer counseling at least 4 times during the third nine week academic quarter (Quarter 3) while Group 2 did not.^ The Grade Point Averages (GPA) for all students were collected both at the end of Quarter 2 and Quarter 3, at which time peer counseling was terminated. GPA's were also collected nine weeks after counseling was terminated.^ Results were determined by multiple regression, analysis of covariance and t-test. A level of significance was set at.05. There was significant increase in the GPA's of those counseled students immediately after peer counseling and also nine weeks after counseling was terminated, while the group not receiving peer counseling showed no increase. It was noted that there were significantly more school drop-outs from the non-counseled group than the counseled group. The number of classes failed, high school attended, grade level and gender were not found to be significant.^ The conclusion from this study was that peer counseling does impact significantly on the GPA's of students experiencing academic failure. Recommendations from this study were to implement and expand peer counseling programs with more failing students, continue counseling for longer than one quarter, include students in drop-out programs and students from different socio-economic and racial backgrounds, and conduct subsequent evaluation. ^

The effects of cross -age peer tutoring on writing and reading comprehension skills and attitudes and self -perceptions as writers of third and fourth grade students

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of cross-age peer writing response groups on the writing and reading achievement of third and fourth grade students. Students' attitudes about writing and their perceptions of themselves as writers were also measured at the end of the study. ^ One hundred and twenty-two third and fourth grade students enrolled in a public school in a middle-class, multi-cultural neighborhood participated in the study. Four existing classes of students were randomly assigned to either the experimental condition (EC) or the control condition (CC). Both groups were pretested and posttested for writing and reading achievement. The intervention, cross-age peer writing groups, met for eleven weeks. ^ Three hypotheses were examined in this study: (a) writing improvement score, (b) reading comprehension improvement score, and (c) students' attitudes toward writing and their perception of themselves as writers based on the five scales measured on the Writer Self-Perception Scale. ^ ANOVAs were done on the pretests and posttests for writing and the Stanford Achievement Test reading comprehension subtest scores for the year of the study and the previous year. ANOVAs were also done for the five areas of the Writer Self-Perception Scale. Cross-tabulations were also used to compare improvement level verses treatment group, and grade level. ^ Analysis of the data revealed that there was no evidence that the tutoring (EC) groups made more progress than the non-tutoring (CC) groups in writing and reading. There was evidence of growth in writing, especially by the fourth graders. Most importantly, the fourth grade tutors, the experimental group, had the most positive feelings about writing and themselves as writers. ^