| dc.description.abstract | The study aimed to examine the effectiveness of reciprocal peer tutoring (RPT) on the academic performance of middle school students in mathematics, the differences in the effectiveness of RPT between high and low math-proficiency students, and the qualities/levels of students’ preparation, explanation, and interaction. The study also attempted to explore the learning-by-teaching effect by analyzing the relationships between the levels of preparation, explanation, interaction, and the test scores.
The study was conducted in a seventh-grade math classroom at a public middle school in Taiwan, involving 23 students (12 high math-proficiency students and 11 low math-proficiency students). Six RPT sessions were implemented for six math topics: Introduction to Exponents and Scientific Notation, Factors and Multiples, Greatest Common Factor and Least Common Multiple, Laws of Exponents, Simplification of Algebraic Expressions, and Algebraic Equations. The procedure for each of the six RPT sessions was identical: after the math teacher covered the topic, a pretest was conducted, followed by RPT session with preparing-to-teach, explanation, and interaction phases. Finally, all students completed the posttest. Pretest and posttest scores, students’ preparing-to-teach worksheets, and audio recordings of students’ verbal explanations and interactions were collected. Self-developed criteria for assessing the qualities of preparation, explanation, and interaction were applied. Since the number and difficulty of questions taught by students varied, qualities were later converted into levels (the extent to which a student reached the maximum achievable quality scores) to standardize students’ performance. A two-way mixed design MANOVA was applied to explore the effects of RPT and the interaction effect between students’ math proficiency and the RPT effect. Box plots were also used to illustrate the distribution of students’ preparation levels, explanation levels, and interaction levels. The results are as follows:
Firstly, overall, after the RPT sessions, middle school students’ posttest scores showed a significant improvement compared to their pretest scores, and this improvement was similar for both high and low math-proficiency students.
Second, during the RPT sessions, students with high math proficiency achieved high preparation levels (60%-70%) with low internal variation, while students with low math proficiency had low preparation levels (30%) with high internal variation. High math proficiency students attained high explanation levels (60%-70%) with high internal variation, while low math proficiency students had low explanation levels (30%) with high internal variation. Both high and low math proficiency students exhibited low interaction levels (high: 30%; low: 10%-20%), with high internal variation among high math proficiency students and low internal variation among low math proficiency students.
Last but not least, among preparing-to-teach, explanation, and interaction, explanation levels had the highest correlation with posttest scores, indicating that explanation level may be a crucial indicator for predicting learning-by-teaching effect. | en_US |