AN INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECTS OF RECIPROCAL PEER TUTORING ON ACHIEVEMENT, SELF-EFFICACY, AND TEST ANXIETY

Reciprocal peer tutoring (RPT) is a cooperative learning strategy whic h capitalizes on the benefit students receive from preparing to tutor one another. In these experiments we investigated the effects of RPT o n the academic achievement, academic self-efficacy, and test anxiety o f undergraduate students. Undergraduate education majors enrolled in e ither human growth and development or educational psychology participa ted in the study. Students developed a series of test questions, used these questions to quiz each other prior to unit examinations, and pro vided corrective feedback to the questions. Statistically significant findings were inconsistent across the experiments. In short, RPT appea rs to have, at best, inconsistent effects on achievement, test anxiety , and academic self-efficacy. (C) 1998 Academic Press.