The typical Amish school is a one-room schoolhouse without electricity or running water; the teacher has never attended high school; the students are not separated by age, grade, or ability. Yet Amish pupils consistently score equal to or slightly above the national norms on standardized tests. Their success may be due to emphasis on social…

Three Scandinavian initiatives--The Stop Violence Group, Comrades in Schools, and The Non-Fighting Generation--address social problems through adolescent peer education. There are concerns that such programs may lead to social control; elite groups of "good" youth may be marginalized; and adults may thereby evade responsibility. (SK)

Describes the varieties of "Writing Fellows" (curriculum-based peer tutoring) programs. Provides help for starting such programs. Presents results of a survey of WF programs. Offers observations based on the experiences of the director of a six-year-old Writing Fellows program. (RS)

Applies a theory of role conflict to the position of peer tutor. Argues that tutors' roles are more complex and problematic than those of many other occupations but that role conflict theory can be helpful in discovering constructive ways to deal with tutorial role ambiguity and conflict. (RS)

The Special Peer Action Network (SPAN) program in Jackson County (Florida) schools brings together gifted students and students with developmental disabilities. Gifted students received background information and training in how to serve as models, helpers, and friends of students with disabilities and then participated in structured interactions…

Proposes a learning community model for peer consultation among college faculty and offers examples of cohort-focused or issue-focused learning communities at Miami University (Ohio). Provides evidence of effectiveness based on annual reports and evaluations and on universitywide presentations, as well as advice on combining one-on-one and peer…

A study of production workers, supervisors, and peer trainers in three manufacturing companies found that most workers were trained by peers; neither peer trainers nor supervisors received trainer training; training was wholly outside the oversight of training/personnel departments. Training practices evolved from experience rather than from…

Lovell and Richardson discuss how, through the family and consumer sciences curriculum, preventing acts of school violence can be presented to students as early as the sixth grade. They suggest that incidents of school and family violence can be reduced by teaching relationship skills. Davis describes STOP the Violence, a program that uses peer…

A group of 10 women developing peer education services participated in collaborative inquiry in order to remove barriers to peer counseling. The following themes emerged: (1) adding experiential knowledge to textbook knowledge; (2) crossing cultures using difference as a creative resource; and (3) using public discourse to transfer knowledge to…

Argues that despite the widespread endorsement of peer collaboration in writing center theory, graduate student tutors are an asset because (1) they have excellent tutoring abilities; and (2) they will provide future support for writing centers as professors in all fields. (NH)

Describes Buddy Reading, a British reading program that pairs older (secondary) and younger (elementary) students to develop and improve reading skills. (JOW)

This paper reviews research evaluating the effectiveness of Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) for reading. Nearly fifteen years of research has demonstrated the effectiveness of this classwide peer tutoring program in improving the reading performance of high-, average-, and low-performing students, including students with disabilities,…

Goals for Health was a National Cancer Institute funded program designed to impact health behaviors of adolescents living in rural Virginia and New York. This study examined three specific objectives: (a) to examine participants' perceptions of the program components and the relationship between program components and overall program perception,…

This study examined how instructional challenges presented by gifted students shaped teachers' instructional strategies. This study is a qualitative research grounded in a social constructivist framework. The participants were three high school science teachers who were teaching identified gifted students in both heterogeneously- and…

In a statistics course for bachelor students in econometrics a new format was adopted in which students were encouraged to study more actively and in which cooperative learning and peer teaching was implemented. Students had to work in groups of two or three students where each group had to perform certain tasks. One of these tasks was: explaining…