Friendship and Task Management in Children's Peer Tutoring |
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| Authors: | Hugh Foot Anne‐Marie Barron |
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| Institution: | School of Psychology , University of Wales College of Cardiff , P.O. Box 901, Cardiff CF1 3YG, United Kingdom |
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| Abstract: | The role of friendship in mediating children's learning is poorly understood, and conflicting claims exist about the manner in which friendship may influence both the process and outcome of learning. Evidence from studies on peer tutoring suggests that children acting as tutors have difficulty co‐ordinating the physical, informational and social demands of a tutoring task, due to their limited cognitive resources. Eight‐ to nine‐year‐old boys and girls were allocated to friend or non‐friend pairs in one‐to‐one tutoring dyads for the purposes of examining the impact of friendship on the process and outcome of tutoring. Although tutoring dyads of friends might be expected to focus their resources on informational components of the task, because their pre‐established relationship would minimise the burden of managing the social demands of the task, the opposite was found. Child tutors who were friends allocated additional resources to the social management aspect of the task, including monitoring tutee progress, but allocated no additional resources to imparting information about the task necessary for improving learning. Far from reducing task demands upon the tutor, friendship appears to impose greater burdens on children's limited resources, consequential upon the need to re‐negotiate their new social relationship arising from unfamiliar and unequal roles into which tutoring has thrust them. |
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