| The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a peer tutoring program in teaching sight words to elementary students who are deaf. Prior research on specific peer tutoring programs such as The Peer Tutoring Model (Cooke, Heron, & Heward, 1983), Classwide Peer Tutoring (Arreaga-Mayer, 1998) and Peer-Assisted Learning (Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes, & Simmons, 1997) has demonstrated that this instructional method actively engages students in learning and promotes mastery, accuracy, and fluency in content learning for hearing students with and without disabilities. However, there has been virtually no research investigating the full use of this technique with deaf children.; Eight students from the Ohio State School for the Deaf were participants in this study. All students had a profound hearing loss and no additional disabilities. The participants were trained to implement the peer tutoring activity by the experimenter. A reciprocal tutoring model was used allowing each student to be both tutor and tutee. Data was collected on the number of peer tutoring steps completed by participants, end of the week and biweekly sight word tests, the number of learning trials per set of sight words and review tests. Generality measures included sentences and short stories containing the words the participant have learned during the study finally, student satisfaction concerning the use of peer tutoring was obtained in a questionnaire. Results showed deaf students could effectively implement a peer tutoring program. Participants demonstrated the ability to learn previously unknown sight words. Maintenance of words varied across the participants from a low of 38.9% of learned words maintained over time to a high of 85.7%. Generality of known words across posttest sentences was a high of 100% to a low of 42.1%. The scores on short stories ranged from 59.2% to 85.9%. Typically, more skilled readers preformed better on review and generality assessments, than less skilled readers. However, both skilled and unskilled readers tended to score well on the end of the week test, with the exception of two participants. Each of the participants said they were satisfied with the program and enjoyed peer tutoring. |
